Fatherlessness and Mass Shootings

For The King — FTK

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Fatherlessness and Mass Shootings

March 27, 2024

For The KingFTK

What does fatherlessness have to do with mass shootings? Surprisingly, a whole lot!

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Transcript

Hello, For The King listeners. I am not your host, Rocky Ramsey. My name is Will Drzymski, a brother in Christ and friend of Rocky's, whom he has generously invited onto the show in order to verbally showcase my artwork to you in 50 seconds.

As an artist, I strive to accurately reflect the glory of God and everything that I paint, and through that process I hope to flood as much of the earth as possible with paintings, which accurately proclaim the undeniable fact that Jesus is Lord, and the creation which he made commands us to worship him. So if you would like to join with me in distributing clean, refreshing artwork showcasing the creativity of the God who made us, I would be overjoyed to have your help. I run my own website called Reflected Works, where I showcase the artwork I've done in the past, sell original paintings and prints, and take requests for unique commissions.

Once again, that's ReflectedWorks.com, all one word, and I'm looking forward to helping you further the kingdom of God right now here on this earth by putting some of your free wall space to productive use. Thank you very much for your kind attention, and now, enjoy the show. I would apologize for this God of the Bible.

Hello friends, welcome to the For The King podcast. This is your host, Rocky Ramsey. On this podcast, we proclaim the edicts of the king, namely and chiefly that Yahweh reigns.

I am joined this episode with Samuel Bornman, author of Wizards and Warriors. He was a guest on the podcast a few months ago to highlight his book. Samuel's a missionary, seminary student, son, brother, farmer.

He does all sorts of things. Author, obviously, author of the book, and runs a sub-stack. If you want to go follow that, I'll make sure to include that in the show notes.

Samuel, how you doing, and do you care to introduce the topic? What's been on your mind, and what have you been mulling over? Yeah, well, thank you for having me on. I'm really grateful to be here. This topic is a really serious topic.

It's a kind of heavy topic dealing with fatherlessness and how that affects society. I think that some of the biggest problems in the world are fatherlessness, parents not doing their job, and sin. Sin is the biggest problem in the world, and fatherlessness is one of those sins.

Hmm, okay. Yeah, I mean, it's an epidemic. People think there's no consequences to, you know, a selfish decision for abandoning responsibility, I guess is a way to put it, and it's just increased, I guess, proportionally the sexual licentiousness in our society.

We don't, they go together, I guess. So, yeah, this is a big, biggest fatherlessness. So, I guess, what are you kind of picking out that one of the fruits of fatherlessness, of abdicating responsibility on the part of men? What's one of the fruits, I guess, we're going to be speaking about? Yeah, so, first of all, I'd say the first fruit of that is the destruction of the family, destruction of the, you know, tearing down of the bond between husband and wife.

When a man advocates his responsibilities, doesn't fulfill his role, doesn't do what he's supposed to do in the home and for his family, and then it progresses to the children because they are a part of that relationship, part of that family, and it can really, really mess people up. And in my, I begin studying mass shootings and what are some common threads, and one of the things I discovered is broken families. Of course, this is independent research, but I think it's very valuable thing to consider and a painful thing to consider.

I think it needs to be more addressed because this is a sin problem, this is a moral problem, not a political problem. Yeah, why do you think, you know, it is an interesting correlation. I mean, I think I've heard this before.

Not that you're not doing good work, you know, and researching it, but I mean, I think it's to show that you're on to something that other people have been picking out, that these characters that end up doing something like a mass shooting, which is, that's the topic for this, you know, how fatherlessness and broken homes lead to mass shooting. What's your thesis on why that lack of a masculine presence leads to violence, and why wouldn't a lack of a mother lead to violence in the same way? Well, because what do you think? I'm talking about young men mostly, because young men tend, tend, it tends to be that mass shooters are mostly young men. There are a few young women who have done, who've done this, but I think it's that young men need a strong man in their life, a strong male influence, to balance out and teach them how to balance out their emotions.

Because young men are emotionally volatile. We're like a, you know, like a, I guess you could say a bucket of gasoline with no lid on it. The wrong person comes along and wrong person comes along and it sets us off.

