News is breaking today of another school shooting—this time in Minneapolis. Children once again trapped in terror. Families shattered. Communities left asking why.
The truth is hard to face, but it must be said: school shootings are not random tragedies—they are the direct legacy of a culture built on repression.
The Shadow of James Dobson
Dr. James Dobson, who recently died at age 89, was celebrated by many as a champion of “family values.” In truth, he was one of the most dangerous architects of childhood repression in modern American culture. Through Focus on the Family, he gave parents a psychological and religious license to break their children’s spirits—spanking justified as “discipline,” obedience demanded as “love,” emotional suppression sold as “strength.”
Dobson was not alone. But he was powerful, and his message spread like wildfire across evangelical America, shaping generations. Parents, themselves victims of repression, followed his prescriptions blindly, convinced that to be harsh was to be righteous. Children grew up learning not to trust their own feelings, not to resist cruelty, not to express anger—because their survival depended on submission.
But repressed anger never disappears. It waits. It festers. And one day, it explodes.
The Hell We Transfer
I wrote earlier: “There is no hell after death. The only hell is the one we carry from childhood—until we dare to feel it.”
Those who grow up under Dobson’s doctrines or similar authoritarian parenting models are often left carrying that hell inside them. If they cannot consciously feel and resolve it, they inevitably transfer it outward. Some turn it inward, becoming depressed, self-destructive, suicidal. Others turn it outward, becoming violent toward others.
School shootings are one of the most horrific expressions of this transfer. Young people, crushed by repression and shame, erupt in violence against the very institutions that mirrored their childhood prisons. The school becomes the stage where the unconscious cries out: “See my pain! Feel what I was forced to feel!”
Guns Are the Weapon, Repression Is the Fuse
Much of the public debate focuses on guns, and rightly so—easy access to weapons makes these explosions catastrophic. But the gun is not the root. It is the weapon. The fuse is childhood repression.
Alice Miller warned us:
“The roots of violence are not unknown." They are buried in childhood.
Until we dare to face that root, we will continue to see the same tragic cycle. Every new shooting is another reminder of society’s refusal to confront its own crimes against children.
Dobson’s Legacy, Alive and Deadly
James Dobson is dead. But the damage he championed lives on—in every household that still believes in breaking the child to “save” them, in every parent who mistakes fear for respect, in every school where children are forced into silence instead of being allowed to feel.
And it lives on in the most tragic way: in the lives of young shooters who were once defenseless children themselves, raised in systems that denied them truth and empathy. Their bullets are the language of a pain they could never otherwise express.
The Only Way Forward
We cannot undo the lives already lost. But we can stop pretending these tragedies are mysterious or inevitable. They are the logical consequence of a culture that has worshiped authority, repression, and obedience over authenticity, empathy, and truth.
The only real prevention is courage:
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The courage for parents to face their own childhood wounds instead of passing them on.
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The courage for society to stop idolizing authoritarian figures like Dobson.
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The courage for survivors to direct their rage not at distant monsters, but at the true source of their pain—the family systems that failed them.
Only then will the cycle of violence be broken. Only then will we stop raising children who carry hidden bombs inside them.
Until then, school shootings will continue. And every one of them will be a mirror, reflecting the same truth we refuse to face.
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