GUNS AND NEUROSES.

Another week, another school shooting, and a lot of the usual retreating to siloes, and probably nothing good will come of any of it.

I'm persuaded by the concluding line in a Wall Street Journal editorial, "Young Men, Guns, & Guardrails" (also available here or here.). "But anyone who thinks gun laws will end mass shootings in America isn’t paying attention to the much larger problem of mental illness and the collapse of cultural guardrails."  It's possible Daniel Henninger was lead writer for that editorial, his "No Guardrails" has long been a pole star here at Cold Spring Shops.

Red State's Bonchie starts the policy conversation.

Republicans should stop playing defense when they haven’t done anything wrong lest they be consumed. Preempt the ineffective policy prescriptions of the left, which only serve to garner unrelated political goals, by introducing actual “common-sense” reforms. Have those reforms not target the Second Amendment, but rather focus on the direct protection of schools, enforcing existing laws, and getting the mentally ill the help they need. If Democrats want to say no to all that, let them go on the record.

A Mahablog post provides an instructive entry to the mental illness side of the discussion.

Regarding mental health services, what would be really useful is helping schools and other institutions recognize and provide counseling services to those who are moving into self-destruct mode. Building more psychiatric hospitals might be a good idea for our mental health system overall, but most of our mass shooters don’t have the kinds of “mental illness” that are treated in hospitals, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa being an exception. And the last thing we need to do is to further stigmatize mental illness either by blaming it or creating a database of “mentally ill” people who aren’t allowed to purchase guns, which has been suggested in the past. Few mass shooters have been diagnosed with anything at the time of the shootings. Most of them don’t have a true “mental illness” so much as just being seriously maladjusted.

Yes, and high school can suck if you're an outlier, and some kinds of outliers get more favorable treatment than others.  That's a research topic for another day.  "The obvious link between mental health issues and Democrat leanings may very well indicate the rise in trans children."  There might be enough protection for genuinely dysphoric kids, or for faddists clever enough to run to the protection, that they're not going to be the school shooters.

• Very liberal ideology and LGBT identification are associated with anxiety and depression in young people. Very liberal young Americans are twice as likely as others to experience these problems. 27% of young Americans with anxiety or depression were LGBT in 2021. This relationship appears to have strengthened since 2010.
• Among young people, mental health problems, liberal ideology, and LGBT identity are strongly correlated. Using factor analysis in two different studies shows that assuming one common variable between all three traits explains 40-50% of the variation.

Extreme progressivism, a different manifestation of a serious maladjustment?  Where are the abnormal psychologists, or whatever they style themselves these days, when that research rubric might be useful?

They might have something constructive to contribute.  The culture side quickly deteriorates into jargon and polemics.  Consider, first, the contribution of a gender studies professor called Reagan Ross.

The shooter who slaughtered our children at Robb Elementary purportedly had a speech impediment and was cruelly bullied when he was young, bullying also a symptom of our unhealthy toxic masculinity culture. He also apparently had a terrible home environment. Such an upbringing couldn't have but led to a thoroughly dysfunctional individual and untreated mental health issues. That doesn't mean of course that every such young person with mental illnesses will become a killer, but it does mean that many if not most toxic masculinity young men will have issues that left untreated could potentially lead to (self) destructive choices. That is, when young toxic masculinity men with mental illnesses grow up in a society permeated with toxic masculinity ideological indoctrination and messaging, that influence—that combination—can potentially lead to the most disturbing of (self) destructive choices.

Michael Walsh starts with the same set of facts and sees "toxic" masculinity as the absence of genuine masculinity.

For half a century masculinity has been under concerted attack in this country—fish, bicycle is one of the more benign forms, although still passive-aggressively hateful—until today it has been deemed "toxic" by the harpies of fourth-wave feminism and their very strange bedfellows in the QWERTYUIOP+ brigades. The unsurprising result has been the diminution and removal of genuine masculinity from the public square— even in the military, which now prizes women and trans-wokeness over men—and its replacement with sundry culturally unacceptable substitutes.

Chief among the missing males have been fathers: real, biological, spiritual, emotional, disciplinary fathers. Not "baby daddies," to use the ghetto term that has percolated its way up and into the larger culture. Not transient sperm donors, who wouldn't exist in the first place without trampy women to enable them. Not semi-functioning biological males embedded in the transgressive woke community who take an "X" for the team. But real men, who not only take responsibility for their children but impart responsibility to the next generation, especially to their sons.

Those two might be in agreement that children aren't being properly socialized, but put them on the same set and watch it deteriorate into Crossfire.