Guns and masculinity

     

     After every mass shooting, the one area looked at are mental health issues and how to identify and treat mental health.  But looking at the mental health issue in more detail it becomes apparent that mass shootings are just a mental health issue for only one gender and one age group.  Young men seem to predominate the profile of mass shooters.  For some young men, the ability to translate their aggression into socially acceptable ways, such as sports and low-level teasing of others, leads others into destructive behavior.  It may translate into destructive behaviors such as vandalism and bullying or for a portion of young men into the need to exact revenge for their hurt feelings by killing as many people as possible.  All of us males have experienced the surge of testosterone as we became adults and have had to learn how to minimize this surge in destructive ways.  While young females during this same period generally deal with controlling feelings that are internally directed, young males have to control their feelings that are more likely to be externally directed.  

     The reality is that we can try and have societal "guide rails" in place to identify and treat the toxic destructive actions of young males, there will always be a certain number that escape these societal measures.  When you add in the easy access to weapons designed for mass killing that exists in America and you have created the situation for continual mass shootings.  As much as the deniers of this reality want to have us look in other directions as the solution to mass killings the experience of the rest of the world shows us that the availability of guns in America explains why we experience so many gun deaths and mass shootings.  America isn't the only country with toxic young men but we are the only one with a Second Amendment.