Background: On numerous occasions over the past year I have condemned the June, 2006 actions of Darren Mack. Mack is a wealthy Nevada father who was involved in a divorce when he stabbed his estranged wife to death and then executed a well-planned murder attempt on a Nevada judge.

Mack shot and wounded the judge but failed to kill him. According to the Reno Gazette-Journal, when police searched Mack's residence they found he "had bombmaking materials in his bedroom" as well as "several boxes of firearm ammunition."

 At the time of Mack’s murder spree, I wrote:

“I condemn without qualification the crimes allegedly committed by Darren Mack in Nevada last week. Mack was angered by his divorce and custody case. Some on the not insubstantial lunatic fringe of the fathers' rights movement see Mack as some sort of freedom fighter. Most of the commentary by other fathers' rights advocates seem to be of the ‘he couldn't take it anymore and snapped’ variety.

“I don't buy it. Though everyone is focusing on Mack's attempted murder of a judge, everyone seems to forget that he first stabbed and killed his estranged wife. After murdering her, he shot the judge through the judge's third-floor office window with a sniper rifle from over 100 yards away. That's not ‘snapping’--that's premeditated murder. Mack is not a good man trapped in a bad system. He is a bad guy. Because of men like him the system had to create protections for women, and unscrupulous women have misused those protections to victimize countless innocent men. Men like Mack aren't the byproducts of the system's problems--they are the problem.”

Since it was the one-year anniversary of Mack’s murder spree recently, I posted my commentary from June of last year on my blog, with the comment “In reading it again now, I can't say I'd change a word.”

MensNewsDaily.com blogger “The Gonzman” didn’t like my blog post and posted an extensive response to it on MND called “Darren Mack II: A Response to Glenn Sacks.” In it Gonzman details his own miserable experience with the family law system and the way it often allows mothers to destroy the loving bonds children share with their fathers.

A few points:

The Gonzman’s main point in his criticism of me is that I do not have the right to criticize Mack because I’ve never walked in his shoes (i.e. I’m not a divorced dad). There are several problems with this argument:

1) When Gonzman writes of Darren Mack, he doesn’t see Darren Mack, he sees himself—himself and all of the decent loving fathers whose lives were manhandled by the family law system. Gonzman is assuming that Darren Mack is a good man victimized by the family law system. This is very speculative, particularly when you consider the terrible violence that Mack wreaked upon his estranged wife and those around him.

It is, of course, possible that Mack was mistreated by the system, but from what we know it sounds far more likely that he was the problem, not the victim. There are plenty of bad women out there, but there are also plenty of bad men out there. Mack is one of them.

2) "Only those who have been victims can judge” is a very flawed and dangerous line of thinking—a line of thinking feminists and misguided women’s advocates use against men every day. Much of the feminist movement and the anti-male laws and polices it has successfully promoted are based on the idea that only (female) victims can truly understand the enormity of the (male’s) crime. Women and their advocates are the only ones who should get to make the rules and everybody else (i.e. men) must shut up and take it.

For example, the criminal justice system has become very stacked against men accused of rape. One of the reasons is the deference of male legislators and judges to the pain of women who claim they’ve been raped.

Another example--male judges hand out restraining orders to any woman who cries, destroying innocent men’s lives along the way. This is in part because feminists promote the idea that a (male) judge doesn’t know how a battered woman feels and what she needs—how dare he refuse her what she says she needs?

(A personal note: No, I’m not a divorced dad, but I’ve received tens of thousands of letters from divorced dads, and I have a pretty good idea of how they feel and their pain. I’ve also spent an unfathomable amount of time answering these letters and trying to direct fathers towards help or offer advice.)

3) We’re often frustrated with the way the feminist movement and the media excuse women's misdeeds. There are countless examples of this. When Andrea Yates drowned her five children in a bathtub, Patricia Ireland, the former president of the National Organization for Women, blamed it on the patriarchy. When Gilberta Estrada murdered three of her four children, the media shifted blame onto her allegedly abusive ex.

Whenever a woman does something evil, the feminists and the mainstream media always seem to have some reason why she’s a victim, or it’s really a man’s fault. If we excuse or sympathize with Darren Mack, are we any different?

4) The Gonzman is outraged that I “put something out like this when Father's Day is mere hours away from us” and asks “What the HELL were you thinking?”

I didn’t put it out for Father’s Day—I put it out because it’s the one year anniversary of Mack’s murder spree, and numerous media outlets (including CBS and several Nevada newspapers) are covering the anniversary.

5) John Dias, a commenter on MND and on Gonzman’s post, wrote:
 
“How sad it is that Glenn feels he has to be so trapped in a rhetorical box that he can't even extend sympathy.”

I’m not “trapped” on Darren Mack—I had no need to even mention him, much less feel “trapped” into condemning him. I condemned him because it’s the right thing to do.

(As an aside, after Mack’s murder spree I was offered the chance to go on a couple of major television shows and take the point of view that “I condemn the murders but can sympathize with the pain that drove him to it.” I declined, because I don’t sympathize with him, and I believe such sentiments are bad for the movement. Others in the movement went on the shows instead.)

6) I can’t go into great detail on this, but while Mack was on the run after his murder spree he tried to bring in/corral certain leaders of the fathers’ movement to defend him in the media and explain away what he did. In other words, Mack was willing to publicly drag our movement through the mud and set us back 25 years over his case and his violence. I can’t imagine anything more selfish.

One final point—it is said that you can judge a movement by who its heroes are. Any modern movement which chooses to make a hero out of (or sympathize with) a murderer might as well pack up and go home right now--it will never go anywhere.

Gonzman’s criticism of me can be seen on MensNewsDaily here.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Family Law, Feminism/NOW, Domestic Violence/DV System, Fathers' Rights/Noncustodial parents' rights, False Accusations, Men and the Media, Divorce/Separation/Child Custody, Men's Movement, Gender Issues (Misc.), Family Court Reform Movement. You can trackback from your own site.