. . . is that guns truly aren't the problem. The anti-gun brigade simply ignore the facts and the statistics, and manipulate victims and their acquaintances to project their own false arguments.
They also ignore a very real problem that's seldom mentioned.
Now that the gun control advocates have had their fifteen 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 number one 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.
. . .
As Terry Brennan, co-founder of Leading Women for Shared Parenting, notes:
- 72 percent of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers; the same for 60 percent of all rapists.
- 70 percent of juveniles in state institutions grew up in single- or no-parent situations.
- The number of single-parent households is a good predictor of violent crime in a community, while poverty rate is not.
Yet, despite the growing number of experts, pundits and commentators drawing attention to the impact of fatherlessness on school and community safety, the post-attack discussion inevitably reverts back to gun control. Instead of spending so much as fifteen 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. We ignore the lack of adequate mental health services, the failure of law enforcement to effectively intercede, and the sickening impact fatherlessness has on each one of these tragic cases. Why? Because it is easier to ban a hunk of metal than it is to right systemic cultural wrongs.
There's more at the link.
If you look at American society and culture over the past three-quarters of a century, I think there's a lot of evidence to support that view. After all, when millions of American servicemen came home from World War II and the Korean War, they were all highly trained in the use of firearms, and many had seen combat. How many mass shooting incidents did they, or their children, perpetrate? Just about none. It's only with the breakdown of the nuclear family in the 1960's and beyond, and the astronomical increase in the divorce rate, that we see the emergence of more frequent mass shooting events.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Peter
EDITED TO ADD: Sebastian offers an excellent analogy as to why gun owners are fed up with those trying to take away our firearms. Click over there to read it. It's a good argument.
11 comments:
I'm sure the breakdown of the nuclear family is part of it. I don't know how much is due to that specifically, though, and how much is due to the more general problem of the lack of norms. Lack of norms leads to anomie, to suicidal and nihilistic behavior.
The old norms are largely gone from society overall. With inter and intrafactional conflicts in the culture war continuing, new ones seem unlikely to coalesce soon.
Unfortunately, it is too easy to blame "fatherlessness" on "weak men" who won't "man up and marry her." In order to right systemic cultural wrongs, it is necessary to remove the imprimatur of heroic victimhood from single mothers.
Biggest part of the problem...?
It's not the family, it is the rest of society. Go back and take a long, hard look at the actual family structures that existed before modern medicine. You think kids have it rough, these days? LOL... Yeah; try having half your siblings dead before they hit puberty, another quarter of that dead in various misadventures in early life, and a mortality rate among parents that is truly staggering. We think "Oh, intact families were common...". Quite the opposite, until the late 19th Century, when modern medicine came in.
So, if it isn't the family, what is it?
For one damn thing, the prolonged agony of adolescence wasn't a thing until recently. You simply didn't have these long, drawn-out periods of "kid without purpose" until the twentieth, and then that became the standard with child labor laws, and the like. I'm going to suggest that the old ways, where a kid was considered an adult in their early teens, and able to be out making their way productively in the world, probably had a lot to do with the drastic difference between "then" and "now", in terms of anomie expressed through violence.
The striking thing to me, as I survey a lot of modern culture, is that the amount of angst and anomie among the young is considerably higher than what I remember from my youth in the 1970s and 1980s. You simply didn't have the crazed "Woe is me, I want to be dead..." thing going on, except in fringe elements, that you see now when you go looking at things like Imgur, FaceBook, and the like. It's all anomie and angst, all the time, and it's not dark humor--A lot of these kids feel as if they have no reason to live, and some of them are expressing that through violence.
The thing is, we're driving our own kids nuts, through delayed acceptance of adulthood and all the rest. The human being was not meant for prolonged periods of "no purpose in life", and that's pretty much what we've created for our young people, especially the males. There's literally nothing for them to do, until they complete their schooling in their mid-twenties. For some folks, that sort of thing is just fine; for others? It's flatly crazy-making, and we're seeing the effects of that all around us.
The correlation between AR-15s and school shootings is so tenuous as to be non-existent but there are other correlations that bear closer scrutiny.
1. Mental illness and/or diabilities
2. Single or no parent families
3. Psychiatric drugs
4. Democratic party affiliation
The first is somewhat obvious but not all mental illnesses or disabilities are violent. Those that are violent are often easily identified. The problem is the paucity of mental health services and facilities plus crazy people have the right to be crazy. Thank the ACLU for that one. Another issue is the lack of training among ppsychologists and psychyatrists to recognize mass killers in planning.
