Fatherless, broken homes linked to ‘nearly every shooting’
As the country heals from the mass shooting in a Florida school leaving 17 dead, gun control activists have controlled the narrative, calling for immediate action and a full-scale assault on the National Rife Association (NRA), Republican politicians, American gun owners, and the Second Amendment.
One common thread can actually be found in a 2015 study and 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.”
“[A]s the nation seeks to make sense of these senseless shootings, we must also face the uncomfortable truth that turmoil at home all too often accounts for the turmoil we end up seeing spill onto our streets and schools,” he wrote in his article “Sons of Divorce, School Shooters.” “The social scientific evidence about the connection between violence and broken homes could not be clearer.”
The Trumpet notes that Former U.S. Secretary of Education William J. Bennett points out in his book The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators that a survey of U.S. schoolteachers in 1940 revealed that the top problems in America’s public school system were talking out of turn, chewing bubble gum, running in the hallways, cutting in line, and littering. By 1990, the top problems included drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, suicide, rape, robbery and assault. These problems have only worsened during the 27 years since.
Writing at The Federalist in 2015, Peter Hasson highlighted the fact that of all the shootings on CNN’s “27 Deadliest Mass Shootings In U.S. History” list committed by young males, only one was raised by his biological father.
The most recent Florida school shooter, too, had no father figure, as his adoptive father died when the suspect was just a boy.
Hasson: “Violence? There’s a direct correlation between fatherless children and teen violence. Suicide? Fatherless children are more than twice as likely to commit suicide. Dropping out of school? Seventy-one percent of high school dropouts came from a fatherless background. Drug use? According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.” How about guns? 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.”
“Without dads as role models, boys’ testosterone is not well channeled,” wrote author Warren Farrell at USA TODAY. “The boy experiences a sense of purposelessness, a lack of boundary enforcement, rudderlessness, and often withdraws into video games and video porn. At worst, when boys’ testosterone is not well-channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world’s most destructive forces. When boys’ testosterone is well channeled by an involved dad, boys become among the world’s most constructive forces.”
Fox News:
The root of fatherlessness is deep and wide, but it ultimately rests in two things: our culture’s dismissal of men as valuable human beings who have something unique to offer—on the one hand, we tell them to ‘man up,’ and on the other we tell them manhood is the problem—and its dismissal of marriage as an institution that’s crucial to the health and well-being of children. This long-standing belief has been supplanted by the notion that marriage is about the emotional fulfillment of adults.
It is not. Marriage is about the needs of children, pure and simple. That’s how it began, and that’s how it remains. Children’s needs are the same today as they were one hundred years ago. It is we, not they, who have changed.
Thus, it is we who have failed.