The dangerous men who’ve made recent headlines locally were once boys who grew to govern their lives with violence.
Last month, Shannon Gooden killed two Burnsville police officers, Matthew Ruge and Paul Elmstrand, and a firefighter, Adam Finseth. He fired dozens of rounds of ammunition, while his girlfriend and children were in the house.
In December, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office charged Matthew Brenneman in the killing of his ex-girlfriend, Danicka Bergeson. Prosecutors allege he murdered Bergeson soon after he was released from jail for assaulting her. And Jaden Trejaun Butcher — at 18 years old, barely a man — was charged this week for his alleged role in a mass shooting in Minneapolis but only after he’d been wounded himself in a separate incident.
Men with guns remain a great societal threat. You can add qualifiers to the conversation, if you’d like. “Dangerous” men with guns. “Violent” men with guns. But any man with a gun could cause harm. And without a platform to teach young men that toughness isn’t the foundation of their manhood, some of them will.
But I still have hope for the boys, the ones who may one day become those men, if we can reach them.
As stewards of the world the next generation will inherit, we have abandoned our youth’s futures in a multitude of areas. We have not offered them an equitable education experience, disinvesting in our teachers and silencing their firsthand knowledge of what’s best for our children. We’ve ignored climate change. Our unhoused have been left without food and shelter in neighborhoods with three-story homes and stocked refrigerators. But we’ve also failed to support the development of a full emotional palette for our boys. That’s a treacherous oversight that’s left destruction in its wake.
My father always tells me when it all changed.
He was a teenager in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s. If there were ever a fight in his neighborhood, people would gather and watch as two young men squared up and threw punches until one of them got the best of the other. He didn’t condone the violence, but he appreciated the process. One young man fought another young man. Without weapons.