Your last point is worth pursuing. We need to do a better job of teaching boys that compassion and empathy are traits to be celebrated. And we need to provide them with male role models with those traits.

Exactly. Women who don’t fit into their traditional gender role now have a big “out” thanks to feminism (not that being a woman in business or engineering or government is easy, far from it). Boys never received that. If a boy isn’t fitting his gender role society doesn’t know what to do with him.

I wouldn’t say we took away care: violence like this has actually been going down for a long time. I would say that we put a lot more emphasis on girls (we always do, in a lot of different ways) than we did on boys. So now we have young women who grow up well adjusted way more often than boys, and we are kind of…

I agree. We shifted towards making sure our girls were getting the same advantages then boys were always given, but didn’t think that we were taking a lot of care and concern away from the other side of the classrooms. There has to be a balance. Also, there needs to be empathy and mental care taught to younger people.…

I can’t star comments like these enough. The patriarchy creates self-loathing men. Access to guns turns them into terrorists.

That was my point: the patriarchy created this guy. And its all of our faults. He had parents and teachers and community leaders who never engaged with him, who probably told him all about “being a man” and probably said stuff like “he will grow out of it” and assumed lots of things for him. It’s the same story time…

Thats also what sexism does. If a man is anything but a perfect “man” it is debilitating, especially for someone a bit borderline. We need to stop pigeonholing people into specific gendered roles. Its not healthy.

Here is a good opinion piece on why so many killers are male and fit this guy’s profile.