Maybe It’s The Missing Fathers? No, It’s Not.
In recent days, I saw a new message trickling into the online debate about mass shootings: missing fathers. Let’s look at it.
The claim seems to be that all (or most) of the school shooters (or mass shooters) were basically fatherless, and further, that this is a contributing cause of their eventual mass violence. I first saw this claim from a family member on social media, and then I began seeing it elsewhere. It turns out that the idea isn’t new, but it IS false.
There were others, but I usually try not to link to sites like the one that rhymes with “The Hailey Trawler” and others in that vein. Do they have something? Have these conservative thinkers found a common link between mass shooters? If it is a truism that mass shooters in general or school shooters in particular come from “broken” homes or homes without fathers then we could be looking at a potential solution — or at least a new item on the list of warning signs.
I have several questions about the claim, and I'll try to answer them below:
Is It True?
As with any claim, before moving on I must first determine whether it’s true. What evidence is offered? Is it verifiable that all (I would even accept “most”) mass/school shooters grew up without fathers?
In the Fox News opinion piece [which isn’t online anymore, as of 2021], anti-feminist Suzanne Venker doesn’t actually address the claim in her headline. At all. But she links to an earlier editorial she wrote, called “The desperate cry of America’s boys”, in which she claims that someone else claimed that of seven mass shooters since 2005, only one (Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho) was raised by his biological father throughout childhood. Not only does she not attempt to verify this claim, but she doesn’t even take issue with the fact that he’s only using a sample size of seven mass shooters since 2005 before going on to assume it’s true and talk about how important fathers are.
The “someone else” she cited was Peter Hasson in the Federalist article I listed above. It’s from 2015. Hasson in turn cites a 2013 claim from professor Brad Wilcox, linking to a story from The National Review that doesn’t appear to exist. Sigh. Then he goes on to blame all types of violence on “no-fault divorce”, “redefining marriage”, and the bizarre claim that the U.S. is on the way to “state-recognized polygamy”. At the very end, he finally lists a handful of (three) shooters who didn’t have fathers: Dylann Roof (Charleston church), Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook), and Jeff Weise (Red Lake, Minn.)
In the Huffington Post’s article, Santorum naturally didn’t back up his claim either; he simply spouted nonsense like: “moms raising children in single-parent households [are] simply breeding more criminals.”
So we're no closer to knowing whether the claim is true. I kept looking.
Crisis Magazine made the claim too, but cited Venker’s Fox piece (see above) as its source. The Daily Wire also made the claim [the article is no longer online, as of 2021], citing both Peter Hasson (see above) and Brad Wilcox (Hasson’s source). Finally, I was able to find Wilcox’s 2013 article [also no longer available as of 2021], in which it turns out that the claim is: “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.” He doesn’t say how many, but does say “last year”, which would mean 2012. He doesn’t list any of them.
This is a horrible standard in journalism, which I’ve come to expect in modern times, and especially from the right when outlandish claims are made. Most of the writers named three or fewer mass shooters known to have come from fatherless homes, and none of them provided a list or citations to actual information. If any of them had done the research, it would have been a simple matter to list mass shooters along with the father situation:
And so on. Not doing so leaves the reader to either (1) assume it must be true because these published people are saying it’s true, (2) assume it’s NOT true, because the writers disagree with me most of the time, or (3) do the research yourself. We can assume that very few will choose the third option. It would entail, first of all, defining parameters (which shootings to include, over what time period) and then actually looking them all up and finding information about the shooters’ fathers.
I decided to begin with Wilcox’s list. Weirdly, he didn’t link to a page on Wikipedia, but linked instead to the editing dialog of that page, which is suspicious in itself. Presumably, he meant to link to this page. I began with the most recent one for which the father situation is known and worked my way backward. I ignored accidental discharges, incidents with no injuries/fatalities, and other cases on the list that don’t seem to fit the profile. Here’s what I came up with (I will include the shooter’s name, age, year of shooting, and situation of his father):
That’s all the school shooters in 2017 and 2018 I could find that fit my criteria. As noted, I skipped suicides on school grounds, shootings near schools that were unrelated, accidental discharges by students/teachers, etc. I’m focusing here on mass shootings where the perp intended to kill or injure multiple people. What about mass shootings that weren’t at schools?
Someday, I might go farther back, but these are all the mass shootings I could find from 2017 and 2018. Notice that only TWO of these eleven men are known to have grown up without a father: Cruz (high school shooting in Florida) and Paddock (Las Vegas). Five are known to have grown up with a father (one with a step-father), and for the four others I could not find information about whether a father or step-father had been involved in their lives.
