Warren Farrell: 'Guns don't kill people — our sons do'

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2013-01-07 17:05

Article here. Excerpt:

'For boys, the road to successful manhood has crumbled. In many boys' journey from a fatherless family to an almost all-female staff elementary school such as Sandy Hook, there is no constructive male role model.
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Adam Lanza is reported to have gone downhill when divorce separated him from his dad. Children of divorce without enough father contact are prone to have poor social skills; to struggle with the five D's (depression, drugs, drinking, discipline and delinquency); be suicidal; be less able to concentrate; and to be aggressive but not assertive. Perhaps most important, these boys are less empathetic.
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It's time we go beyond fighting over guns to raising our sons. With one executive order, President Obama can create a White House Council on Men and Boys to work with the Council on Women and Girls he formed in 2009. Why? No one part of government or the private sector has a handle on the solution.

A coordinated strategy is best developed at the White House level. The mere formation of such a council by the president alerts foundations, companies, families, teachers and therapists that our sons' "failure to launch" needs to be on their agenda. And politically, an effort to go beyond the rote ideological disagreements of the two parties could help build the unity to actually do something instead of fight to a standstill in a closely divided country.

There are few things a culture does as important as raising children. We can't continue to fail half of them.'

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Comments

Saw this today, makes very valid observations; note the female mass-murderers mentioned too, and they were also on meds or coming off them.

http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/the-giant-gaping-hole-in-sandy-hook-reporting/

This isn't to say I don't think we could do a better job of keeping dangerous weapons such as AR-15s out of the hands of ppl who are basically insane, and not just any kind of insane, but homicidally so. It does mean though that the issue is not quite so cut-and-dried as "let's just take away all the guns!", as if we could actually do it. The simplistic answers from all quarters bandied around since late last year's tragedies in Connecticut and New York won't cut the mustard. The problem has to be tackled from multiple angles and even then we need to accept that we won't be able to totally stop all such terrible events. But we can reduce their occurrence a whole lot.

Oh yeah, re psych meds: This is a tough one. Anti-deps and other psych meds for more serious conditions like psychosis or schizophrenia do a lot of good for a lot of ppl who really need them. I am not coming down on psych meds as such. It's just as with firearm possession, things are usually just fine; it's just when things do go badly, they go VERY badly. "There's no such thing as a 'minor problem' with an airlock on a spaceship in orbit." Really, I don't know what we can do about the psych drug issue except to have our pdocs be a whole lot more careful about bringing people off them.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2013-01-08 02:17

I think it might be wise to consider how men are treated in our society. Men are still usually asked to do the worst jobs, from cleaning out the sewer to fighting our wars. War is often a traumatic experience for men--but men are often expected to deal with on their own. I recall how soldiers returning from Viet Nam were treated--even if they had been drafted, they were called "baby killers" and often blamed personally for the war. That's a huge psychic burden to put on a man. Today repeated tours in Afghanistan have resulted in the suicide rate among soldiers being higher than the casualty rate over the last year. And divorce takes a toll: divorced men kill themselves ten times more often than divorced women. Of course, every mass killing brings out the negative male stereotypes--which reinforces the now common cultural view of men as the bad guys. Anything a man achieves today is credited to "male privilege." Only rarely are the achievements of men recognized.

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Submitted by el cid on Wed, 2013-01-09 02:35