What does Anna Quindlen mean when she writes about "Our Peculiar Standards of Masculinity"?

I assume that you are asking about Quindlen's line in her
essay about school shootings that is in the link below.  If so, what Quindlen means by
this is that we here in America have strange ideas ("peculiar standards") as to what it
means to be a man ("masculinity").

Quindlen points out that
Kip Kinkel's father did not believe in psychological therapy.  Instead, he thought that
he could take care of his son's problems by doing things like buying him a gun. 
Quindlen says that this shows that we have strange ideas about what it means to be a
man.  We think that men do not go to therapy to have their feelings examined.  Instead,
men do aggressive and violent things to prove their masculinity.  For this reason,
Kinkel's father thought that a gun would do his son more good than therapy
would.

So, Quindlen is using this phrase to say that
Americans have (in her opinion) strange and counterproductive visions of what men should
be.