Tragedies such as the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday have a habit of becoming political before the bodies have even been counted. But if there’s one thing everyone can and should agree on, it is that none of this is normal.
Children should not be forced to undergo regular drills to prepare them for the threat of a shooter. Parents should not be worried about whether those drills will someday be necessary. And the public as a whole should not be accustomed to reading headlines about the latest mass killing. Yet here we are, reading about the 27th school shooting this year.
We have a problem in this country — that’s just a fact. But it’s a problem much more complicated than many would like to admit. The solution is not simply to restrict access to firearms, as gun control advocates like to claim. And I say this as someone who is much more of a squish on gun policies than many of my fellow conservatives. I think it’s ridiculous, for example, that the 18-year-old Uvalde shooter was able to own a gun legally when he was not considered legally responsible or mature enough to buy a beer. And I think certain restrictions, such as narrow and well-defined red flag laws that would allow law enforcement to block a person’s access to firearms if a family member or close friend is able to prove he is mentally unfit to carry one, are a good idea.
But there is no evidence that the sweeping gun control policies pushed by leftists, such as an outright ban on assault-style weapons, would have done anything to prevent the mass shootings that have taken place. Such policies aren’t even good at preventing common crime. In Chicago, for example, which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country, and where law enforcement regularly seizes thousands of illegal weapons per year, crime is so rampant that Mayor Lori Lightfoot had to enact a curfew prohibiting minors from being outside after 10 p.m.
Moreover, gun control policies, even if they could be effective, would be little more than a Band-Aid solution. People don’t shoot each other just because there are guns around. The Uvalde shooter wanted to shoot up a classroom full of children — that’s the real problem.
This, ultimately, is the heart of the debate. Why are so many young men being driven to commit such heinous acts of violence? Why do they always seem to have no one in their lives paying attention to the signs of mental instability and aggression? What is wrong with our systems that they keep failing to identify and help people who are desperately in need of an intervention?
Gun policies are just one part of the debate, and they usually only scratch the surface. But it’s easier to focus on firearms than it is to talk about the other cultural factors at play, which we tend to avoid because they reveal difficult truths about our society and the ways in which it has failed.
Why is it, for example, that 75% of the most recent school shooters, including the 18-year-old in Uvalde, were raised in broken homes without fathers? Indeed, this background is so common among perpetrators that criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi concluded after the Sandy Hook school shooting that the absence of fathers is one of the “most powerful predictors of crimes.” Boys raised without a fatherly presence are more likely to act impulsively, irrationally, and, yes, violently. They were deprived of the discipline, structure, authoritative role model, and sense of identity that a father is supposed to provide, and they suffered for it.
Unfortunately, 75% of black children are born into similar situations, along with 61% of Hispanic children and 39% of white children. But instead of advocating a cultural revival and policies that would encourage it, today’s leftists insist that there’s nothing wrong with eliminating the traditional family structure of a mother and father. In fact, they argue that getting rid of it is a good thing. Just a couple of years ago, Black Lives Matter vowed to “dismantle the patriarchy practice” of appointing men as the heads of homes and “disrupt the Western prescribed nuclear family structure.”
The other obvious cultural factor at play is social isolation. We have created a society in which it is extremely easy to feel alone. Fewer and fewer people are attending church; more than one-third of Americans say they’ve never interacted with their neighbors; and the vast majority of young adults say they spend more time online than they do meeting friends in person. To make matters worse, we’ve spent the past two years discouraging in-person interaction altogether, locking children and teenagers out of communal environments such as schools, and exacerbating the mental health crisis that many of them were already experiencing.
Small wonder, then, that mass violence has skyrocketed over the last decade. We’ve replaced traditional community with a fictitious online world — one without any of the guardrails or accountability that typically accompany the former. And as a result, loneliness, anxiety, and depression rates are through the roof, especially among young adults. Indeed, most of the recent school shooters have been described as “loners,” young men who were isolated, bullied, lonely, and angry. The Uvalde shooter, for example, had few, if any, friends. He reportedly dropped out of school and was mocked for having a lisp and wearing eyeliner.
I wish I could say what the solution is to all of this, but I’m just not sure. What I do know, however, is that children need fathers, and they need to be a part of a community that will protect and care for them and, most importantly, hold them accountable — whether that’s a church, a soccer team, or a close-knit neighborhood. They need to be surrounded by adults who will teach them the importance of individual responsibility and who will step in when necessary.
Too many children aren’t being raised in that kind of environment. We, as a society, are failing them. It’s well past time we admit as much.
