We’re on record as wanting federal action on guns in the wake of El Paso and Dayton, and indeed before that. But that’s hardly the only thing Americans need to think about in the wake of these latest horrors.

In particular, it’s worth looking back at our colleague Maureen Callahan’s column days after the Gilroy Garlic Festival killings, “Why Are Young Men So Angry?”

Not every mass-shooting perp fits the profile, but most do: As Callahan put it, “young men, almost always white, who report feeling alienated, dispossessed, misunderstood, victimized and all too often rejected by women” and feel “a specific strain of anger — deep, repressed, biblically vengeful.” Why?

As she noted in a follow-up column, readers answered in droves. Men, and some women, lamented “a decades-long erosion — in education, in popular culture, in the family and the workplace and society at large — in the way we now raise and regard boys and young men.”

It’s a culture that defines boys’ natural rambunctiousness as sickness and medicates it with Adderall, that offers few truly positive role models — with TV, as one writer put it, painting most “men, both black and white,” as “bumbling and not-too-bright.”

A therapist reports: “Countless clients have told me, for example, that they believe all men cheat on their wives because their fathers cheated. That men lie. Are not loyal, etc. Our current culture offers little aid.”

Instead, many complain, it targets “toxic masculinity” — as if masculinity were a force to be suppressed rather than nurtured into a proper manliness.

Of course, only a handful of boys dealing with this toxic brew turn shooter. But the problem surely also has something to do with the opioid epidemic and the unprecedented decline in lower-class white-male life expectancy.

Most important, no one — certainly not Callahan nor any of her correspondents — remotely thinks that any of this justifies or excuses any violence. It’s only one piece of a puzzle that also includes missed warning signs and mental-health questions.

Nor is it any suggestion that America return to some 1950s era of white-male hegemony. Rather: Callahan’s question, and finding the right answers to it, are important to taking the nation to a better future.