My temporary conclusion, then, is that the claim being advanced by right wing commentators isn’t true (which fits the profile of many right-wing claims). It’s not true that most or all of school shooters or mass shooters in general grew up without a father, though it is of course known to be true in a small percentage of cases. It is possible that if I went back farther in time that the percentages would change. However, I think I have shown that the people making the claim are very reluctant to list their sources, list the shooters to which they refer, or actually show us the numbers, and I have certainly shown that in 2017 and 2018, the majority of the shooters do not fit the claim.
Is It A Contributing Factor?
Even if someone can find a time period in which many of the shooters grew up without fathers, this wouldn’t automatically mean it was a factor in leading them to become killers. It’s a non sequitur to say “Because some of them were fatherless, the fatherlessness was a cause of their later violence.” There must be something besides a statistical correlation to show that the lack of fathers at some point in their lives somehow urged them to take up arms against crowds of unarmed and unsuspecting victims. (To drive home the point about statistical correlation, I’m willing to bet that a great majority of these shooters wore blue jeans during their early years. No sane person would suggest that blue jeans caused the shootings.)
Ignoring for the moment that I’ve already shown there’s NOT a statistical correlation, let’s examine this second claim. The articles and opinion pieces I cited above all claimed that boys growing up without fathers in the home are more likely to be violent.
Venker claims that boys who grow up without fathers “tend to act out in a manner that’s harmful to others”, but does not cite a source for her claim. She also cites the experience of being a mother of a 15-year-old boy, “who would not be the exceptional young man he is if not for his father” — and offers no evidence to back this claim. How could she possibly know whether her own son would behave in a worse manner if his father was missing? She goes on to never back her claim, but does turn the tables on women and adds the claim that “women are divorcing perfectly good husbands in their search for what they believe will be a better match” and says this is to blame for most fatherless boys.
Quick lesson in argument and logic: adding a new claim does not support your first claim. Not only is the second claim not evidence for the first one, it too requires evidence. Venker never offers evidence for any of these claims.
Hasson takes a different path. He actually does cite evidence. But before he does, he cites long-dead people’s opinions that marriage and the family are requirements for society to do well. The evidence he does bring up includes the “shocking” figure that 41 percent of American kids are “born to an unmarried mother”. Of course, this is irrelevant, since the marriage status of a mother is not reflective of whether a father figure is in the home. Even if it was, I think mentioning this would actually refute his point, because it means that nearly half of America is growing up without fathers (many millions of children), yet we’re only seeing dozens of mass shootings. It means 99.9999% of children growing up without fathers do not end up shooting anyone. That’s a MUCH stronger correlation.
Hasson also cites a 1995 Heritage Foundation (ultra-right-wing organization) article that notes this “correlation”: “the rise in violent crime parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers.” (Notably, that article doesn’t mention its sources either. Are you seeing a trend here?) Hasson goes on to note a correlation between fatherlessness and suicide, high school drop-out rates, and drug use — though he never explains how these three rates are related to mass shootings. As I mentioned above, he thinks the increase in “no-fault divorce”, combined with “redefining marriage”, spells doom for the U.S. But again, he never says why; just makes this claim.
Santorum also did not explain why he thought kids growing up without fathers would become mass shooters, or how he thought the two were related.
But the fact that these conservatives are really bad at making their case doesn’t mean their case is false, right? Logically, they could still be correct despite being very bad at convincing anyone of it.
For example, if they could show that violent crime rates have been increasing at similar rates to “fatherless” homes, that would be evidence, right? (If not outright causation, the correlation could be convincing.) As it turns out, violent crime in the U.S. has been decreasing in the United States — it remained relatively stable from the 1970s through the ’90s, but has dropped off since then. Alone, this seems to refute the claim that children without fathers tend to be more violent — as increasingly more Americans grow up without father figures, crime has dropped off in this country.
What about mass shootings, specifically? Have mass shootings and/or school shootings increased at a rate similar to the rate of fatherless boys? While Politico claims mass shootings are becoming deadlier but not more frequent, other analyses say otherwise. The Cato Institute notes that mass shootings might have grown more frequent, but correctly adds “this sort of random mass shooting [is] one of the rarest mortality risks imaginable.” (The actual annual death tolls are incredibly low, when compared to “falling” or “the flu”, and are especially low when compared to overall firearms-related deaths.) The LA Times shows evidence that mass shootings are actually increasing, but only takes data back to 1984.
