Good Men Project Actually Gets It Partially Right On Mass Shootings

I’m not a fan of the website known as the Good Men Project. While the name sounds fine, like it’s about helping guys become better men, what they generally do a better job of is telling guys how to be better women. It’s a site for male feminists to pontificate on a number of things they know nothing about. Male feminism is often treated like the only path to being a good man.

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Based on the number of supposed male feminists who turn out to be sex creeps, I’m not sure it’s any path to being a good man.

However, I try to be in the habit of admitting if someone or somewhere I dislike gets something right. This time, the Good Men Project sure seems to have slipped up and said something not idiotic.

Newscasters, get your act together. Forget about gun control for a minute and focus on fathers. Let’s turn the media to the relationships mass murderers have had with their fathers. These men have lived life feeling excluded and without protection from their fathers’ emotional distance.

Anyone who kills strangers has suffered trauma so powerful they have lost track of their compassion. Because they haven’t felt connected to a compassionate man, mass murderers are expressing rage at a world which hasn’t yet helped them manage their sense of exclusion.

The ultimate exclusion we typically conjure as humans is death. Bringing death to innocent people is for mass murderers a way to reach out for attention and express anger at the lack of love in their lives. Scratch the surface just a little bit to go into the development of mass murderer mentalities and you’ll find boys whose fathers have themselves been emotionally deprived and mismanaged.

Now, I’m not a touchy-feely kind of guy, but the fact that the Good Men Project is noting that the fathers are at least somewhat to blame isn’t as idiotic as some might like to paint it.

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The vast majority of mass shooters come from single-parent households. They’re young men raised exclusively by mothers, often without a father figure at all. They’re violent, but that violence often exists after a childhood where Daddy wasn’t around to teach them about when aggression is good and when it’s outright evil. There were no father figures in their lives at all.

It’s not so much about emotional distance and has more to do with a complete lack of presence.

Still, like I said, if they say something that’s not stupid, I want to give them credit for it. Yes, that includes doing so if their reasons are little more than feminist, new-age mumbo-jumbo or pseudo-psychology. I’ll focus on what I agree with them on, and that’s the role of the father.

The piece concludes by suggesting the media turn their attention to fathers who raise these monsters, which isn’t a bad idea. The problem is, these fathers are usually not raising their kids, so it seems unlikely we’ll see the media report on them any time soon.

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