Time to launch “Dads Demand Action to Raise Healthy Boys”

By: Rob Okun

How can we in good conscience celebrate Father’s Day in the middle of an epidemic of gun violence almost exclusively perpetuated by men? We can’t.

There’ll be time enough for backyard barbeques once fathers take the lead in establishing “Dads Demand Action to Raise Healthy Boys,” following in the footsteps—a decade late—after “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense,” launched the day following the mass murders at Sandy Hook.

In recent years, a growing number of men have been questioning conventional definitions of manhood and masculinity, so it’s an apt moment—with the scourge of male mass shootings fresh in our minds—for fathers and other men to reinvent Father’s Day. A day more about raising healthy boys and girls than about flipping ‘burgers and ‘dogs on the grill, as fun as that may be.

What a powerful message it would send for fathers and other men to demonstrate the urgency of this moment by establishing a group to raise healthy boys, especially just weeks after two 18-year-old males murdered 31 people in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas, among so many other mass shootings.

See more in this weeks Boone County Journal