We overlook a significant factor in mass shootings: fatherlessness

A child s most important parental figure is the same-sex parent because children model themselves after them. For young men, having that father figure in their lives provides a blueprint for manhood and a source of protection from the outside world.

The world can at times be harsh for young men, but your father is supposed to be your source of security, a builder of confidence and a teacher for how to regulate your emotions in stressful situations. Most crucial, the father is the son s purpose compass as he helps guide him throughout the trials of adolescence towards purposeful adulthood.

But what happens when there is no father in a child s life? What happens to those boys when their compass is nowhere to be found? They all too often become lost boys and grow into lost men.

I know this feeling of being lost because I was that lost boy I also grew up without my father in my life. I understand what it feels like to be confused about how to be a man, feeling like you re not being advocated for and becoming depressed to the point of considering suicide.

What people misunderstand about mass shooters is that they are more suicidal than homicidal. To do something of this nature, you have to no longer care whether you live or die. The action of taking other people s lives in the process of killing themselves is a way for them to grab attention on the way out because they ve spent a significant portion of their lives feeling invisible.

Men with unregulated emotions and hopelessness and without a positive purpose are either a danger to themselves or others in any society. When they re raised without proper instruction, we cannot be surprised when they choose chaos in the form of drugs like fentanyl or a gun as their instrument to express their dysfunction.

via nypost.com