If we don't learn to control our emotions. And I mean, that's, that's one of the themes of Proverbs is not being foolish, not being, you know, being wise. And one of the ways being wise is controlling your emotions.

Yeah. And so I think that that is, that is one of the things that a man does in his home to help young men become stable pillars of society. But I think, I think that, I mean, if you look, if you look up studies with, with animals, so there was this event that happened with a national park.

I think it was, it was somewhere in Africa. I don't remember where I couldn't find the story again, but there were some young male elephants that were transferred onto this, this National Reserve area, with a whole bunch of young female elephants. And there were no older male elephants because logistics of transporting an older adult elephant was a lot harder, more expensive, more dangerous.

And so they transported a whole bunch of young, young elephants, young bow elephants, and they began having problems with female elephants getting beat up, young cats that weren't normally attacked by elephants, people trying to drive through the park to look at the elephants getting attacked. And they were trying to figure out what in the world was going on? What made these young elephants so violent? Well, someone had the bright idea of bringing in one older bull elephant. And as soon as they did, the problem ended because there was an old experienced bull elephant who could push them around and make them behave and make them respect the female elephants.

And so I think that is a hint of what men do for young men. They keep them in check when there's a strong older man in their life who is stable and doesn't have anything to prove. That's good.

Awesome. That's awesome. I guess two points on that.

The first thing that came to mind, I guess more on the whole, the natural law side, a father is in the home, the, what's the best way to put it? Like this, the small dose or the small exposure to danger that the children need. It's controlled danger. That's the way to put it.

It's controlled danger. So when dad, like you don't see moms like throwing their kids around and like wrestling, you know, they might a little bit, but dads are the ones that are like roughhousing with the kids and throwing them, throwing them everywhere. And, you know, let's do a cannonball.

I'm gonna throw you really high up in there and throw you into the pool or, you know, what stuff like that. That stuff dad does. And it's, and what it is and why kids are like dad's fun because he's exposing them to control danger.

And if they don't do that, they're going to go out in the world and make a stupid decision. Like when you get a young guy that thinks he's hot stuff and dad hasn't been wrestling him and putting him in his place and this guy, he thinks he's hot stuff. So he's going to go out and thinks, thinks he can basically pick on people and bully people.

And then he gets the snot, you know, beat out of them because he thinks he's, he's hot stuff. Um, dad's the one that's supposed to humble him by beating them up at home. Obviously not physically assaulting your kid where you're like, but, but wrestling in this place, like you're, you're inferior dude.

Like you're a, you're a child, you know, you can't go around and talk back to people and pick fights your kid. Um, yeah. And that's, I think that's maybe the mentality.

Some of these mass shooters are going to, they think they're invincible. They think they can do whatever they want. They've never, they've never had a dad to beat them up per se or expose them to danger.

So they think, they think there is no such thing as danger. They think they can go and murder a bunch of people and get away with that. And then, uh, if you, if you, if you want me to go on or did you have some on that, I had one other thing.

Oh, go ahead. Okay. The second thought was, uh, tying it to a biblical example of a lack of a father creating a monster per se.

Um, so I'm thinking of the story of Cain and Abel. Um, God is the father. He required, required a specific sacrifice.

Cain denied, uh, submission to the father and then what's he do? He murders Abel, right? Uh, and anger. So I think there's some, there's some example there of a young man that denies the bull, you know, the older bull elephant, right? And your example that denies, um, some kind of exposure or a humbling to be around a man, an older man that puts you in your place. If he denies that in himself, he's going to end up obviously not always becoming a legit murderer, but in his heart will harbor anger and bitterness and he'll be a man like Cain rather than a softhearted man like Abel.

Um, so that was an example that came out of my, I'm sure there's more biblical examples of maybe David in Absalon. Uh, David didn't seem to be a good dad in Absalon. Um, you know, I was hurt by that.

Yeah. In fact, I've heard that one of the, I've heard other people say, I believe it was maybe even Michael Foster who said that, uh, one of the best fathers in the book of, in the books of Samuel is actually King Saul. Um, yeah, because his, his, his kids turned out, his kids turned out well.

