School shooters and fatherlessness
The Parkland shooting seems to have inspired a surge of references to the alleged fatherlessness of most school shooters (and even of most mass murderers). This article is fairly typical of such pieces, for example, and I see similar assertions in comments just about everywhere on the right side of the blogosphere.
However, I’ve not seen compelling evidence that fatherlessness is more common in shooters than in the general population of young people these days. Now, that does not mean I think that fatherlessness is not an extremely important issue and a scourge. It is both, most definitely. But still, fatherlessness doesn’t appear to be more prevalent among school shooters or other mass murderers than among other people of the same age, although there’s a common misconception to that effort.
It also depends how one defines “fatherlessness.” Just as an example, the Parkland shooter Cruz had a father who died when Cruz was six years old. He was indeed fatherless, but his home wasn’t “broken” in the usual sense of divorce, so does it really make much sense to blame the breakdown of the family and the divorce rate for Cruz’s fatherlessness and his violent behavior, as some do? The last straw for the already-troubled Cruz was probably his mother’s death (also apparently no one’s fault), which left him orphaned, which is also not an especially common state these days either among shooters or among non-shooters.
Another favorite example is Adam Lanza, commonly cited as the child of divorce and fatherlessness. However, after the divorce of Adam’s parents (which occurred when Adam was a teenager), his father was actually still quite heavily involved in Adam’s life until the son estranged himself from his father against his father’s wishes (see this for more on that). How do we analyze that? And in the cases of both Nikolas Cruz and Adam Lanza, they both exhibited fairly serious psychological problems from a very early age, when their fathers were very much part of the family.
I imagine I’ll be criticized for this post, because it may appear that I’m minimizing the deleterious effects of fatherlessness. But that is neither my intent nor does it reflect my belief. I believe that fatherlessness and the increased divorce rate are pernicious aspects of modern life, and that they have very negative effects on a huge number of children (and increase incarceration rates and delinquency), and statistics show that divorce clearly is far more common than when i was growing up. But I just do not find the evidence for school shooters coming disproportionately from fatherless homes to be compelling or well-done.
Most of the articles I’ve read that make that claim either report anecdotal evidence and/or cite a study that involved analysis of the shootings in a single year, which is hardly a way to take a comprehensive look at it. Maybe I’m missing something—I haven’t spent an enormous amount of time researching this, and if there’s compelling evidence I missed, I’m open to it. However, after the Newtown school shooting I wrote an article for PJ on this very topic in which I went into some details of my own observations, and I suggest you read it in its entirety.
Also, have the number of school shootings gone up in recent years? It turns out that we probably don’t know, because of the difficulty in tracking, measuring, and defining what constitutes a mass murder or a school shooting or other act of mass violence—not to mention the political uses to be made of tweaking the data to make a political point. But there’s some evidence that school shootings have actually declined since the 1990s rather than increased, contrary to public perception.
Of course, one school shooting and one death is one too many. But I would rather rely on hard evidence before I come to conclusions about what’s to blame for these killings.
you wont see it.. you have to dig and do the math yourself, just like demographics or crime… ie. you have to put pieces together they obfuscate. like russia worried and telling its women when they demographically collapsed the truth about peri menopaus and the best year (china is now doing the same. and russia halted abortoins because of the harm done)
but since 1968 as it went on and on, you have to be a blind idiot to not see the lack of direction, the gangs to make up, the higher suicide rate, the younger they get now too… and more
Remember they removed the idea of harmful things before they exported this version here, there is tons of evidence for that, IF you want to know it, and there is tons of fake bs IF you want to pretend not to..
for instance. you loaded your comments by saying the bukharins think fatherlessness is bad, and the trotskyites are the left…
so that point makes no sense. and there is no good data coming as you see it to tell you on way or the other, then how do you know this no good data is mostly coming from the right? you realize or rater dont, its not from the alt right… thats the fake label smeared accross.. like nazi was smeared accross all whites now… duh.
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well, this is my expert category… 40 years of heavy detailed study
but dont worry, you will just push it aside. its not what is wanted to hear
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63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (US Dept. Of Health/Census) — 5 times the average.
90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes — 32 times the average.
5% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes — 20 times the average. (Center for Disease Control)
80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes —14 times the average. (Justice & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26)
71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes — 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report)
Apparently, NC said the voices (demons) made him do it.
To clarify what I mean by demons, I don’t mean angels. I mean n+3 dimensional entities that are nearly immortal, but lacking a body. They will seek to possess or be close to a human body to feed upon negative energies like hate and fear and what not. This is their sustenance, and perhaps a replacement for all the things they lack now that they can no longer utilize their nephiliim bodies.
