Photo by Thomas Tucker on Unsplash

With the two recent shootings popping up all over my social feeds, I felt like I needed to get a few words in on the issue.

There is an elephant in the room that no one is talking about with regards to the mass shootings that the United States has been experiencing.

Everyone wants to debate the guns themselves — do we need more, do we need less. What types should be regulated, what shouldn’t. What did the founding fathers really mean when they wrote the second amendment.

But there is another, bigger issue that I argue needs some attention.

Namely — the shooters are usually kids. And by kids, I don’t even mean they were “kids” in the grand scheme of things, I mean they are really, really young.

Early twenties for most of them, some even younger than that.

Connor Betts, the Dayton, Ohio shooter was 24. Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter, was 21.

The garlic festival shooter was 19.

Even the guy that “drove his car” into the crowd of protestors at the Unite the Right Charlottesville rally, who still pops up on the news every now and then—20 years old.

It’s a fact that is sort of glossed over by the media. It’s not as if their ages are omitted from the reports, but rather there seems to be no commentary on that fact that these are essentially children committing the greatest and deadliest crimes of our time.

They are never referred to as kids, which is interesting. Always “men”.

But in my eyes, if your rights are being legally restricted because of your age — you’re a kid.

And the reason this issue is not pushed to the forefront of the national debate is because — as we all know — it doesn’t fit the narrative.

The narrative being pushing by most (not all) mainstream media outlets is that guns=bad. That’s all. That’s the only conclusion that you are supposed to draw. And also, that Trump=bad because he is backed by the NRA (who supports gun rights) and law abiding, middle of America types (who also support gun rights).

The age and gender of the shooters has no relevance to the gun rights debate, and so the issue is omitted.

Looking past the mainstream narrative, the common thread here isn’t just that a firearm was used in the commission of the crime. It’s true, that without a firearm, these kids would not have been able to do the damage that they did. But let’s be honest — it wouldn’t have stopped them totally. They would still be who they were. They would still hold the same beliefs, spread the same messages, and advocate for the same cultural and political shifts.

The commonality we should be focusing on is the fact that these people taking these violent paths are very young men.

Ideologically driven young men.

With or without guns, these boys are not fitting neatly into our society.

People, even young, hormonal post-teens just barely out of high school don’t just wake up one day and decide to hurt people.

These types of thoughts have been brewing in the minds of these individuals for years. YEARS.

Which means that something went very wrong a long, long time ago in their lives. Happy people don’t think like they think. People who can get along with others, who are succeeding in our society and who are accomplishing worthy goals don’t just decide to go on suicidal rampages.

I mean can you imagine how committed to your beliefs you need to be to take an action that you know is not only going to hurt others, but will also inevitably end your own life? And can you imagine what exactly those beliefs are that these people come to such deranged conclusions?

The individuals acting in this way believe in their rightness so thoroughly that they are willing to die for it. Even more than willing — they are accepting of it.

We need to take a closer look at what is going on here in regards to young men not fitting in. How is it that they can see their lives as so devoid of purpose and meaning that they can decide that the absolute best course of action is to go down in a blaze of bullets and “glory”?

I’m not going to pretend that I have the answers to this one. I don’t.

But I think it’s worth pointing out that this issue, which is to me an obvious commonality, is not being talked about nearly enough. We have become so focused on the political agendas revolving around the gun rights debate that we are missing the obvious cries for help from our young men.

Because, to be frank — these shootings are not isolated incidents. They are a warning. A herald.

We desperately want to label these lunatics as fringe members of society, people with warped minds and views that are impossible to digest. But the truth is, for each mass shooter we see there are millions of peaceful people who share nearly identical views.

Most people however have a head on their shoulders, an interest in self preservation, a tendency towards compassion and a bit more rationality than the shooters. Most people do not resort to extreme violence simply because they aren’t getting their way in life.

But just because the act is insane doesn’t mean that the basic motivations are baseless. It doesn’t mean the problems that lie back of these violent episodes aren’t worthy of investigation.

All I’m suggesting is a shift in focus. We can still talk about gun rights. We can still follow the paper trail of the NRA.

But we shouldn’t drop the societal issues that lie in the background.

Mass shootings require guns. It’s true.

They also require fingers to pull the trigger. Young, male fingers, in this case.