I mean, yeah, look at Jonathan. He was ready to submit to God's will. Didn't want to take, uh, he didn't want to claim the throne.

Yeah. He wanted to give it to David. Um, but he was so faithful to his father that he even dies with his father in battle.

Um, so he was, he was a good son and Michael, even though she had her faults, she, uh, she was, she was, she was a good daughter. Um, and she was faithful to, to David, even against her father's will. Yeah.

So that makes you think that even a man who is, you know, God can have mercy on a family where, you know, the father's not doing his job or the father's not right with God or the father is in rebellion to God because Saul definitely was, but Saul must've done something right with his kids. Exactly. Yeah, I totally agree.

So you said something about, uh, people who become that mass shooters maybe being angry, uh, because they don't have a dad or angry or, or think that they're invincible because they've never had a dad put them in their place. I think actually it's, it's, it's definitely anger. I think a lot of it has to do with a, they have this twisted sense of justice or twisted sense of, um, of who they are in the world.

Um, because many of the mass shooters I was, I was, I was researching, um, ended up living with their mother or grandparents, um, before they, before they, uh, committed their violent acts, um, before they committed murder, um, and the, they seem to have been much more of surrounded by, by women encouraged to do, um, things like play video games. Um, there's this, there's this one young guy. He, his, his mom was divorced from his dad.

He's living with his mom has a brother, but his brother's living with his dad. He isolated himself from his father and brother. Um, he isolated himself from his mother so much so that at one point he went several months without speaking to her, even though he lived in the same house with her.

Uh, he only communicated to her through email, um, which is really unusual. Um, he was, spent his time playing video games. Um, and in fact was so malnourished that he was in danger of brain damage from his malnutrition, uh, at the point he went out and began murdering people.

Um, because he, he starved himself because he didn't believe his room to get food. Um, so, so this, these, these people, they, they're dealing with a whole bunch of really awful things in their life. They're, you know, many of them have come from broken homes and their parents either aren't doing their job or aren't able to do their job because their parents aren't living together.

And so they become angry, I think, because they're not able to find fulfillment. Um, they're, they're missing a, a central part of what God designed the family to be and they're frustrated. And because they haven't been trained to control their emotions, um, they do, they do things that everybody regrets later.

Hmm. So I'm not, I'm not certain so much that it's actually people being like, oh, I'm invincible. I'm going to go out and kill a whole bunch of people because I feel like it.

Um, I think there are some crazy people like that. In fact, um, I probably know some, um, but the, the, the idea I think is more that they come from broken homes, they're frustrated, angry. Uh, their family is not what God designed it to be.

And Satan tempts them to fulfill their evil desires and they give in and they do, and they go murder people. Yeah. Yeah, I agree.

With the, with the invincible man point, I, maybe, maybe to some extent they think that they're, you know, um, they can get away with it, I guess, that they can go and play this usurper of justice. Um, right. Because you said they have a twisted view of justice and they're trying to like accomplish something to some extent too.

Maybe to prove themselves, who knows. Um, so in that sense, I guess is maybe what I was getting at with the whole, like they think they're invincible, like they've never been, they think they can get away with stuff, I guess is the point. Like they're allowed to break the rules.

They're different, you know? Um, yeah. Dad, dad's never, mom's kind of coddled them. Like you said, they, they usually end up with mom.

Mom's coddled them. And this is why it's important to have a father in the home because that's mom's, mom's gonna keep the peace she's gonna protect and nurture in that sense. That's the way she's designed, you know, in her femininity, god given role as a woman.

And the man's goal is to kind of be a to stretch the children, you know? Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah.

It's the iron sharpens iron thing. Yeah. Um, it's the, it's the idea of, you know, if you have any familiarity with blacksmithing, it's tempering.

Tempering, you heat the metal. Yeah. And then you shock it by dunking it in oil or water and cooling it quickly.

Makes it brittle. If you drop something that's been quenched hard, it will shatter. Oh, wow.

And so what you do then is you reheat it and let it cool more slowly. And that softens the steel. And depending how you, how you, how you control that second, that second quench, that second cooling process, you heat it up, you get it red, you let it wait.

