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Mind you, it isn’t little girls who are doing the shooting. Mothers and women apparently tend to do a better job of bonding with girls. They admit pain more readily. Males on the other hand, have trouble expressing weakness and admitting feelings. And this, I believe, predisposes men to be quick to shoot with deadly guns.

Some so-called experts conclude that these schoolyard-shooter boys are exceptional. Some say they are aberrations. A few shout about poor parenting and a lack of supervision.

Could this new trend in schools be an ontological issue – a quest for meaning? Purpose? Perhaps. But I think much, much more is going on here.

Rev. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and leader of men’s retreats throughout the world, has studied various cultures to see how each turns boys into men. Rohr’s findings make the most sense to me for a solution to the schoolyard violence criss-crossing our nation.

In his research , Rohr discovered that culture after culture felt that if a young man between 13 and 16 were not introduced to the mysteries or pains of life, then the young man would not know how to handle pain, loss, alienation, and rejection.

There is pain in many of the realities young men experience in the world: you are not the center of the universe; life is hard; you win some and lose some; one day you will die; you are not in control; your life is about something or Someone bigger than you. If a young man can’t deal with his pain, Rohr concludes, he abuses his power.

However, “for the man who has descended into the drowning waters and come upon the other side, for the initiate who has been in the belly of the whale and spit up on the shore, there is an ultimate new shape to the universe,” Rohr wrote in Sojourner magazine.

When it comes to the violence enveloping this nation’s youth, are we reaping what we sow? Can we do things differently with boys; things that demand a shift in the way boys are introduced and initiated into reality?

What seems to be needed is a time of initiation; a weekend where fathers, sons, and grandfathers can check into a local hotel or hike into a pastoral woods together; a time when young males can hear about the realities of life’s struggles, limitations, pain, death, and difficulties.

Of course, that will take some doing in a culture fascinated with fast food, instant potatoes, and quick fixes. This ritual bonding of fathers and sons will require well spent – sons staring in the faces of their own fathers; sons being equipped by the experiences of their fathers with the armor needed to confront life’s predicaments.

Guns and gangs don’t have to win. Fathers can mend the male soul. America will move in the right direction when it stops to pause and ponder the worth of each son and begins to tell each one the terrible truths about growing up.

(Ed. Note: This article appeared in slightly different form on the op-ed page of the Detroit Free Press on August 26, 1998. Larry Ventline, Free Dolphin, has been a Catholic Priest and counselor for more than two decades.)
1 The Saint Anthony Messenger, “Naming the Father Hunger: An interview with Richard Rohr,” October, 1990.