"Lost Boys" and mass shootings

The LA Times is not exactly the media arm of the NRA. "Op-Ed: We have studied every mass shooting since 1966. Here’s what we’ve learned about the shooters"

First, the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying. The trauma was often a precursor to mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, thought disorders or suicidality.

Second, practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. They often had become angry and despondent because of a specific grievance. For workplace shooters, a change in job status was frequently the trigger. For shooters in other contexts, relationship rejection or loss often played a role. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.

Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives.

Then there is this, which is highly related: "Missing fathers and America's broken boys - the vast majority of mass shooters come from broken homes"

[Divorce] is destructive to both boys and girls, but each sex suffers differently. Girls who grow up deprived of their father are more likely to become depressed, more likely to self-harm, and more likely to be promiscuous. But they still have their mothers, with whom they clearly identify. Boys do not have a comparable identification and thus suffer more from father absence. They also tend to act out in a manner that’s harmful to others, which girls typically do not.

The root of fatherlessness rests in two things: our culture’s dismissal of men as valuable human beings who have something unique to offer, and its dismissal of marriage as an institution that’s crucial to the health and well-being of children.

Patheos rejects the idea that mass shootings are the result of "toxic masculinity."

Mr. Black is not the first to attack masculinity and suggest it’s at the root of all evil. Indeed, the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’ has become boilerplate language in America.

It’s not a hard sell, either. After all, it is boys and men who are typically to blame for violent acts of aggression. Ergo, testosterone—the defining hormone of masculinity—must be to blame. But testosterone has been around forever. School shootings have not.

Mr. Black is correct that boys are broken. But they’re not broken as a result of being cavemen who haven’t “evolved” the way women have. They’re broken for another reason.

They are fatherless.

For more than 50 years the US government's deliberate intention has been to make intact nuclear families unnecessary for the conceiving of and raising of children. Not long afterward, first-wave feminism jumped on the bandwagon.

Today we are told that gender and sex are merely social constructs and that there is no difference between parenting of children by a mother or father, who are conceptually merely social constructs anyway. Marriage rates have plummeted, especially among the lower economic classes. Increasing (heck, huge) numbers of boys are growing up with no father present in the home. And they are growing up in a culture that derides masculinity as "toxic" and has a presidential candidate telling them, "the future is female." And if they are white boys, they are especially mocked, scorned and derided these days.

But yeah, "high capacity magazines" are the real problem, sure.

Update:

[I]n the new era of “toxic masculinity,” young men are taught to ignore their heroic instincts and learn to be weak. They are instructed always to be on guard against the monster within. ...

This demonization of intrinsic maleness is part of a feminist movement to rewrite human history as the tale of tyrannical patriarchy. It quickly mutated out of the #MeToo campaign, which began as a reasonable get-square with powerful men who preyed on women but since has taken on a frighteningly punitive air. 

Now masculinity itself is the enemy and must be crushed from its earliest manifestations.

Boys and young men are bombarded with messages pathologizing their DNA. If they look at a woman, they’re accused of leering. If they open a door for a woman, they’re sexist. Even the way they sit on the subway has been criminalized as “manspreading.”

The American Psychological Association formalized the new pathology earlier this year by declaring “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful.”

The male attributes it fingered as most worrisome were: stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, aggression, anti-femininity, achievement, “eschewal of the appearance of weakness,” adventure, risk and violence.

But meanwhile, we have women completing the US Army's Ranger school and piloting fighter jets, and that is strangely not "toxic femininity," but "I am woman, hear me roar."