School Shooting

An Observation About Men in Society

Mark Noonan12 Comments

V the K notes what might actually help to prevent school massacres:

The best approach to ending mass murder incidents at public school seems pretty straightforward; make schools more secure. At the high school my son went to, there was only one to get into the school during school hours. You had to enter into a secure vestibule, then be buzzed into the main office by a staffer. This simple expedient, coupled with an alert staff, would have prevented what happened in Florida. It also would have worked at Sandy Hook.

This is true – but, also, a little sad. The thing about breaking the big rules is that you don’t end up with no rules, but with a lot of little rules, instead. We broke the big rules about what it means to be a man ’round about 50 years ago…and now we’re forced to enact a whole series of little rules to ensure that when the males who don’t know how to be men go nuts, fewer people will be killed and injured.

Men need to feel valued as providers and protectors. If men are not valued as such, then they will tend towards a nihilistic destructiveness. As no one was writing things down way back when, we don’t know if it was a man who cut the deal with the woman or the woman who cut the deal with the man, but the deal was struck: woman sticks loyally to the man and the man, in turn, sticks loyally with the woman…providing sustenance for their children and protection against other men. And when that deal was struck, however it was struck, for the first time a male became a man.

Yes, this does presuppose that the man, in return for doing his part, will gain a bit of authority – in Roman times, they called it pater familias. The concept was, ultimately, that if a man was to tie himself to one woman and make certain that she and all children were cared for, he was to exercise a level of authority over the family. Fair? Fair has nothing to do with it: it was what it was. It turned brutish males into civilized men who would throw their lives away in defense of wife, children and home. If you wonder at the return of the brutish male, look no further than our destruction of the idea of the man as protector and provider.

Build your security gates. Continue to drug males who won’t fit in. Jail them in ever greater numbers. Propagandize against “toxic masculinity” all you want. But unless men feel themselves to be part of a larger whole and have distinct duties and privileges attached to that, then we’ll continue to get madmen wading into our schools to kill.

“Everyone predicted it,”

Cluster28 Comments

These were the words of a fellow student of Nikolas Cruz and a common theme that surrounds many of these mass shootings. Whether it be the Orlando nightclub, the San Bernardino Christmas party shooting, or Aurora, CO, it seems that many of these mass shooters are known by several people to be on the verge of such horrific actions, yet everyone stays quiet and these very disturbed people are given the space needed to act upon their demons. I even read one account where school officials were well aware of Mr. Cruz and his bizarre behavior and his penchant for fire arms, and if one account is correct, authorities were to be called if Mr. Cruz were to be seen on campus with a backpack. If these accounts are accurate, than there enough warning signs in my opinion to have prevented this.

I grew up in the 70’s in Montana and everyone owned guns, nearly everyone hunted, hunter safety was a school course, and it was a rite of passage to carry your rifles in the back of your pickup. AND THERE WAS NOT ONE SINGLE SHOOTING. I will easily wager a substantial bet that there were a lot more guns on my campus in the 70’s than there are at any campus today, yet not one person was shot in my four years of high school. Were the guns different? No. Is the culture different? Hell yes. One huge cultural difference in my opinion is the level of societal discipline towards children and the “first person shooter” games that so many kids are obsessed with. School officials, administrators, and teachers have abdicated their responsibilities and the inmates now run the asylums. Political correctness, and over emotional parents have handcuffed teachers who no longer can impose discipline and order in the classroom and I have seen this first hand. In my day, if you acted out in class and disobeyed school officials, there were real consequences, and the parents followed through. This level of discipline and order is missing from many kids lives these days and we see the negative societal impacts.

In a free country of 300+ million people and hundreds of millions of fire arms, confiscating and controlling fire arms is a non starter, but of course this is what you will hear every progressive across this nation crying about today. Guns are not, and never have been the problem. The cultural environment our kids are growing up in is the problem, and it needs to be addressed. Had there been some well trained officials on campus with fire arms, this may have been prevented. In fact in this day and age, why there aren’t armed guards on many of our school campuses is beyond me.

UPDATE, By Mark Noonan: Looks like the FBI missed it, too. And as usual for me, I bring up this song on these events. It’ll keep happening until we change.