In other words, the data is massively inconclusive. Each study defines “mass shooting” differently (as the Cato article noted), excluding incidents that others include, and vice versa. There isn’t actually a standard definition of “mass shooting” in the U.S. It’s a catchall phrase designed by media pundits. This makes it difficult to put data together to form a trend.
But let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that these types of mass shootings actually have grown more frequent. Could it be due to the rate of boys being raised without fathers? It would be REALLY weird if it was. Here’s why: Black boys are far more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than boys of any other ethnicity/race while white boys are second only to Asian boys in being most likely to have a father at home — yet almost all the mass shooters and school shooters have been white boys or white men. If growing up without a father in the home was a worthy predictor of whether someone would become a school/mass shooter, then most school/mass shooters would be Black and Native American, not almost entirely white.
If you can think of other arguments that the conservative pundits missed in their weak attempt to back this claim, feel free to lay them out in the comments. I searched for hours and couldn’t come up with a single valid argument or a single piece of evidence that backs the claim that fatherlessness has something to do with violent crime in general or mass/school shootings in particular.
Anecdotally, I don’t actually know many men who grew up without fathers in the home. But of all the ones I do know, exactly ZERO of them are mass shooters or school shooters. (The only person I personally knew growing up who is currently in prison is a white man who grew up with a father in the home.)
What Can Be Done?
It turns out that this third question is irrelevant. Now that we’ve shown the claims aren’t true — that most mass/school shooters didn’t grow up fatherless AND that fatherlessness doesn’t appear to contribute in any correlatable way — then nothing needs to be done about it.
Even IF the original claims had been shown to be true, there isn’t much of an answer here. Venker didn’t offer a solution in her op-ed. (In her earlier one, the only solution she offered was “Masculinity, channeled well” by “involved dads”, and she didn’t elaborate.) Hasson also didn’t offer any solutions. The closest he got was his closing sentence: “All that remains to be seen is whether we decide to keep destabilizing American homes, or wake up and give our kids the upbringing they deserve.” He doesn’t explain what kind of upbringing kids deserve, but the word “deserve” is a link to a Catholic article about Pope Francis saying children need both a mother and a father. Hasson doesn’t say whether he thinks people should be forced to have a father, or how this solution would come about. Santorum went a little further. He said we should be “working together to try to see what we can do to get more dads involved in the lives of the kids.” The article didn’t elaborate on how to accomplish this, though Santorum is known to have suggested that women who refuse to name their children’s fathers should be kicked off welfare. (Which seems to be a way to make people poorer, but not a way to get fathers into boys’ lives.)
In other words, not a single one of these people was offering a solution. Every one of them was repeating claims that no one has ever given evidence for. The entire point of both Venker’s and Hasson’s pieces seem to be to rail against the loss of the “traditional family”, a common rallying cry for conservatives.
Conclusion
While every mass/school shooter is different in many respects, there really are a few correlations between them. Almost all of them have been male. Almost all of them have been white. Most of them have been within a certain age bracket (Paddock, at 64, was quite the outlier). There is also a mild correlation with domestic abuse — quite a few of them were either accused or convicted previously of harming a significant other or child before going on their shooting rampage. All of them had access to firearms, and most of that access was entirely legal.
But other factors simply don’t correlate. As I showed above, it’s not necessarily common that they grew up without a father. Not all of them were poor. Many of them hadn’t been previously diagnosed as mentally ill.
So, the next time you see someone pushing the “they didn’t have fathers”, refer them to this blog entry.
Note: About a month ago, I tackled [link temporarily invalid] some of the more common right-wing talking points in the school shooting conversation — teachers should be armed, our entertainment is too violent, God was "removed" from schools, mental illness, and guns certainly aren't a factor. Each of those arguments either fail through their own merits, are outright absurd, or aren't entirely convincing.
UPDATE, 2021.09.17: I was surprised (and pleased) to find this blog entry listed as a source for a Snopes fact-check.
Comments From Original URL:
Anderson Connors, 2018.03.25, 14:12
Again, you have argued well and seen quickly through the logical fallacies of these regressives. They will say ALMOST ANYTHING to avoid the obvious: these men couldn’t have done what they did if guns weren’t so easy to come by.
One note: I grew up without a father in my home, and mostly without any father “figure”. That changed, briefly, in my teens, when my mom married a Christian man who eventually converted her. That was also the unhappiest time of my childhood, and the only time of my childhood during which a gun was in our home. If I had decided to shoot up a school, I could have ONLY done it because my step-dad brought a gun into our house and didn’t fully secure it.
