The Mukilteo shooting is one of many incidents of gun violence that took place in Washington state this year. Heidi Groover’s news feature on the connection between toxic masculinity and guns is one of our staffers’ favorite stories of 2016. It’s republished below.
By now, the plot points are familiar. A woman dates a man. The two break up. He’s jealous, “heartbroken,” he can’t take no for an answer. He buys a gun—or he has one already. He kills her.
Police say that on July 29, 19-year-old Allen Christopher Ivanov crept up to a low-key house party in Mukilteo, saw his ex-girlfriend with another man, returned to his car, read the instruction manual for the AR-15 he’d purchased a week earlier, loaded the gun, and returned to the party to inflict mayhem. He shot a young male partygoer who discovered him, then his ex, Anna Bui, and then two more men, according to a detective’s account of Ivanov’s statement.
“Ivanov stated that everything that went on tonight was about a girl,” the detective wrote.