That is, and you wait for the right moment to put it back in that water that shocked it and previously made it brittle. This time because you get it at the right moment, makes it tough, makes it flexible. Um, it's so it's hard enough to hold an edge if you're talking about a knife, but tough enough or there are flexible enough that it doesn't shatter when you hit something with it.

And so that is what fathers need to do to their sons. Because otherwise you get a young boy that or a young man that he's pent up with emotion, he gave him a shock and he shatters. And he wasn't, he wasn't tempered properly.

And so I think that is a pretty good analogy of what happens to these young men is they don't get the right treatment growing up. And so they are either dull and unable to cut anything and struggle to be useful in life or struggle to find meaning in life. And or they're just, they're so brittle that something comes along, they hit it, they snap and people get hurt.

Yeah. Yeah, so I actually have a pretty wild story of an encounter with a mass shooter. So not at an active shooting situation.

But I think it was two years ago, I looked on the news one day, and look at my classmates from elementary school, because I went to public school. So I was in public schools, there's a bunch of different people I ran into. One of the guys that was in my class in fifth grade, he used to come over to my house and spend the night, he literally just like shot up a bunch of people and the police killed them, Louisville.

And I saw his face out of my jaw dropped. I'm like, what? Like that dude used to go to my house. I remember when he come over, he had some anger issues, dude, we would play like Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, and I'd kill him in the video game and he'd get mad and like want to leave and go home.

I remember he punched me one time and like he was just, he had a fuse on him. And when I looked at the story of what happened to this guy, like why he shot up this place in Louisville, it's because like somebody kind of insinuated that he might get fired or whatever and then he snapped and came in and shot up a bunch of people at work. So I guess circle on that back to your point about like shattering the sword that all of a sudden these men are breaking.

They're at their breaking point. They've never been tempered. They've never been strengthened to actually deal with the hardship of the world.

So instead they get, they sit in mom's basement for 10 years and play video games and look at porn and eat bad food that destroys them, destroys their body and fills them with soy and estrogen and they're screwed up in their mind because physically they're off kilter and spirits with off kilter and they're fragile. So then something happens in the world that breaks them. They snap and their solution is for a lot of people.

It's one or two things. Either they kill themselves or they go kill others. Or they attempt to do both.

Yeah. Or it's a yeah, it's both. Because many of these mass shooters do things like shoot their mom before they go do it.

Oh, wow. Because they've given up on life. And for some reason, like they might really like their mom, they might have seemed to get along with them.

Great. There was one guy who before he went and shot up a school, he, he shot his mom while she was sleeping in bed. There was another guy who shot his grandma because he was living with his grandma.

And he shot her before he stole her truck and went off and went to a school and shot a whole bunch of people before he killed himself. A lot of these, these people are suicidal. They're not scared to die.

Some of them are just scared to die alone. And so they, for some reason, they, they think it's easier to either have the police kill them or to kill themselves after they have killed so many people that they feel terrible. Um, because some of them do, some of them kill a whole bunch of people and they're like, oh, wait, I just killed a whole bunch of people.

What am I going to do? Well, I guess I'm going to blow my brains out. And you're like, because, I mean, it's, it's terrible. They, they, they need Jesus.

They need, they need, they need change. And I think that the church really needs to try to, needs to learn to identify people who are struggling with suicidal, suicidal tendencies. Yeah.

People who are, don't have their dad around people who are being bullied in school, you know, because these are all things that, that, that tie in, there's lots of, lots of these people get bullied or they are the bully. Um, and lots of these people don't have parents or their parents aren't doing their job. Um, the Dayton, Ohio shooter, he, uh, he was apparently known for threatening girls at his school, saying that he was going to kill them and do all sorts of other stuff to them.

Um, he was a bully. He got suspended multiple times for telling girls he was going to kill them. Um, and then he, uh, went to, went to a bar with his sister and her boyfriend and some other friends.

And while he was there, he shot his sister and eight other people before he was killed by the cops. And you think his dad was there. His dad was in his life.