Had she never brought that man into our home, I would never have had access to a gun during my minor years. I can’t say for sure whether I would have been happy without him there — it’s possible I was going to be less happy during my teen years regardless — but I certainly wouldn’t have been able to get a gun.
(Fortunately, history will record that I did NOT go on a shooting rampage, like most other boys raised without fathers.)
Wil C. Fry, 2018.03.25, 21:55, in response to Anderson Connors:
Thanks for the comment/compliment.
I admit when I first saw the claim, it rang true for me, because they listed several of the shooters as examples. But I’m getting better at noticing flaws in logic. And I noticed there was no list or citation for the claim that all/most were fatherless. And then I caught the non sequitur — the followup claim that the fatherlessness was the root cause.
So I decided to check. :-)
Dana, 2018.03.27, 14:31:
Anecdotal evidence based on 23 years of representing poor people charged with crimes (all crimes; not just shooting): slightly more than half of my clients come from homes where the father didn’t reside in the home. Of those, many also didn’t reside with a mother, but were in foster care or lived with other relatives. However, in those communities, I’d say that slightly more than half the overall population (regardless of whether they are charged with a crime or have no criminal history) come from non-traditional families. It’s just not a predicative factor whether someone will commit a crime or not.
Wil C. Fry, 2018.03.27, 09:48, in reply to Dana:
Thank you for the input. (I’ve now begun anticipating input from you any time I write on matters that touch on your profession, LOL.)
Some additional thoughts on my blog entry:
1. I’ve also seen studies showing that a startling amount of our behavior is inherited rather than environmental. For example, children adopted at birth will often behave in ways more consistent with their genetic parents than with their adopted parents (for certain categories, at least).
2. An additional factor that I think is missed in these “missing father” claims: the statistics don’t actually show that the fathers are missing (except in cases like Nikolas Cruz, whose father died). The “single mother” stats only show that she’s not married — I’ve known lots of women who raise children in the same home with the children’s biological father but aren’t married and always check the “unmarried” box on surveys and census forms. In many cases where the parents are divorced and don’t live together, both parents are still greatly involved in the children’s lives — the parents get along well enough as long as they don’t have to live together.
3. But even in cases where there is no actual father around, and no substitute father in the house, these boys aren’t growing up “without male role models”, which seems to be the root of the claim. Almost no one lives in isolated farmhouses like we did 200 years ago. Almost all of us interact with dozens of other people on a daily basis. I’m not the only man my children see — I just happen to be the one they see the most. They see men at parks and playgrounds, grocery stores and tax offices. Without listing every person my children come into contact with, I think I can safely say they see plenty of men in their lives.
(4. Not to mention men on TV. Almost without exception, the fathers portrayed in kids’ TV shows are what I would call “good male role models” — kind, listening, caring, wise, willing to admit mistakes, knowledgeable without being condescending, etc.)
Erik Archer, 2018.10.15, 19:43:
Hey there, I came to your blog after a Google search, and it was excellently written. You did an excellent job of disputing right-wing rhetoric and fallacies. Although growing up fatherless isn’t exactly a good thing and it’s always ideal and preferable to grow up in a household with both parents, for some families it doesn’t always work out that way unfortunately. Right-wingers are so narrow-minded on this subject with their one size fits all way of thinking.
I found your article after looking for anything that invalidated the argument that being fatherless acts as a catalyst for setting one down a path to crime after seeing quite a few topics on this on Reddit’s Men's Rights sub, where a lot of the hardcore Men’s Rights Activists there often use the fatherless argument for why the crime rates are so high. I personally find that quite offensive as I myself was raised by a single mother never knowing who my father was and although it’s not easy being raised by just one parent, it is possible to turn out okay and still live a normal, productive life without the other parent present. Coming from a single parent household is absolutely not a catalyst for someone turning out bad and likewise coming from a home where both parents including the father reside isn’t a guarantee the person will turn out good. Do your research and you’ll see the vast majority of murderers come from 2-parent homes or knew their father to some degree, and the number of fatherless murderers is actually very low by comparison, especially with serial killers and mass shooters. Not to mention you’ve also had numerous dictators and tyrants who also knew their fathers like Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Yet right-wingers always point out that most mass murderers come from single mother households without ever backing that up with facts and they always like to point to statistics without looking at the bigger picture. Which goes to show their ignorance and closed-mindedness.
