By Karen Ocamb

Three days after the worst mass murder in U.S. history, two schools in Northern California were locked-down after a 28 - year - old methamphetamine abuser told his pastor he was going to make the Virginia Tech killings “look mild.”

Jeffery Thomas Carney subsequently surrendered to the Sutter County Sheriffs. He had a criminal record for burglary and was facing a charge of domestic violence against his parents, the Sheriff's Department told local reporters. Apparently he had hoped to commit “suicide-by-cop.”

Carney was trying to “copy-cat” Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui, the silent, rage-filled South Korean student loner who killed 32 students and teachers before killing himself. In a video sent to NBC, Cho, 23, referred to Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as “martyrs,” just shy of the eighth anniversary of that rampage which took 12 innocent lives before the murderers killed themselves.

And before Carney, Cho, Harris and Klebold, there was Charles Whitman, a former Marine and Eagle Scout who murdered his mother, then his wife, then perched atop a 30-story tower at the University of Texas in the blazing heat and for almost an hour and a half, shot and killed 14 people, starting with a pregnant teenager; 30 others were wounded before police got to him.

As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert points out in “A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun,” while we might “profess to be baffled at the periodic eruption of murderous violence in places we perceive as safe havens,” there are a number of “remarkable consistencies.”

In particular, Herbert writes, “the killers have been shown to be young men riddled with shame and humiliation, often bitterly misogynistic and homophobic, who have decided that the way to assert their faltering sense of manhood and get the respect they have been denied is to go out and shoot somebody.”

Herbert quotes renowned prison psychiatrist Dr. James Gilligan, now a professor at N.Y.U., as saying that a combination of misogyny and homophobia is a "central component" in such violence.

“An underlying factor,” Gilligan says, “that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one's manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act."

Already the debate has shifted to something concrete—guns—and more recently, guns and politics, as if the larger, more central debate about the psychology of violence— manhood, misogyny and homophobia—is too esoteric to handle.

And yet, in an oddly ironic way, this is precisely the time when wrestling with the issue matters most.

Consider this: Reports from the 2008 presidential campaign trails indicate that the country is tired of division, as evidenced by the Republican embrace of Rudy Giuliani, despite his socially moderate positions. Indeed, most Republicans didn’t blink twice after Giuliani said he would permit his third wife to sit in on Cabinet meetings, “if she wanted to.” Such an utterance by President Clinton would have been cause for hostile Congressional hearings.

Then there is the firing of radio shock jock Don Imus for calling the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.” Contrasting old white geezer Imus with the dignified, mostly African American young women, a cry rose up from women and blacks who have been humiliated and degraded for too long; “When is enough enough?”

And yet the hate-speech continues. In an April 18 blog, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel wrote, “now that Don Imus is gone, (Media Matters for America has) assigned the vegan lesbian transsexual 'interspecies erotica' devotee they had monitoring the Imus show to monitor my site."

It seems all the right-wingers want to be Ann Coulter or Michael Savage—self-appointed Masters of Mean.

But does hate speech have consequences? Is hate speech connected to bias-based violence? Perhaps debate over the recently introduced federal hate crimes legislation will elucidate this. We know that opponents to the bill, which adds sexual orientation to the list of protected groups, consider every crime a hate crime, and do not want to criminalize thought, saying we can never truly know someone’s motivation for committing a violent act. And opponents especially do not want to make it difficult for religious leaders who spew anti-gay rhetoric, claiming that’s what God said in the Bible.

“Death Penalty for Homosexuals is Prescribed in the Bible,” screams the cover of a vehemently anti-gay pamphlet published by Pastor Peter J. Peters. And he’s far from alone. Rev. Fred Phelps and his creepy Westboro Baptist Church choir are up on YouTube.

Meanwhile, most discussions about safe schools focus on gangs and racially based incidents of hate and consistently fail to mention safety for students who are or are perceived to be LGBT. Perhaps debate over state Sen. Sheila Kuehl’s new Student Civil Rights Act will help.

But we’ve come full circle: If young men who are constantly picked on, bullied and humiliated have a propensity for becoming violent to prove their manhood, then we must stop considering schoolyard bullying as an acceptable “rite of passage” to maturation.

We must also honestly examine the constitutional idea of equality in America. The truth is only white straight men are automatically equal. The rest of us have to constantly prove ourselves.

Here’s a question: Why is it that gay people who have been constantly bullied have not become violent, but instead often go on to become responsible citizens, successful entrepreneurs and even great political leaders?