Unlike those who immediately reacted with hysterical rage and ignorantly focused on one object, I waited through the solemnness of Memorial Day and a full week to gather thoughts on the horrific massacre in a small Texas town.
Stats show seven children each year on average are killed in schools. That’s seven too many, but more than 100 are killed annually in school transportation accidents and several hundred every year in urban gun violence that the left ignores for ideological reasons.
It seems like after further review this was mainly a tragic failure of a school district and law enforcement, so why make policy for the entire country based on one town in one county — out of 3,100 counties in the United States — or a potentially inept police response?
More than three in four mass shootings use handguns, not assault rifles, and K-12 shootings constitute but 7% of all mass killings.
It’s a brutal world, and you cannot deter all evil. The anti-gun lobby actually thinks we can legislate morality via policy, and everything ends utopian. The right understands humanity and is more realistic. Quite sadly, there is no panacea and will always be school shootings.
We avoid confronting a reality that this very troubled Uvalde teenager had nothing in common with the other 332 million Americans.
As I listened and read throughout the week, the only detailed, logical conversations about stopping these tragedies from occurring took place on the right; the left just ranted about guns and demonized political opponents as killers.
If you posit the crumbling of families and communities contributes to America’s gun violence problem, you get lambasted by tone-deaf liberal elites, who assert that’s a distraction.
It’s a much thornier subject for the Acela media apparatus to talk about families and mental health, so President Joe Biden and Democrats don’t deviate from their unhinged rhetoric and political agenda.
Utah Sen. Mike Lee wondered about a connection between children raised with one parent, asking, “Why is our culture suddenly producing so many young men who want to murder innocent people? It raises questions like, you know, could things like fatherlessness, the breakdown of families, isolation from civil society, or the glorification of violence be contributing factors?”
Noting fatherlessness, family breakdown, and isolation as harmful is not insensitive; yet even the suggestion sent the left into ad hominem rage.
They admire tyrannical neighbors and ludicrously believe nothing except stricter gun laws or revoking the Second Amendment could diminish the very small number of school shootings.
Enormous problems usually have many contributing causes, but the “only talk about guns” crowd lazily asserts that what distinguishes America from other wealthy countries is the presence of guns.
The argument is weak. For example, while fatherlessness unfortunately is more widespread here than anywhere, the countries close behind us also have gun violence problems.
Even an extensive Princeton University study explained, “Growing up outside a family with two biological, married parents yields especially negative consequences for boys as compared to girls, including worse educational outcomes and higher rates of criminal involvement.”
Are children raised without a father present statistically more prone to violence?
"We are told that guns are the problem but if we fail to identify the real problem, we come away with the wrong solutions." #mentalhealth
— Winsome Earle-Sears (@WinsomeSears) May 28, 2022
Well, gun violence, criminality, and anti-social behavior are less likely for people with strong role models who enjoy the benefits of intact families and close-knit communities. So why is it so controversial and rage-inducing to note that fatherlessness could contribute to mass shootings?
I’d like to have a thoughtful discussion, but those harboring maximalist positions on gun control refuse to engage.
A.J. Kaufman
A.J. Kaufman is an Alpha News columnist. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Florida Sun-Sentinel, Indianapolis Star, Israel National News, Orange County Register, St. Cloud Times, Star-Tribune, and across AIM Media Midwest and the Internet. Kaufman previously worked as a school teacher and military historian.
