When Will It Stop?

I was in the middle of posting Day 1 of my #30DayWritingChallenge about the bomb packages from earlier this week when news broke about an active shooter during services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. The anti-Semite killed 11 people.

Much like with the bombs, many people immediately retreated to their political corners. It is exhausting how that has become our first instinct, even as an active shooting incident is unfolding before us. Online, Twitter detectives began sharing unconfirmed information about the incident even while it was still taking place. Donald Trump, who the night before said he could take his incendiary rhetoric up a notch, immediately said that the attack would not have happened had there been armed guards at the synagogue.

That can't be our response to the massive amount of gun violence that exist in this country, can it?

I grew up in the housing projects of the South Bronx during the decades when the neighborhood was full of violence, drugs and more fires than we could keep up with.

I routinely had to step over drug users in the stairwell of my building (the elevators broke down often) and at a very young age I learned the difference in sound between a gunshot and firecrackers. And while that was quite the lesson to learn as a child, it is nothing compared to the active shooter drills that occur in schools across the country today.

But, as we know, it is much worse than that. Places of worship that serve as centers of our communities and places of peace are targets. Concerts, movie theaters, supermarkets. It seems no place is safe from an angry person with a gun -- whether purchased legally or not.

The vast majority of mass shooters are men. Anger, as we see all the time, is an emotion often heralded in men, but immediately castigated in women. Many men are never taught how to process and deal with their emotions. In fact, the very concept of doing so is seen as unmanly by many. What is considered manly? Anger and violence. It's in our movies, our sports, everywhere in our culture.

So, when does it stop? Or more importantly, how does it stop? What is the best way to raise sons with a full emotional toolkit? How do we re-define masculinity, which we know has massive repercussions on how men treat women? No one policy is going to shift human behavior. This is on all of us. I'd love to know what you think. How do we change things?

(cover image via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)