Male role models, not gun control, is needed to stop mass shootings

We don’t have a gun-control crisis in this country, what we have is a masculinity crisis.

And until we start to get honest about the importance of a male influence in the lives of boys, nothing is going to change.

This isn’t an easy conversation to have in 2019. We live in a time where women proudly champion their independence and single motherhood. Any disagreement is immediately shouted down with terms like “toxic masculinity.”

When a young man commits a heinous crime like a mass shooting, the media loves to use sound-bite reasons like assault weapons, Trump rallies and hate groups. Could they all be factors? Sure, but there’s another common denominator that keeps getting overlooked. 

Dr. Warren Farrell, a behavioral psychologist who pioneered the “boy crisis” terminology spent years researching why boys are steadily falling behind women academically and experiencing a record high incarceration rate.

What he found was if a boy grows up in a fatherless environment, he has a higher chance of struggling emotionally when he reaches puberty. Men will always be the main teachers and role models that help boys handle the surge of testosterone that comes during maturation.

How does this tie in with mass shootings? Farrell found that almost every single one of the mass shooters in the last nine years were raised by single mothers with little to no male influence in their lives. Similarly, he found that prisons are essentially warehouses for a dad-deprived population. 

In 2015, 19-year-old Anthony Sims, better known as the “Oakland killer” fatally shot a mother attempting to rush her children to safety after a nearby argument turned violent. The last Facebook post on Sims’ account read, “I wish I had a father.”  

How is it that women who are raised in a similar environment don’t go on to commit heinous acts of violence? It’s part of an uncomfortable truth that runs counter to the far left agenda regarding gender equality. 

It means admitting that boys and girls are biologically different and need different influences in order to grow up to be stable adults.

Men will always be the beacons to guide boys in a constructive way toward manhood. Women don’t know what it feels like to have testosterone raging through them in the same way that men don’t know what it feels like to give birth.

Coming to terms with the reality that there is a downside to feminism in terms of raising boys is a bitter pill that we all have to swallow if we want to see even the slightest decrease in mass shootings and violence. 

We can either continue to argue endlessly about whether video games and Trump rallies cause boys to go off the rails, or we can pull up a chair and have some difficult conversations about the importance of masculinity.