It is easier to view them as parasites or as a disease, than as “sentient aliens”. I’m not sure most of them are even sentient now.
one thing you will note is that the old shootings like texas am, were medical issues, the new ones are issues with ritalin, fatherlessness, etc, moving, resiliency, etc…
the other problem is that even if they have fathers the mothers have power of divorce… so there is more contention and less stability
you would do better to split it up between pre feminism, 2nd wave, then after that…
as its not just fathers, its schools and other places too… and of course, women do not care to hear mens stories, you can even read about how they dont even believe there are any..
so its not just fatherlessness… its all the things around the hegelian thrust of the movement that sought to displace rather than increase (you know, like make more schools not throw the kids into the trash and unmake the you work hard you can succeed as affirmative action says, you work hard, and she can succeed even if she isnt as good (law says so))
so if you really really want to understand the subject, put them in the categories and see.. you can go back to 1927 with a man who made these kids look like pikers
oh, one more thing… the more common thing is the programs around each of them later on that kept us from keeping them out, removing them, etc..
Andrew Philip Kehoe American farmer and treasurer of his township school board, notable as a mass murderer for killing his wife and 43 other people (including 38 children), and injuring 58 people by setting off bombs in the Bath School disaster on May 18, 1927. He committed suicide near the school by detonating dynamite in his truck, causing an explosion which killed several other people and wounded more. He had earlier set off incendiary devices in his house and farm, destroying all the buildings, as well as killing two horses and other animals.
After the bombings, investigators found a wooden sign wired to the farm’s fence with Kehoe’s last message, “Criminals are made, not born”, stenciled on it
List of rampage killers (school massacres)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers_(school_massacres)
there are only 55 items on the list starting in 1927
1913 – 1971 – 6 incidents world wide in 60 years
1971 – 1981 – feminist sexual revolution starts – 7 incidents
1982 – 1991 – diversity starts, boys out, girls in – 5 incidents
1992 – 2001 – children of the first drugged sex party who didnt learn what their parents knew, didnt know how to raise kids, didnt have social networks, all got a trophy even if they lost, and on and on… all the changes full flower – single dads hammered, etc… – 11 incidents
2002 – 2011 – children of the children, and more improvements destroying the patriarchy (you know when we taught latin, teens had 13th grade reading level, there were sports – hows that olympics? systems openly hostile to boys and PROUD.. – 17 incidents
2011 – now – all white boys are evil racists, two generations of extermination talk (which ladies dont pay much attention to)… they are losers, and so on. however, they were this from birth, so they dont care. more check out than fight… – 8 incidents (three more years to go)
you will find the split is not alt right but young old, women vs men…
81-91 – 7 incidents
then the children of the others
Everyone likes to find what’s in the numerator for the school shooters and proclaim that’s wrong with them.
We can’t restrain the freedoms of all the fatherless kids, the kids who have behavioral problems, or the picked-on kids–even if we should, even if we want to–because only a very tiny minority ever harm anyone but themselves. We’d have nothing left over to do anything else. The cure would be worse than the disease.
Mom Lynda Cruz paid $50,000 to adopt alleged school shooter Nikolas Cruz from his “drug addict” biological mother when he was just 3 days old, and then dropped another $15,000 on his younger half-brother, Zachary, when she found out the troubled mom was pregnant again, according to a report. “Nik’s biological mother was just a complete screw-up, drug addict and thief,” former friend and neighbor Trish Duvaney told RadarOnline. “I even said to Lynda: ‘You don’t know the mother’s background.’ Both children were born after one-night stands. The birth mother, she didn’t even really know who the two biological fathers…
https://nypost.com/2018/02/27/alleged-school-shooters-mom-paid-50k-to-adopt-him-from-drug-addict/
Perhaps there is a dearth of evidence regarding fatherlessness but it seems to be (without taking a break to really really look for it) that there is ample evidence that the much revered “Single Mother” is something that results in a tsunami of dysfunction amongst our “yout”.
“Sandy Hook had an all-female faculty, from principal to teachers,” CNN Senior Law Enforcement Analyst Tom Fuentes said.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2018/02/27/cnn-analyst-women-cant-conceal-carry-because-of-their-wardrobe-n2455083
Until the above piece, I never knew that there were no males at the school… (did anyone else?)
