This is not another column meant to revive the nation’s long fascination with Charles Manson. Countless articles have appeared about the evil mastermind and the seven murders most associated with his name. This column is written to remind society what can create such a monster.

You have likely read about Manson’s uncaring teenage mother. By 14, young Manson was living on his own, surviving as a petty thief. Wherever he went, he was described as a discipline problem.

1970s America did not become captivated with Manson because he was a cold-blooded killer. In fact, there is no proof he ever murdered anyone. It was the power he held over his ragtag followers and his ability to get them to kill for him — at two separate homes on two consecutive evenings in August 1969 — that mesmerized the nation. After the bloody facts of the Manson Family killing sprees, something visceral happened. America got scared.

Gun sales soared in and around the Los Angeles crime scenes. Security guards and home alarms were in big demand. Author Joan Didion wrote that she believed “the 1960s ended abruptly on Aug 9, 1969, at the exact moment when the word of the murders … traveled like brushfire through the community.”

A short time after the Manson Family’s seven-month trial, the FBI began to notice a trend. It discovered that seemingly random murders shared specific characteristics. Young co-eds in locations across the country were being killed. Young boys were disappearing in Cook County, Ill., and presumed dead. And bodies began to turn up in a riverbed in Rochester, N.Y.. To the bureau’s horror, there were multiple active serial killers at large.

Among the names the FBI’s newly formed Behavioral Science Unit would later attach to the crimes were Ted Bundy (the “Campus Killer” with at least 30 victims), John Wayne Gacy (the “Killer Clown” with 33 victims) and Arthur Shawcross (the “Genesee River Killer” with 14 victims).

Did these men begin to kill so that, like Manson, they could bask in massive media attention?

Or had they been so damaged by the difficult and abusive childhoods they were reported to have had that, like Manson, they developed into full blown psychopaths?

There’s a considerable amount of information about the childhoods of some of America’s most notorious serial killers. Bundy was told that his grandparents were his parents, and when he learned his “sister” was really his mother, he came to despise her and, apparently, all women.

As a boy, Gacy was routinely beaten and humiliated by his alcoholic father.

Shawcross was a young victim of incest at the hands of his mother and sister.

The point is that the more society neglects its children, the more they could grow to become criminal predators.

Statistics from the Radford University Serial Killer Database show that since the glut of serial killers and their victims in the ’70s and ’80s, the numbers first increased, but they have consistently gone down.

Could this be due in part to our deeper understanding of childhood development and the need for positive nurturing early on?

Maybe the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, that promotes better nutrition and health for the underprivileged had something to do with the decrease.

I don’t know the answer to these questions or what has caused the numbers of serial killers and their victims to go down over the decades. But I do know we still have a crime problem in this country. The FBI reports there were an estimated 17,250 murders last year, as well as 95,730 rapes and 1.2 million violent crimes.

The passing of Manson makes me wonder whether we’re doing all we can to eradicate miserable childhoods, gang activity and the frightening increase in the murder rate we see in many American cities these days.

I’m afraid the answer is no.