I’m 31 now and have never known my father, who split with my mother when I was maybe about 1 or 2 years old? From what my mother has told me, he frequently got drunk and the relationship was taking a turn for the worse and rather than have an unsuitable father figure in my life she opted to raise me without him. It wasn’t an easy decision, but sometimes single parents face things like this. I sometimes feel a bit of an emptiness over never knowing my father and not having that father/son bond most men have had, but if the father was a bad person and the exact opposite of what a good parent should be then maybe it was for the best, and having a bad father is pretty much the same as being fatherless. Although my mother was in some relationships over the years she never really settled down with anyone. I still had positive male role models in my life to fill the void of a missing father, with my uncle and cousin. Would I liked to have known my father? Of course, I do wish things had been better between my parents and I’d grown up with both, and I would’ve even settled for a good stepfather. But sometimes it’s just the deck you’re dealt and you got to make something good out of it rather than just being upset over something that’s not changing.
Truth is you do your homework and you see there’s many fatherless people of both genders who still turned out to live normal lives and you have people who grew up with their fathers or knowing them who still turned out bad. Yet right-wingers don’t want to hear it and still fall back on the argument that fatherlessness has led to the downfall of society and they don’t look at the bigger picture and take other things into account. And I’ve noticed many who fall back on this argument are quick to anger and judgment if you debate them telling them fatherlessness isn’t a cause or catalyst, and if you insist otherwise they talk to you like you’re stupid and don’t know what you’re talking about. When I was debating this issue on Reddit’s Men’s Rights sub I even had one write me off as a troll for pointing out being fatherlessness isn’t a guarantee for someone turning out bad. I think to focus on this flawed argument is taking attention away from things that are the true underlying cause of things like crime, and while the lack of the father present could be true in some instances it doesn’t appear to be so in the vast majority of them. Plus, what does this issue have to do with the subject of men’s rights to begin with? I feel equal rights for both genders are important and especially in this day and age of both toxic masculinity and toxic femininity equally being an issue that’s further splitting us apart, and this kind of thinking does absolutely nothing to find a solution. A lot of the users on the Men’s Right sub are a bunch of right-wingers who use this illogical argument and don’t really care about legit gender equality and although valid points are sometimes made by them in regards to gender inequality they use this to justify and validate their own ignorance rather than come up with a solution.
Just wanted to congratulate you on the article and keep up your good writing. Although I grew up fatherless and by all accounts my dad wasn’t the most upstanding of men, I do respect and salute all the good, caring fathers who are out there and you seem like you’re definitely one and a dad your kids are very fortunate to have. While being fatherless or motherless is never a good thing sometimes things unfortunately just don’t work out between two people the way they should. Even if fatherless one can still live a normal and productive life so long as they’re raised properly and taught well from a young age, and this is something a good, caring and devoted single parent of either gender is absolutely capable of doing.
Wil C. Fry, 2018.10.15, 19:44, in reply to Erik Archer:
Thank you for the thorough and lucid comment, Erik.
Max Goodwin, 2018.11.19, 00:22:
Terrible article. For someone who considers themselves an expert on “logic” and “argumentation”, you contradict yourself several times and make many anemic, inane, and non-sequitur points with completely wrong data.
"Black boys don't commit mass shootings" -- okay, sure, but they have disproportionately high rates of crime -- and wherever you picked up this parrotting-slogan, it's not even true: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mass-shootings-in-2018/ -- and by the way, 16% of mass shooters being black is perfectly in line with their demographics in the US.
You skimmed a Wikipedia article and thought yourself a debunker. The fact that you put "father unknown" for most ofthem doesn't show that the claims are wrong, it shows that you spent half a minute googling each one and stopped after 5 when you realized Gooogle isnt literally omniscient and can't tell you the parental situation of every single obscure mass shooter (everyone on your list was a literal whomst whose lives aren't going to be documented on Wikipedia). Meanwhile there are genuine researchers behind the claims these dumb conservatards are making. Here's a list similar to yours compiled by an actual PhD instead of an amateur with Google: https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/shooters_myth_stable_home_1.15.pdf
In any case it is not even disputable that children of fatherless households fare worse. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962786/ Study after study corroborates this. Wasn't less true when progressive icon Obama said it https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/23/barack-obama/statistics-dont-lie-in-this-case/ or liberal mouthpiece NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/06/18/533062607/poverty-dropouts-pregnancy-suicide-what-the-numbers-say-about-fatherless-kids Asinine anecdotes from someone who sounds and looks like he's never left the suburbs don't change this, and putting them in there just makes you look like more of an armchair analyst.
