As I’ve continued to wade through a number of articles and comment threads about Elliot Rodger, I’ve decided I want to detract my statement about the main culprits of this tragedy being gun control laws and our severely inadequate mental health system.

While those are societal institutions and systems that need to be reformed the case of Elliot Rodger is far more complicated including a myriad of factors that would take me considerable analysis to get the bottom of and really articulate a systemic solution to make tragedies like this significantly less probable.

To name some of the factors beyond gun control and mental health we have:

– American society’s rigid and constraining views about sex
– American’s superficial values for people at the modern (‪#‎orange‬) level of development
– Suspect Parenting
– Very little articulation of healthy masculinity in 2014
– An education system that focuses exclusively an objective knowledge rather than subjective knowledge, self-knowledge, and emotional intelligence
– A combination of a largely stigmatized and ineffective mental therapy industry
– Failure to create reliable process for reporting and dealing with potential dangerous individuals

This issue also complicated in terms of cause and effect. There’s been a lot of talk about misogyny being a core issue. But Misogyny was much more an effect than a cause, generated by the psychological defense mechanism of rejection. And it’s inevitable that psychologically wounded individuals will generate hateful ideologies to attempt to counteract their pain. The solution is not attacking these ideologies but rather developing societal systems and mores for reliably treating different forms of psychological woundedness.

Anyway that’s beginning of what I think we should be taking into account in our collective conversation about this tragedy and hopefully some progress will be made.

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”
– Paul Romer