Our greatest public health crisis is the angry young American male

Of course gun control works. It worked in the 40's, when the guns were at war. It worked in the fifties, when gun responsibility was taught and enforced--by parents, no less. The same in the sixties and seventies and eighties, before video games. How riled can you become at pinball? But then society began shifting. The NRA emerged, the country began dividing, children were not taught to respect boundaries. Hate increased. 9/11 happened. The country became more intolerant. Now we need real gun control, like the Brady Bill, the Clinton ban on automatic weapons. The Right and the NRA won't have it, for all the reasons mentioned. And so children and loved ones die, and I see no end.

I wrote this paragraph last night, on Marty Damon's blog, Welcome Words. Grasping straws and hoping some leader would step up and solve the problem. Wanting, like all of us, that currently impossible solution, gun control. Today I read a New York Post column, which is the title of today's blog. The author is Maureen Callahan.

We are continuing to create, she says, more than 20 years after Columbine, young male mass shooters who target schoolchildren. Only in America are we cultivating young men hellbent on killing our children.  "...it’s probably only another week before another random mass shooting, another round of national outrage and sadness, another collective shrug of hopelessness."

The profile is young, male, angry. Online threats made openly, not on the dark web. Obsessed with guns, violence and first person shooter video games. He is a lone wolf no more, not since the internet. "Now any disaffected young man can become, with anonymous encouragement and advice, a killing machine."

Boys and young men, whose frontal cortex is not mature until age 25 plug into online groups and share grewsome fantasies to rape, kill or commit mass shootings.

After 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security began tracking online chatter to disrupt planned terror attacks, as did the FBI, which began proactively working up profiles of future terrorists. Why can’t the same be done here?

These young men are visible long before they are old enough or strong enough to carry out a mass killing. Teachers see them every day, bullied, friendless, badly broken homes, no support, little parental guidance.

Before the shout of violation of personal rights goes up, why not monitor these on-line conversations and in the end keep the young man under surveillance. If he leaves home armed to the teeth, intercept him at the school, the movie theater, the church, the supermarket. 

This is a blogger note. I believe the first two paragraphs may have a white or yellow or grey background. I believe it's because I used copy and paste.