The root causes of recent school shootings are fatherlessness and the breakdown of family values. The real reason for shootings are the breakup of the nuclear family and the absence of any values, family, religious, or other – leading to nihilism and anarchy.
Now that the gun-control advocates have had their 15 minutes of fame, let’s start focusing on the real issues impacting the rise in school shootings since that infamous day in Columbine in 1999.
Issue No. 1 that no one in the mainstream media or government wants to acknowledge: fatherlessness.
Specifically, the impact of fatherlessness on the boys who grew up to become school shooters. Yet, despite experts’ correlation between the impact of fatherlessness and school and community safety, the post-attack discussion inevitably reverts back to gun control.
Instead of spending so much as 15 minutes on fatherlessness we are forced to endure the same salacious headlines, the same provocative tweets, the same tired old memes about the evils of guns as if somehow a cold piece of metal convinced yet another boy to become a mass-murderer.
The gun is simply an easier target for the left and increasingly, the only one that fits its template. Evidence for any other cause, especially one that contradicts their political narrative, will be ignored.
Two of the strongest correlations with gun homicides are growing up in a fatherless household and dropping out of school, which itself is directly related to lack of an active or present father.
The rate of mass shootings has tripled since 2011.
We blame guns, violence in the media, violence in video games, and poor family values.
Each is a plausible player.
But our daughters live in the same homes, with the same access to the same guns, video games, and media, and are raised with the same family values.
Our daughters are not killing.
Our sons are.
But boys with significant father involvement are not doing these shootings.
As noted by University of Virginia Professor Brad Wilcox in 2013, "nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s 'list of U.S. school attacks' involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.”
Dr. Warren Farrell, author of the new book The Boy Crisis, explains: Minimal or no father involvement, whether due to divorce, death, or imprisonment, is common to Adam Lanza, Elliott Rodgers, Dylan Roof and Stephen Paddock.
In the case of 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, he was adopted at birth. His adoptive dad died when Nikolas was much younger, and doubtless, the challenges of this fatherlessness was compounded by the death of his adoptive mom three and a half months ago.
In the interest of fairness, there is plenty of blame in every direction.
If Cruz had experienced any kind of meaningful contact with the criminal justice system in Broward County it is possible his killing spree could have been avoided. The Sheriff’s office, which appeared incompetent and impotent both before and after the shooting, was allegedly besieged with tips and complaints about Cruz.
"This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be a school shooter," Broward County Public Defender Howard Finkelstein told the New York Times. "If this isn't a person who should have gotten someone's attention, I don't know who is. This was a multisystem failure."
If Israel’s office had taken the Cruz case seriously, perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to purchase the weaponry he used against his former classmates.
“He had a clean record, so alarm bells didn’t go off when they looked him up in the system,” said veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello. “He probably wouldn’t have been able to buy the murder weapon if the school had referred him to law enforcement."
So I conclude both the non-enforcement of existing gun laws and the coddling of juvenile offenders are to blame.
Many high-profile protestors advocate the abolition of privately owned guns and the repeal of the Second Amendment. The facts though support government regulation of families, which I don’t hear anyone proposing.
The action we as a society must take is to identify risk factors and empower those closest to the situation to act.
As opposed to federal gun legislation, taxpayer dollars must be directed to the local level. Ryan Petty, father of Parkland victim Alaina Petty, stated: “where we really stop the next killer is in our homes, in our communities,” by directing funds to the discretion of America’s towns and communities.
Communication- “see something, say something” otherwise characterized as a “red flag law” as well as targeting the underlying causes will produce better results than targeting the tools of the shooters.
We choose to ignore this obvious reality and blame the tool preferred by the perpetrators at our own peril.