You say that violent crime has been decreasing and this debunks fatherlessness as a culprit of violence -- yet all the studies you show a few paragraphs later say mass shootings have been staying the same or increasing. You'd expect that to be following the downward trend, yes? So this actually runs contrary to the argument of the overall post?
This downward trend of crime means nothing for your argument anyway. It's such a terrible proxy. There's so many other things that have changed in a century than just marriages -- a meta-trend doesn't disprove more specific data. In any case crime is reversing it's course in recent years, especially in cities and via gangs.
You also cited the Cato institute, which is as far right as Heritage, so it makes it even clearer you're just using Google and have no standards or rigor.
Also, something I've noticed: the phrase "-- and I turned out fine!" is almost always uttered by people who did not, in fact, turn out fine. Nobody thinks themselves "messed-up". Nobody thinks their parents didn't raise them right.
Reddit-tier. NEXT.
Wil C. Fry, 2018.11.19, 16:43
Max, thanks for reading and for commenting. (I removed your website link because the site contained graphic pornography, but otherwise left your comment intact.)
* ‘For someone who considers themselves an expert on “logic” and “argumentation”...’
I don’t consider myself an expert on anything, much less logic and argumentation.
* ‘ “Black boys don’t commit mass shootings” — okay, sure...’
Where did you get the part in quotation marks? I didn’t say it in my blog entry. I said: “... almost all the mass shooters and school shooters have been white boys or white men.” I failed to list a source, but there are plenty, including the one you provided.
* ‘16% of mass shooters being black is perfectly in line with their demographics in the US.’
This serves my point perfectly. As I noted in my entry, black males are far more likely to grow up in single-parent homes than are white males. If fatherlessness were the cause of mass shootings, any observer would expect the rate of black male involvement to be far higher. But it’s not. It’s very close to their actual percentage of the population.
* ‘The fact that you put “father unknown” for most ofthem doesn’t show that the claims are wrong...’
Correct. But it does show that the people making the claims did so without evidence. If the father situation is unknown, then claiming the cause was “missing father” is highly suspect.
* ‘Here’s a list similar to yours compiled by an actual PhD...’
Thank you for the link. Dr. Langman has indeed done plenty of research on the topic; he’s considered an expert in the field. But even he admits, right at the beginning of that file, that he doesn’t include information on shooters if the family situation is unknown. He also clarifies well that he’s not using “missing fathers” as a criterion. He’s using a very different standard of “how functional the families were, regardless of whether... the parents’ marriage was legally intact.” He includes a broad variety of additional information, such as whether the parents consumed alcohol, whether they were ever arrested, and any evidence of “dysfunction” in the home.
I’m sure he’s on to something, and I have no quibble with his information or research. But he’s definitely not making the same claim as the people I cited in my blog entry above. Dysfunction in the home is quite a different thing than home without a father, though of course the two situations will often overlap.
‘...someone who sounds and looks like he’s never left the suburbs...’
This statement, definitely not a slur against me, makes tons of sense. I have definitely never left “the suburbs” (unless you count the years I spent in poverty in one of Arkansas’s poorest inner city neighborhoods, or the even more years I spent in deeply rural Oklahoma towns). And people from the suburbs definitely don’t have any grasp of... Nevermind. I think it’s obvious I was being sarcastic in this part of my reply.
‘...it is not even disputable that children of fatherless households fare worse.’
Correct. And I mentioned in my entry that it’s correlated with suicide rates, school drop-out rates, and drug use. But the claim under consideration here is that fatherlessness is the cause of increased mass shootings. And no one making the claim was able to provide evidence for it.
‘You also cited the Cato institute, which is as far right as Heritage...’
I’m aware that Cato was founded in part by Charles Koch and has a decidedly libertarian bent, though this is different than Heritage’s radically regressive ideology. Regardless, I regularly cite sources from both left and right, if the information appears accurate, well-sourced, and/or useful for actually solving problems. I don’t think an organization’s political bent should mean their numbers should be automatically dismissed, do you?
“...something I’ve noticed: the phrase “—and I turned out fine!” is almost always uttered by people who did not, in fact, turn out fine.’
An interesting observation, but I fail to see its relevance here. I think most of us will agree that mass shooters didn’t “turn out fine”, though in many other cases “fine” is too subjective to use as a measuring stick. Each of us has a different standard as to what counts as “fine”.
Again, thank you for commenting. Next time: careful with the links and personal slurs.