Families often break down when a child has a disability but the Democrats have enshrined the single mother and make every effort to support them. It is also a seldom published fact that the crime rate among black children in 2 parent families is about the same as the general population.
There is a correlation between psychiatric drugs and mass murders. Suicidal thoughts and tendencies are listed as potential side efeects for all such drugs. It’s bad enough when a child or teenager has such a reaction but look what happened at Las Vegas and the Colorado theater massacres.
The final correlation is the Democratic Party. Julian Assange noted that 94% of our killers are affiliated with the Democratic Party. Maybe we have to ban Democrats from owning guns.
I think Takirks hit it. But not having a father figure/role model plays a part, as does the lack of religion/religious education that we all got growing up.
And don't forget that the reason so many boys are stuck on psyco-tropic drugs is because damn near all the teachers these days are WOMEN. Up until the middle sixties at least, many teachers were retired male/vets who came over to teaching as a second career.
What you need to understand is that these gun control slobs are not trying to solve a problem. That is why reason and facts doesn't work on them.
THEY WANT YOUR GUNS. THEY WANT YOU DEFENSELESS.
The school shootings are merely an excuse to do that.
I blame Rupert Murdoch. He wants to sell advertising space / time. How do you get people to look at your junk? Show them something that will get them upset, and what's more upsetting that dead children?
I'm sure that there is no correlation between increased mass casualty events and the advent of modern psychotropic drugs. Believe that and I've got a bridge to sell.
@ Jay Dee,
I'm in full agreement with you, on that count. The correlation between psychoactive pharmaceuticals use and mass shooting perpetrators is there, if you dig for it.
Which is something our "journalists" are unwilling to do, for reasons I'll leave to the reader to work out. Collusion between "Big Pharma" and other parties...? Desire to further the goals of statist left-wing causes? Pick your poison; the real question is why nobody is talking about all this.
My best guess is that it's akin to cancer--There are a myriad of causes, with varying degrees of direct causation.
At least one aspect of things isn't talked about very much, and that's the rise of the self-centered propaganda they've been doing in the schools, focused on "self-esteem". A lot of these "empowered kids" are turning into the most debased form of narcissist, and I suspect that many of these mass shooters are responding to that messaging at a fundamental level. Some of them have gone on record during their interrogations that they didn't consider other people to be "real", whatever that means.
I think we're at a point in things where there's an unholy concatenation of factors, ranging from the mass prescription of psychoactives (accompanied by really poor clinical practices and patient observation), the change in social values/mores, and this trend towards idealization of the self over all else. Self-esteem is important, but the degree to which we've emphasized it, over real self-accomplishment and competence...?
I think a lot of this whole thing feeds back from the kids today being fed this line of self-esteem bullshit, and then them comparing what they've been told vs. what they are actually able to accomplish in school and life. The contrast between expectation and reality is what's driving them over the edge of rational behavior.
And, it's like so many things in modern education and society--The progressive powers-that-be in all the institutions have confused the result with the path to getting that result, and so they think that enabling the purchase of a house is somehow going to magically inculcate the attitudes and values of the middle-class bourgeoisie into the culture and milieu of the lower economic classes. They are, in short, putting the cart before the horse, and confusing the result with the cause. Same-same mentality is prevalent in the schools, when it comes to instruction in reading and basic math--They've looked at how the higher-level achievers do things, like taking the shortcuts in reading whole words instead of letters and syllables and doing math by breaking things down into smaller steps, and they've decided that teaching the kids who haven't mastered the basics of phonics and math drills should somehow mimic these more advanced and successful kids. Where they should be doing drills and memorization, they are instead teaching the advanced tricks of the trade, which are essentially meaningless to those who don't already possess the basics.
The overall mentality is that these "missionaries to the unenlightened" don't really understand what the hell they are doing, how they themselves got there, or how people really behave and learn. You want to fix a lot of this crap in modern society? Fire all these asshole theorists, get back to basics, and quit trying to improve things. Kids did better in one-room schoolhouses taught by high-school graduates than they are in today's screwed up "modern" schools. Every kid in the rural one-room school my grandmother taught in learned to read, write, and do basic math. Today's high-school graduate, who has had all these multitudinous resources lavished on them...? A lot of them can't even write a coherent sentence or paragraph.
Hell, for that matter...? I've run into college graduates with advanced degrees who can't write effectively enough to describe something that happened in their presence mere hours before--Which is disturbing to recognize.
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