His dad knew he'd been suspended from school multiple times for telling girls he was going to kill them. Um, and he was in this band that was into really, I mean, I almost hate to say it, you know, the type of band he was in is what they call, I've never heard of it before. It's what they call or no grind, which I mean, just tells you that just the name makes you want to cringe it.

And on his social media, he was claiming he was a Satanist. So this is someone who very committed to death, very committed to, um, uh, perversion. And his dad knew it.

I mean, I don't know how you live in the same house with a son who is, who's like this and not know it. I mean, he was doing this publicly enough that he gets kicked out of school for saying he's going to kill people. Um, you would think he, his father would know would be able to do something.

Um, even if daddy has turned his own son over to the cops and say, my son, uh, is not safe to be heavily in society. I mean, that's a terrible thing to say that you're going to have to turn over your son. But I mean, the Bible does say that a son who doesn't respect his parents or beats his parents, the parents need to go to the authorities and let them know.

And if they don't, they're then complacent in his crimes, their accomplices, their enablers. Um, and so because of this, I mean, the family lost their only son and only daughter on the same day because their son killed their daughter and a whole bunch of other people. Yeah.

I mean, can you imagine? It's tragic. It's tragic. Yeah.

Yeah. This is the ugliness of sin. Yeah.

That's what we're seeing, you know, with, with this phenomenon rising in our society. Um, I think that this episode, you know, as Christians, we want to be able to, um, spiritually discern and test the spirits, you know, whatever the spirit of anything, you know, um, so there's a lot of, um, discernment and I guess connecting the dots or, uh, inferences we can draw from the, these scenarios and this specific issue that we can guard ourselves again as Christians against as Christians. And, um, on top of that, realize the severity of our jobs as fathers and husbands, um, just how pivotal it is and how much God works through means, um, of something like, even if it, let's just, let's talk, let's just, uh, hypothetically think about a non-Christian family and let's just say the dad's in the picture that has God so set up the world.

God has his fingerprints on everything in such a way that a non-Christian family where the dad is actually spending time with his son and hanging out with the son, his son's less likely to be caught up in a specific sin called mass shootings, mass, mass murdering. It doesn't mean he's, you know, he's saved and he's born again, but what it does mean is God, you know, we're totally depraved, but we're not as depraved as we could be. So reform theology doesn't teach that we're, um, totally, um, corrupt, I think is the, the different term, little corruption.

It's just, total depravity. Thank you. Sorry.

Um, so we're not as we're not completely corrupt in every single way where we only do the worst possible evil thing that we could do every waking second. No, that's not, that's not the nature of the fall. But what is the case is that we're capable of all sorts of evil, which could be one of the most evil things we could do, you know, in a second.

And God has in his grace, you know, set it up where fathers can actually have a good effect on their kids, whether Christian or not. So as a Christian father, how much more, you know, should we be striving to tap into all the goodness has given us got all the goodness God has given us by just being a father. Um, so I kind of rambled there for a second, but I think those are some good exhortations.

Do you, what do you think? And in terms of exhortation, it's, yeah, I think what you're talking about is, is what we call common grace because God has set up the world that if you, if you live the way God designed the world to work, even if you're not a believer, things tend to work for you. Yeah. You know, if you, if you save money, you know, let's talk about finances from it.

If you save money and you spend it wisely and you invest it wisely, the natural consequence because God, how God set up the world is that you will become more wealthy. Um, whereas if you don't save wisely, you can be a born again Christian going to church, but you don't save wisely. You don't invest wisely and you get into debt and you, uh, keep getting into more and more debt because you don't know how to manage your finances.

You're going to become poor. That's the other, that's the other side of the natural. It's another one of the natural consequences of this world.

If you, if you don't, if you don't follow, uh, God's law and, uh, live the way God designed the world to work, there are native consequences, but if you do follow God's intended role for the world and the family and life, um, it can have good consequences, but it can fail too. It's not fail-proof because what we really need is the gospel. We need, we need the sacrifice of Jesus.

You know, he's, he's the son of God. He came and died for all our sins. And if we don't accept that, um, we are going to receive punishment.

Yeah. But if we do, we can receive eternal life and God can change our lives and we can come out of a terrible family situation and be stronger and better than, than we ever imagined. Yeah.

