Written by Mary Anne Wentink
Since Columbine, we have all been shocked and sickened by a series of mass killings at schools, churches, malls, theaters, concerts, and other public assemblies. This last month we witnessed three such events, and, as has become all too common, our commentators have split again to call for gun control or to repeat the familiar trope: guns don’t kill people, people do.
More specifically, boys do—virtually all of these horrors have been perpetrated by young men in their teens or early twenties
Why? Among the calls for better background checks and larger mental health expenditures, we seem to ignore the more basic question as to why so many of our young men have become so disaffected that they take out their frustrations by killing strangers, often other kids. Such things were once unthinkable, even among the criminal class. In the last few years they’ve become almost commonplace, and among the perpetrators, a point of pride and a rite of passage that now can be and frequently are documented with “go-to” videos of the murders as they’re taking place.
We can talk about the breakdown of the American family and how some boys lack any adult male role models in their lives. We see the rise of gangs in which murder forms a part of their initiation rites. We can point to the addictive video games that have become more lifelike and violent, many espousing a totally amoral philosophy, encouraging the player to throw aside all ethical considerations to win to another level. We can review today’s “youth” literature, often bleak and violent, dystopian, pointing to a cruel and useless existence, with many celebrating death. We can point to Hollywood shoot-em-ups where the “good” guys are as bad as the “bad” and every gruesome detail is portrayed lovingly and often in slow motion with a maximum amount of gore. We can also point at Hollywood sitcoms where the father is portrayed as a fool. We can blame the accusatory and divisive rhetoric of the politicians labeling their opponents as racist Nazis calling for the extermination of entire groups in our society, and we can blame those groups that actually do call for the death or transportation of other groups.
All of these problems are certainly contributory, and most of the killers are known to have been influenced by some combination of these factors. But is this the reason why our kids are killing kids?
It’s often pointed out that other nations have these same influences and don’t turn out so many murderers. Why do American boys seem to be so much more susceptible? Is it the availability of guns, or is it our modern American PC where boys are being minimized at all turns and from a very early age?
For instance, it’s common practice to diagnose ADHD and begin drugging young boys for simply being boys. We’ve seen boys called perverts for hugging a girl at age 5 or chewing up a cookie to make it look like a gun. Many schools are abolishing active P.E. and team sports in favor of school programs that make all children question their sexuality before most kids have even begun considering the matter. At the same time, many school classes teach that all males are predatory by nature, proclaiming masculinity as toxic, to be restrained at all costs.
These same boys are also exposed to the particularly rabid feminists who decry men’s very existence except as potential sperm donors. After that indoctrination our boys are shown such examples as the Kavanaugh hearings that teach most explicitly that all a man has achieved can be destroyed by a single woman crying rape in a public forum 40 years after an alleged attack because the woman must be believed and, even if the accused is, in fact, innocent, it doesn’t really matter as some man somewhere has raped some woman and all men must therefore pay the price.
With this constant barrage of negative messaging from early childhood to young adult, is it truly any wonder that some of our boys actually turn into the monsters we’ve already branded them?
