Mass killings are now a regular feature of American life, and as we have recently seen, the gunmen involved are barely out of high school. The barely grown-up white men — they have all so far been white men — can hardly support themselves. Given their age, I have often wondered: Where were their parents when their murderous plans were hatched and executed? Why didn’t the parents know their sons had lethal weapons and an even more lethal mental disposition to murder? There are of course outliers. A weapon is a parent’s present to their child. It happened at Sandy Hook; the killer used his mother’s present to kill her, and 20 children and six adults.

Ten years ago last week James Holmes killed 12 people as they peacefully watched a Batman movie. I doubt his parents could have known their 24-year-old son’s intentions. But, I opine, the same can’t be said about Dr Lynne Fenton, his psychiatrist. He apparently, on several occasions, told her he wanted to kill people. Anyone with a psychiatric ailment who repeatedly shows a murderous or suicidal inclination, should be taken very seriously.

But at the moment my thoughts are on the latest crop of 18-year-olds, in Buffalo and Uvalde, and the 21-year-old in Chicago. Why didn’t the parents know what their children were up to, if they lived under their roofs,? What were the new weapons for? Raising a family is a difficult responsibility that we take on willingly and one we can never shun. Parenting is akin to gardening — you get your hands in the dirt; you sweat in the sun carrying bags of manure. The result is invariably a garden rich with dazzling, blooming flowers. A parent, like a gardener, can never turn their gaze away from their responsibility.

The few parents of mass murderers who opt to talk about their children have a way of portraying a cherubic image of their off spring. They never saw anything unusual in their children’s behavior prior to the killings. But we know that these killers have thought and prepared to kill for a long time.

The exception is Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine killers. She has talked about her son’s life at TED talks, and in a memoir — “A mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of a Tragedy.” She paints a picture of an ordinary boy and can’t imagine she could have done anything that would in any way have helped avoid the eventual Columbine school massacre. She says very little about Dylan’s friends. One of them, Eric Harris was, from all accounts, quite toxic. That Dylan and Eric dressed in black trench coats raised no alarms in her.

I can only say, “thank you for your courage,” to Sue Klebold. She’s a rare mother of a mass murderer willing to tell the world what she knows about her son. Some people consider her talk and book no more than an excuse for raising a killer. I see it in a different light, as both a human reaction with the added dimension of sharing her anguish with the world.

I believe that more parents of mass killers should be invited to tell us more about their killer kids. We know a lot about their lives from their social media, but that tends to be cold and superficial. Maybe an innocent mother of a teenage son can learn some telltale signs that she should look for from these parents?

I suggest we invite parents of mass murderers as a matter of common practice to sit down and tell us more about their children. What distinguishes one killer from another? Let’s learn from the tragedy of our neighbors by listening to what the people closest to the killers know.

Let’s give these parents a moment to tell us what they know, and maybe, just maybe, we might dissuade another mass shooter.

Over and above everything else, a good parent knows how their child is feeling, what he procures, what’s in his closets. And who and what he does with his friends.

Pius Kamau, M.D., general surgery, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and president of the Consortium of African Diasporas in the U.S.A. He has been a National Public Radio commentator and a blogger, and is author of “The Doctor’s Date with Death.”