Shamar Elkins with his children on Facebook.
Photo: Shamar Elkins/Facebook
The deadliest mass shooting our country has witnessed in two years was not an assault at a church or a school but an incident of domestic violence, according to police. Shamar Elkins, a resident of Shreveport, Louisiana, killed eight children, seven of whom were his, on Sunday morning. The only child who survived climbed to the roof and jumped. Elkins also shot two women, one of whom is his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh. She reportedly planned to leave him.
I may not know the family at the center of this tragedy personally, but I am all too familiar with the way these stories go. Shreveport is my hometown, the third largest city in Louisiana, a place my parents have lived since I was a high-school student. My stepfather pastors a church a few streets away from the crime scene. Shreveport was the place of my late mother’s happily ever after, the place where she began a 27-year love story with her husband after surviving three violent romantic relationships. After each relationship, the men became violent; one shot her. The other two beat her. She left anyway. And in Shreveport, she lived to tell the tale.
Many women are not so lucky. I cannot look at my feed lately without seeing stories of Black women’s lives ending tragically: Cerina Fairfax, the victim of an apparent muder-suicide by her husband, former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax; New York City Public Schools staffer Lisa Grier, whose boyfriend is charged with second-degree murder for allegedly beating her to death with a hammer in Mount Vernon; Coral Springs vice-mayor Nancy Metayer Bowen, whose husband is charged with premeditated murder of the rising star in Florida politics. Across these deaths, much of the public discourse has centered on the mental-health challenges of the alleged male perpetrators. Shamar Elkins had indicated struggling with suicidal ideation and “demons” to his mother and stepfather. Justin Fairfax seemed increasingly despondent after a series of harrowing rape allegations derailed his aspirations for the Virginia governorship.
It is tempting to treat Elkins’s actions as the isolated incident of a madman. But poor mental health is never a reasonable explanation for attempting to execute one’s wife and children.
Patriarchy offers a better explanation for this violence. Patriarchy teaches men that women and children belong to them, that they are property that men get to have, as a male rite of passage. Men are taught, in what bell hooks famously called a “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” to measure their worth and value by the size of their bank account, the size of their genitals, and the size of their families. These are forms of toxic self-value, predicated as they are on women and children having no agency or dreams of their own.
Alarmingly, the belief that women should just go along with it appears to be gaining in popularity. A recent global survey of thousands of Gen-Z men found that 30 percent of them believe that women should simply do what their husbands tell them. These sentiments are helped along by the rise of the manosphere and a nation being led by a group of right-wing extremists with Neanderthal ideas about gender and sexuality. Christian nationalism reinforces the idea that women and children are property and that they can be disposed of at a man’s will. It is telling that this brutal crime occurred in Shreveport, a majority Black city represented by House Speaker Mike Johnson, where politicians have eroded women’s access to health care and a poster of the Ten Commandments is required in every classroom.
When women exercise agency in their romantic lives by choosing to leave partners who no longer fulfill their desires, that choice is frequently a deadly one. The United States has a growing problem with femicide, a phenomenon that scholars had previously been more apt to attribute to lesser-developed countries than western industrial nations. A rise in femicide is the predictable outcome in a country hell-bent on turning back the clock on women’s rights, especially in the Deep South. Black femicide is at crisis levels with Black female victims dying at four times the rate of white women.
So do not fall for the simple “mental health” narrative. Men who kill their wives and children are not just bad apples who needed a free month of BetterHelp. These killings are the natural outcome of a country enamored with patriarchy and determined to make sure that men can freely dominate women. That country, our country, has decided that a patriarchal reset, in which men are heads of household and women and children are their willing and devoted subordinates, will help “make America great again.” That country, our country, has also decided that any woman who does not get onboard should pay with her life. Any woman who will not submit to the role of wife and mother, even when her husband is terrible and dangerous, should consider the possibility that she will be killed. Sometimes she is killed through anti-abortion policy. Sometimes she is killed with a gun.
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