"Maybe we need a White House Council on Men and Boys"

Auch in den USA kommt man allmählich dahinter, dass die Amokläufer der letzten Woche etwas mit der Jungenkrise zu tun haben könnten:

We’ve seen that face before, though it was easy to forget. Young, pasty-faced, non-threatening, it might be the face of the underemployed young man still living with his parents down the street, or the student with no honors by his name in the class yearbook. Pretty girls pay little attention to faces like this.

It’s only when this generic underachiever blows away several people or someone famous, that we trouble ourselves to study that face, the face of Michael Kenneth McLendon, who killed 10 people in South Alabama Wednesday, or Tim Kretschmer, who killed 15 in Germany the same day. Young men like these seem to have tragic bad timing: Bereft of attention all their lives, they often do their killing on the same news cycle.

This is the face of Arthur Bremer, of John Hinckley, of Eric and Dylan, the Columbine boys, and dozens upon dozens of faces whose rampages have faded into memory.

We can’t presume to understand what hidden abuses might have caused any of these individuals to snap, or whether there was any particular reason at all. When a man systematically kills his mother, grandmother, uncle and cousin, it hints of some dark family secret. But McClendon killed people he didn’t know as well, and later stories from Alabama have shot down the earlier report that he kept a “hit list.”

There is, however, overwhelming evidence that underneath each specific case of hidden turmoil, there runs a deep current of humiliation and shame.

“Everyone laughs at me, nobody recognizes my potential,” Kretschmer, the German high school kid, wrote before his rampage.

Many people have similar feelings, but it’s the effect these emotions have specifically on young men with marginal sexual or financial prospects which has this murderous result, whether the gun laws are those of the state of Alabama or the Federal Republic of Germany.

Hier geht es weiter.

Wie furchtbar, dass es erst Dutzende von Toten brauchte, bis Journalisten das aufgreifen, was die Männerrechtsbewegung seit Jahren dringend empfiehlt.