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.
