Welcome to Breakpoint, daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of Unchanging Truth.

The Colson Center, on John Stone Street.

Last Saturday, at around midnight, a 22-year-old man entered a Colorado Springs nightclub with an assault-style weapon and started firing.

Five people were killed, 18 injured in the horrific evil attack that lasted only minutes before Army veteran Richard Fiero,

heroically charged and subdued the attacker with the help of a few others.

Our city now mourns the loss of these people who were made in the image and likeness of God, and we now reckon with the shattering of peace and community, even as the holiday season approaches.

Media outlets were quick to mention, often with an accusatory tone, that the nightclub is a gay hangout in a city,

brimming with evangelical ministries who teach that homosexual behavior is sinful. Many also implied that the shooting was motivated by hatred of people who identify as LGBTQ.

That may or may not be true.

If it is, the guilt for the shooter's hatred and evil actions are not shared by the millions of people who hold moral views about sex marriage and gender, whether they're faith-based or not.

Even as details of this particular tragedy continues to emerge, America, the city of Colorado Springs and the state of Colorado, are now left to reckon with yet another mass shooting.

The sheer number of which demands that we ought not isolate each from the others as if there are no patterns or trends that connect them all.

There are, but they're not the ones to which the various sides so quickly retreat, the narrative so loudly proclaim, like political affiliation, religious affiliation, or a particularly targeted community.

Writing a few years ago at the LA Times, Professor of Criminology, Jillian Peterson, and sociologist James Densley offered a revealing look at America's mass shooters.

They studied every shooter since 1966, and the vast majority have four things in common.

First, early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. Second, seeking validation from extreme communities, often online.

Third, openly admiring the work of prior shooters, and fourth, nearly all are longtime loners with an identifiable crisis point, getting fired or expelled from school.

And we should add, they are all men. In fact, there's something else. The young men who appear on CNN's list of the 27 deadliest mass shootings in US history have something else in common.

Almost all of them grew up without fathers. Early indications suggest this was true of the Colorado Spring Shooter as well. Put differently with very few exceptions, the signs that a young man is headed down a dark road, overlap noticeably with signs that we see across our culture that young men in general are not doing well.

Lacking strong role models and healthy social groups increasingly left behind academically and vocationally, floundering for a purpose in life beyond video games, countless males are seeking solace and the only communities they can find, usually online, where the fallous kinds of hate conspiracy theories and nihilism await them.

Now of course, these factors don't always lead one to become a mass shooter or broken culture may have encouraged them along these dark paths, but they made the choice to walk that way. They bear the guilt themselves.

Even so, for every young man catacized into some toxic radicalism, like Dylan Rue for the El Paso shooter, or into some nihilistic unbelief, like Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris in the Aurora Theatre shooter, and then choose to act on it with a gun?

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