Who Is Raising Our Sons?

A 16-year-old fired a shotgun through the locked doors of Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon. Once inside, he murdered three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and a teacher in a special-needs classroom. Another teacher fought back, throwing her cell phone at him and then tackling him. It wasn’t until an armed father of two Silver Rail students who had followed the murderer inside opened fire that the carnage finally stopped.

This was America’s 436th mass shooting so far this year and the 36th shooting on K–12 school grounds. It got more news coverage than usual because of the heroic dad who stopped the massacre. But according to the Mass Shooting Tracker, such shootings happen about three times every two days.

Notice how these stories unfold now. The shooter is a minor, so his name remains undisclosed for days. By the time we learn anything about him, another shooting or scandal has seized the headlines. The debate goes over to guns, and the deeper question never gets asked: What is wrong with our young people?

How can we watch this again and again and refuse to look at the root cause?

We don’t yet know why Griffin John targeted the Silver Rail children. Police named him the day after the attack, searched his home, seized his devices, and interviewed his parents, but they haven’t announced a motive. A few details stand out. He had once been a special-needs student at Silver Rail, and he targeted that classroom when he entered. He lived with his mother in an apartment near the school. His father appears to have had little to do with him.

The only way to understand mass shootings is to understand the shooter. That means understanding his family—or lack of family. Mass shooters are almost exclusively male. They tend to come from fatherless, unstable homes. They are usually rebellious toward authority of every kind. Research from the Institute for Family Studies shows that a boy raised by a single mother is about twice as likely to become delinquent as a boy with a good relationship with his father.

After the 2012 massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook by a deranged 20-year-old former student, sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox warned that the evidence linking broken homes to violence could hardly be clearer.

Commentator Matt Walsh once laid out the chilling recipe for a school shooter: Take a boy; remove his father, authority, morals, guidance and companionship; place him in front of a screen all day; feed him endless content, including pornography; give him drugs; and leave him isolated.

The Silver Rail murderer appears to fit the pattern. What should terrify us is that America is full of boys who fit the pattern! Their parents have left the door wide open for dark spiritual forces to shape the men their sons become.

Entertainment is one of the biggest ingredients for a school shooter. The Columbine, Sandy Hook, Uvalde and Marjory Stoneman Douglas murderers are known to have played first-person shooter games like Doom and Call of Duty. Millions of boys now spend hours a day acting out hyperrealistic killing on a screen, then watch more of it on television and online. Militaries use such simulations to condition soldiers to kill. Why do we assume the same training is harmless for a 12-year-old? Add the twisted sexual content available on every phone, and we are mass-producing angry, isolated young men.

Whenever these all-too-common murders happen, leftists use the opportunity to blame Americans’ right to own guns. But Americans have had that right for 250 years, long before mass shootings became so tragically frequent. Not long ago, boys parked pickups with hunting rifles in the rack in the school parking lot. Gun laws are far stricter now than they were then. The murder weapon in Bend was a pump-action shotgun—a design that has been around for a century.

The guns haven’t changed. The people have.

The Violence Project has found that mass shootings are about six times more common than they were in the 1970s. Something happened to America. We no longer know how to raise our children.

In the weeks ahead, we will hear about warning signs, mental health concerns and access to firearms. We will debate purchase ages and door locks. Those things matter. But broken families, absent fathers and wicked entertainment aren’t side issues. They are the main issues!

The spirit world is real. In his book America Under Attack, my father, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry, explains that Revelation 12:9-12 prophesy of a war in heaven in which Satan and his demons are cast down to Earth, knowing they have “but a short time.” He shows that this happened in 1986, when Herbert W. Armstrong died—and that the surge in lawlessness since then is the result. Demons prey on the fatherless, the neglected, the drugged and the empty-minded, and those who feed on violence.

“Demons prey on empty minds!” my father wrote in a 2017 article. A fatherless, undisciplined mind empty of purpose and the truth of God is fertile ground. Jesus described an evil spirit returning to an empty house with seven others worse than itself (Matthew 12:43-45). Ezekiel foresaw a land so full of bloody crimes that they would link like a chain (Ezekiel 7:23). That is what we’re watching: Uvalde, Apalachee, Bend—and the next one.

The carnage in Bend stopped because a father heard gunfire, followed a killer inside, and stopped him. Every father in America needs that same courage at home, long before a boy ever picks up a shotgun.

Fight for your sons and their minds because someone else is already fighting for control.