After 10 years of custody battles, court-ordered counseling and imminent imprisonment for non-payment of child support, Thomas James Ball, a leader of the Worcester branch of the Massachusetts-based Fatherhood Coalition, had reached his limit. On June 15, 2011, he doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire just outside the Cheshire County, N.H., Courthouse. He was dead within minutes.

In a lengthy “Last Statement,” which arrived posthumously at the Keene Sentinel, Tom Ball told his story. All he had done, he said, was smack his 4-year-old daughter and bloody her mouth after she licked his hand as he was putting her to bed. Feminist-crafted anti-domestic violence legislation did the rest. “Twenty-five years ago,” he wrote, “the federal government declared war on men. It is time to see howdeserve to be able to physically defend themselves from assault … from a woman.”

For some, it’s more than just talk. In 2006, Darren Mack, a member of a fathers’ rights group in Reno, Nev., stabbed his estranged wife to death and then shot and wounded the family court judge who was handling his divorce.

That kind of violence continues right up to the present.

In Seal Beach, Calif. last Oct. 12, a day after Scott Evans Dekraai and his ex-wife had been in court to fight over custody of their 8-year-old son (Dekraai had 56% custody but wanted full custody and “final decision making authority” on matters of the child’s education and medical treatment), Dekraai walked into the hair salon where his ex-wife worked armed with three handguns. There, he