Amen, brother. Amen. I'm sorry.

I was going to say that this problem is not political. It's not about guns. It's not about controlling people.

It's about preaching them the gospel and changing their hearts and minds because if you don't change the hearts and minds of people, you're still going to have problems. Yeah. Yeah.

Amen. That's the gospel. You know, that's the promise of the gospel.

You're, you will be born again. You know, that's the root. Yeah.

It's always the root. Well, do you have any other, uh, exhortations or, um, if not, then I say maybe, maybe pitch real quick on how these ideas kind of wrap up with what you're doing on your sub stack and your, your book of wizards and warriors. Um, and we can kind of leave it at that.

So sure. Yeah. First an exhortation real quick.

If you're a young guy listening to this and you say, I'm living along with my mom or I'm not a manly young man. I want to become stronger. I want to be, uh, I want to be independent.

I want to don't want to be dependent on other people. I want to be a tough, strong guy who's going to do good for society and my community and my future family. I think there are two things you should do.

Read the Bible and find a strong man who will let you learn from him and model him. Um, but don't, don't, don't go, don't go, don't go into the extreme of becoming a macho man. Don't, don't join a king.

Um, that's a fake masculinity. That is a fake toughness. Uh, a true man doesn't need to prove it.

Yeah. Um, so, so what I'm doing with my sub stack is trying to encourage young men, especially boys who are not quite yet young men, but they're, they're getting there. Uh, I'm trying to, uh, encourage them to become strong, become tough, uh, not be, not be wimpy, not be little mama's boys.

Um, what I, I try to do is I, uh, I try to write stuff that's encouraging. Um, but also should give you a kick in the seat of your pants. If you're not doing, you're not, not doing what you need to do.

Um, I'm, I'm still a young guy too. I'm still, uh, learning. Um, I'm still growing, but I hope to, to help, help young men.

I've also written a fantasy novel that is, is it's entertainment. Um, but I think that some of our best role models, some of the heroes we aspire to be come from fantasy and can be a really good role model. Um, in situations I still at times remember, uh, JRR Tolkien and the hobbits and how they persevered through tough, tough stuff and tough situations when I'm going through tough stuff.

Um, so, so I think that reading the Bible and reading, reading good quality stories and then going out and trying to be, uh, the best person you can through the blood of Jesus, uh, under the grace of God and, uh, trusting in him to, to make up for your, your limitations because nobody's perfect and, uh, we're all gonna, we're all gonna fall on our face sometimes, but, uh, Jesus is right there to, uh, pick us back up and pull us back onto the right path and say, all right, take the next step with me. So that's what I'm trying to do. You can check me, you can check me out at, uh, uh, samuelbornman.com. Um, and you can find there a link to join up to my, my newsletter, get a free short story.

Um, yeah, all kinds of good stuff. Awesome. Yeah, guys, go check us stuff out.

Um, and you can go listen to that last interview. We actually talked about the book of wizards and warriors. Um, I'll put it in the show notes as well.

You're welcome to go listen to that and hear Samuel talk about, uh, his book as well. Uh, thanks for joining me this evening, brother. Uh, great topic.

Um, thinking about stories. I think that's, that's really what these men at the end of the day were lacking. They didn't have a story.

They had, they had no, they didn't have a reason for existence. So they had to blow their brains out or go blow some other people's brains out and then kill themselves in the process. Um, yeah.

And even though I say that, you know, they went and blew their brains out. I mean, I am not heartless. I feel for them.

Um, it was depressing. It was saddening. It's discouraging to read about these lives.

And I, with this podcast, I hope I do not communicate to anyone that I wish they were dead. I do not because each and every life is precious in the sight of the Lord. And, um, I am saddened that they did these things.

And I hope that in their last moments, they repented and turned to Christ before they died. And I pray that everyone, everyone in the world will, um, because we all, we all need Jesus. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. The, the Lord takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked.

Um, exactly. So I forget, I think that's an Ezekiel, Ezekiel somewhere. Um, forget the exact reference, but thanks again, brother.

And thank you for listening for sticking, uh, with us. I was done with the doxology to the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, the only God, honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.

Yeah.