In most cases, boys learn any number of coping strategies to deal with the daily taunts of their classmates. Some turn inwards, self-medicate with drugs or alcohol, become loners. A large number of teen suicides contain stories of such daily abuse. And, in a very few cases, the anguish of having one s masculinity challenged, ridiculed, denigrated builds until it explodes in a cathartic rage that seeks to destroy the entire world. The belief that retaliatory violence is manly is not a trait carried on any chromosome, not soldered into the wiring of the right or left hemisphere, not juiced by testosterone.
Boys learn it.
They learn it from their fathers, nearly half of whom own a gun. They learn it from a media that glorifies it, from sports heroes who commit felonies and get big contracts, from a culture saturated in images of heroic and redemptive violence. They learn it from each other. And this parallel education is made more lethal in states where gun control laws are most lax, where gun-lobbyists are most powerful. Because all available evidence suggests that all the increases in the deadliness of school violence is attributable to guns.