There could be no better poster boy than Mel Gibson for the wisdom of “red flag” laws, which allow the state to remove guns from people in a mental health crisis or who are an active threat to the community. To be clear, the actor lost his gun rights due to a 1996 federal law that strips gun rights away from people convicted of domestic violence. Gibson was convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence in 2011 after pleading “no contest” to accusations of punching his girlfriend while she held a baby. Yet Donald Trump’s administration reportedly forced out a pardon attorney for the Justice Department because she refused to restore Gibson’s gun rights.
“This is dangerous. This isn’t political — this is a safety issue,” Elizabeth Oyer told the New York Times, which first reported on her Friday firing.
She’s right. A history of domestic violence is a strong predictor of a man’s overall tendencies towards violence, a fact so well-known that even the far-right Supreme Court balked last year at ending the law prohibiting domestic abusers from having guns. Eighty-two percent of Americans agree that wife-beaters should not have guns, including even 81% of Republicans. Gibson’s story illustrates why this is such a big deal. While Gibson downplayed the attack against his then-girlfriend as a “slap,” prosecutors said he punched her hard enough to bust her teeth. But what’s telling is how remorseless Gibson has been. During the attack itself, he screamed that she “deserved it” while calling her names, outraged she refused to “smile, and blow me.” In official court documents, he continued to insist his violence was merely “an attempt to bring her back to reality.”
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
Trump has a long history of rewarding men accused of violence against women with praise, cushy jobs and legal interference to protect them. He clearly feels a kinship with them, as someone who was found liable by a civil jury of sexual assault, in an attack that sounded very much like what he bragged about doing routinely on the infamous “Access Holllywood” tape. Trump and his allies often spin the issue as a “woke” assault on men. Recently, Vice President JD Vance complained, “our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge.” He pretended that it’s about telling men they can’t “tell a joke,” when the real problem is men punching women in the face and sexually assaulting them in department store dressing rooms.
The battle over Gibson’s gun rights underscores how this is not, as MAGA likes to pretend, a matter of feminist joykills complaining about a few off-color jokes. Gibson’s legal right to tell jokes, no matter how tasteless, is not in dispute. The issue is letting him have weapons designed to kill people with ease. The research on this is crystal clear: Domestic abuse is far more likely to turn deadly when a gun is involved. But not only does Trump not care, it seems very much like the threat of violence is part of the allure. Trump’s toxic brand of “masculinity” valorizes violence and abuse, especially against people who are smaller or less powerful. That’s why his administration appears to have intervened in the prosecution of Andrew Tate, a misogynist “influencer” who was charged in Britain and Romania for rape and sex trafficking.
In 2013, the American Psychological Association (APA) released a report about the psychological causes of gun violence, and found that what is commonly known as toxic masculinity is a major factor. “Adherence to stereotypic masculinity” is associated with “stress and conflict, poor health, poor coping and relationship quality, and violence.” When men who are invested in this view of manhood feel their masculinity is threatened, they tend to lash out even more violently, especially against women. Despite all the tough guy talk, men who are invested in stereotypical masculinity tend to be especially insecure and even prone to mental health issues. Subsequently, they are at a high risk of suicide.
It wasn’t too long ago that Republicans reacted to these realities not by calling for stricter gun control, but by claiming that they wanted more focus on “mental health.” But that was always a bad faith argument, because the GOP has never shown any real interest in improving access to mental health care. Still, it was enough to get some states to pass “red flag” laws that at least allowed family members and law enforcement the ability to remove guns, at least temporarily, from people who are exhibiting signs of mental health breakdowns. These laws are often passed in reaction to mass shootings, which they do help prevent. But there’s robust evidence that they are especially effective at preventing suicide and domestic homicide, as well.
Unfortunately, the “red flag” behaviors that indicate that someone poses an imminent threat of killing others or themselves are often indistinguishable from the toxic masculinity that Trump promotes. Making threats, throwing tantrums, escalating violence against women or less powerful people? That’s what makes you a “man” in the eyes of Trump and his MAGA movement. So it’s unsurprising that there’s a growing push in MAGA leadership to strip away protections aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of the most violent men. Mel Gibson is the most showy example, but even scarier is what is happening in Florida, where the Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying to repeal the red flag law that was passed — by a Republican-controlled state legislature, no less — in the aftermath of the infamous Parkland school shooting in 2018.
Luis Valdes, the Florida director of Gun Owners of America, backed DeSantis, telling the Miami Herald, “Red flag laws are a political Band-Aid that swept the issue under the rug,” and that the “issue is that there’s a mental health issue in Florida.” This gambit reveals the total bad faith operating here. If someone is having a mental health crisis, the solution is not to allow them to access guns until they’ve sought and completed treatment. Taking the guns away is how law enforcement and family members can keep the person from hurting themselves or others until they are well again.
But there’s reason to doubt that the Trump-led GOP wants people, especially men, to be stable and mentally healthy. As the APA report noted, happy, healthy men are less likely to be “aggressive, coercive, or violent.” Aggressive, coercive, and violent is what Trump wants from men — even if it means sacrificing mental health. Paul Krugman wrote in a recent newsletter, “I don’t see how you can look at recent statements by Donald Trump and Elon Musk without concluding that both men have lost their grip on reality.” He extensively quotes both men’s social media posts to “get a full sense of the madness,” arguing they’re both being consumed by their tendencies “to grandiosity, vindictiveness and paranoia.” He’s not wrong, but what reasonable people see as full-blown nuttiness reads to Trump and the MAGA faithful as the truest essence of masculinity — and they don’t care how destructive or violent it gets for the rest of us.
Read more
about this topic
