Women In The Workplace Responsible For Gun Violence, Claims repugican Whack-job

No repugican war on women?

On September 18^th, just days after a mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard left 12 Americans dead, BuzzFeed reported that repugican Jim Rubens seized the opportunity to express his anti-woman, anti-equality views, by placing the blame for this type of violence, not on guns, but on women in the workplace.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, Rubens was asked about previous statements he made on his blog, in which he attempted to connect gun violence to women in the workplace. Rubens stood by his statements, claiming that female equality has led to an increase in violence among men.

“The collaborative, flexible, amorphously-hierarchical American economy is shutting out ordinary men who were once the nation’s breadwinners in living-wage labor and manufacturing jobs… Because status success is more vital to the male psychology, males are falling over the edge in increasing numbers.”

Jim Rubens is a former US Senator who is expected to announce his candidacy for the New Hampshire Senate seat, currently occupied by Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Rubens removed his blog post after realizing that his statements had drawn negative attention of the national kind. He might as well not have bothered. His views about women in the workplace are already widely known, considering he authored a book in 2008 titled “Oversuccess,” in which he made many similar claims.
For example:

“The collapsing number of male jobs in the increasingly female-centric economy just adds to the already harsher impact of OverSuccess on males.”

and another all time favorite:

“It’s a tiny fraction of males that become stressed for whatever reason and engage in acts of extreme violence. If you look through individual psychology of mass shooters over the past 10-20 years, you can see that in the profile. Often it’s a person who has been subjected to extreme stress in the form of social rejection, job loss and associated mental health issues.”

Actually, no. The Navy Yard shooter had a job as a civilian contractor and was enrolled in college, as well. He was scheduled to start work the same week he went on his killing rampage. There is absolutely no evidence that the shooter had any of the assumed stresses Rubens alleges such as job loss or social rejection. Even if you want to reach into his past and say that he lost job as a Navy Reservist, the evidence there clearly shows that he lost his job as a Navy Reservist because of his violent behavior. That’s exactly the opposite of what Rubens alleges, when he suggests that he became violent because he lost his job.
Not that is there is any shred of evidence that any of Rubens’ interpretations are rational. His statements take two completely unrelated types of data, and then embrace the fantasy that is some kind of connection. Basically he says “More women are working” and “More people are getting shot” and “therefore the two things must be related.”
If we use this type of logic, we can relate gun violence to just about anything we want. “More people are eating ice cream” or “More people are using the internet” or “More people are planting vegetable gardens.” Following Rubens’ line of reasoning, any or all of the above “facts” could be the real cause of gun violence in the United States.
Also using this same line of reasoning we could suppose that more people having guns might somehow be related to more people getting shot, but since Rubens has an A rating from the NRA, he obviously doesn’t get rewarded if he makes that connection. Plus, we all know that more guns couldn’t possibly be related to more shootings, right?
On his blog post Rubens points to a New York Times article that shows that 82% of job losses during the recession affected men. He mourns the loss of the male dominated society which, no doubt, benefited himself, at the expense of others. Yet, he conveniently ignores the fact that the repugican cabal have long opposed policies that would enforce equal pay for women. He somehow manages to just overlook the reality, that being able to pay women less to do the same work as men, is a hiring incentive for employers. The very policies Rubens supports do nothing more than allow women to undercut the wages of their male counterparts, putting more women to work at an unfair wage and sending more men to the unemployment line.
Republicans like Rubens love to place the responsibility for their terrible policies on others. They have a unique ability to ignore relevant facts while at the same time managing to make the totally irrelevant appear relevant. The absolute ignorance of this guy’s statements should not be allowed to fly under the radar. And yet he’s just another example of the same type of white, male supremacist that the repugican cabal represents. The repugican cabal backs candidates like Rubens for one reason only. Their single goal is to drag the country back to the days when society was controlled entirely by white men.