As far as I understand it, most of the massacres are carried out by disaffected and alienated youths or young men, acting alone. They are almost certainly mentally disturbed, if not ill, and there will be many factors that have got them this way - I'm very much with
@slant on this that a practical way forward is to identify them in advance and nip the problem in the bud. That takes resources and expertise - it sounds like some States are willing to do this and others aren't. I doubt that it's all that difficult because most of these guys don't seem to be all that clever - a teenage lad is pretty transparent. The islamicist terrorists who have carried out atrocities in the UK seem to have a similar sort of profile - angry and alienated young men with a degree of mental instability, but they can be a bit harder to find ahead of the game. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but most of these guys will be victims of some sort, driven to extremes by goodness knows what demons.
This is on-point, and I agree, but the cultural and gender roles assigned to young men in the United States make this approach and process difficult because the need for help in men is culturally equated with weakness, which is mutually exclusive with being a “man.”
Of course, there is also potential for the stigma associated with mental illness and treatment, depending on your mindset, and family/community.
As American boys become teenagers and begin the process of individuation, the family/community/culture begin to wash their hands of him. He needs nothing, because he is now a man. The culture at large does not challenge the idea he has right-minded agency and autonomy. He goes forth, and will make something of himself, or so says the myth and the expectations of his role.
That he would ask for help, or we offer it, would shame both the man, and the culture—him for his failure to meet expectations and play the role he was assigned, and the culture for pretending men are both more and other than they are...human.
Until we love our boys, and in turn young men, for who they are, as they are, and recognize their worth, and their needs, we will continue to lose them to a darkness that preys upon them, breaks them, and discards them, resulting in suffering for us all.
Perhaps some of the problem is caused by systemic dysfunctionality in government, but I think it's misleading to project all the faults of society onto this possible problem. The solution has to lie also with people individually or in local organisations taking responsibility rather than putting it all on 'Them', the oppressors. I'm not saying there isn't truth in it, but there are other deeply rooted problems too such as (for example) the effect of family break-ups on children, the lack of stable father role models for many youngsters, bullying, and social isolation. This is a social problem, not just one of government, and there will be others too, such as the impact of the media and social networking. Of course many people don't like looking at their own individual behaviour and thinking about it's impact on their immediate family and on society as a whole - but, far more powerfully than our votes, our individual attitudes and behaviours add up into those of the whole society around us. We end up with the society that we invent through our own individual attitudes and contributions - and we inevitably end up with governments that reflect this grass roots culture regardless of the way they come into power.
Exactly. There is a systemic aspect, yes, but the root of losing these young men is fed by the pain of their unmet human need. It begins with the self, the family, and the community. Those things are shaped by larger systems, but those systems are not causal.
I've reflected on it, and I don't think I have anything useful to say on whether or not you should ban personal ownership of firearms in the USA. I can't see that gun ownership serves the purpose of guaranteeing freedom - personally I'd have been scared silly as a kid if my school had had to be controlled by armed guards and I would have felt very unfree indeed. But maybe that's just me, living in a very different sort of society. But as others have said, the problem wouldn't go away if you banned them. There are just too many already out there, and people who feel strongly about it would get access to them come what may.
Nods.
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Martin Luther King Jr. said that a riot is the language of the unheard. That’s for a neighborhood, a community, a city.
The violence of a lone shooter at a school—that is also the language of the unheard, but only one voice is speaking–with a gun—because we are wilfully deaf to the plaintive wail of their soul’s longing.
Forgive us, for we know not what we do,
Ian
for running off with flaming batons of misunderstanding.
