Oh, but it’s a chance to bond, mother and child over guns. There are so many nonlethal ways to bond — hike, cook, give the child a camera and tell him to capture life. Yes, the Roseburg shooter was an adult. He could legally buy his own weapons. Still, he was living with his mother, the one person who should know him better than anyone. She may have been blinded by her own obsession with guns, as evidenced from her social media postings.

Only in a country with a pathological refusal to recognize the truth about weapons and deaths would parents arm their mentally unstable children.

In two-thirds of the nation’s school shootings, the attackers used guns from the home or a relative’s residence. Shootings rank near the top as a leading cause of death among children and teens, and 60 percent of those occur in the home.

But just as we can fault mothers in many cases, we can look to them for our salvation. Take it from Liza Long, a Boise, Idaho, mother of three, who produced a blog, “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” that went viral after the 2012 Newtown shootings. “I live with a son who is mentally ill,” she wrote. “I love my son. But he terrifies me.” She says she would never have a gun in her home.

To be clear, mental illness does not equal violence. But having guns around people who are likely to do harm to themselves or others is madness. And it can be stopped.

What about the fathers? Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said the Oregon shooter’s father, divorced and absent for some time from his son, was “a failure” who “owes us all an apology.” Fathers certainly have an equal responsibility. But it’s the mothers, in most cases, who know the names of their children’s teachers, who understand their deepest fears, who have a unique relationship.