Adam Lanza attended Sandy Hook Elementary School, the same place where he fatally shot 20 first-graders
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2012/12/18/adam-lanza-sandy-hook-student/1777525/
When certain well educated people who are teaching and dealing with children and young people are convinced that a lot of the troubles in our society are caused by males and then you have a troubled young man, often without an older, respected male to model his life after that might really be a factor. There is a lot of confusion in the education system and I would hate to be a young man, 14 or up trying to decide who I wanted to be if I was a bit confused to begin with and expected to reach adulthood sometime in my late 20’s.
At the very least having a father means stability as long as the father is loving with no problems of his own. It is very difficult to develop into a mentally heavy being when a kid constantly has to worry about if he is going to get a beating from mom’s boyfriend or if mom’s going to have the money to pay for the field trip next week. When my father went through a job change after his company went bankrupt during the financial crisis 97 or 98 it took a toll on the family mentally, imagine a kid growing up going through uncertainties like that every day.
BTW Asia financial crisis 98 is the reason I hate Soros and the political parties he supports, a uncle of mine lost his life savings in the stock market.
Looking at the crime date is always interesting. Steven Pinker has an article asking the more general question, has violence increased since he wrote his book, Better Angels of Our Nature.
He also has a new book out, Enlightenment Now, which might shed some light.
In the article he admits that there has been a bit of an up tick. But he seems to claim the trend is down, and that we’re still a lot less violent than historical. For instance, Mexico. Homicides per 100,000:
1943………….50.2
2004………….10.4
2011/2013…..22.9
I think he mixed up the data points for 2011 and 2013. Because the data doesn’t match the claim he makes in the sentence. Whatever the case, I have a healthy respect for the work he did.
Last night, I got it into my head to make a ranking of how much EU countries budget for their diplomatic services. Collecting the data, was a huge headache.
I suppose we’ll see. Concerning fatherless families, I’d say I grew up in a fatherless family. When I was young, my father was deployed overseas a majority of the time. He was maybe around for 80-100 days a year. And the divorce rate for some of his early squadrons was through the roof (70 to 90 per cent).
I don’t think it had a major impact on me. I was surrounded by positive role models, that dedicated themselves to something larger than personal comfort. Having a sense of service is important. I think a lot of people lack a sense of service. They look at it as a side pursuit, not something to build their lives around.
https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/has_the_decline_of_violence_reversed_since_the_better_angels_of_our_nature_was_written_2017.pdf
The correlation between fatherlessness and violence has long been noted. As always, correlation is not causation. That said, the issue of fatherlessness might be an indicator of personality issues. Here is my experience.
We raised an autistic son. The one thing that struck me attending parent support groups was that most were single parents. Most marriages fall apart under the extreme pressure of a child with disabilities. Rather than blaming fatherlessness as a cause of violence, perhaps it should be used as an indicator of issues and prompt closer examination of the perpetrator.
Fatherlessness has a lot to do with inner city violence. The mass shooters are mostly psychotic, which is a different issue. Dylan Roof is a weird example who may be psychotic or just a psychopath. Loughner, the Gabby Gifford shooter, and Cruz are both examples of a willing concealment of prior behavior. Loughner’s mother worked in the Sheriff’s office and concealed complaints about her son. We know the Cruz story. The Colorado movie shooter was psychotic and seeing a psychiatrist who did not warn anyone.
A previous person mentioned that in traditional USA values, male adults would tolerate the children of other people more, because the children respected the hierarchy. This meant that children were free to seek people to learn from, regardless if this was their peers, their older age groups, or other adults.
It’s not really a village, it’s more like a common military family or clan. Everybody has a social relation to everybody else, because they are neighbors and treat other family’s kids as partially their own kids.
This meant that if your parents didn’t understand you or had no solution to your problems or if they lacked a skill, you could shop around the region to see if your friends or the parents of your friends had something that was useful.
So when teenagers and kids walked down the road and saw me practicing swordmanship, sometimes they would come up to talk to me. And it felt like they were getting something that they weren’t getting from their parents, their school, their peers, the “cool crowd”, and so on. I’ve had Jehovah Witness groups walk down the street to their appointments, and one of them would stop and watch/talk with me as I demonstrated my cutting skills ( on plants).
Because JWs have a complete pacifism creed, I don’t think this person saw a lot of competent demonstration of these types of skills.
There would be 20-30 year old neighbors that like to work on cars, and they would get together and talk about things as they observed some of my practice in the yard. Some of the Mexicans thought it was funny. Some of the white groups would taunt their buddies with “you think you can take him”, when they were 100+ feet away. Due to the air pressure and my particular cultivation methods, my hearing is quite perceptive, so I saved them and then they realized I had heard their conversation.
They get freaked out that I can hear them from that range while I was practicing 360 degree defense, counter, attack combinations. If they had stopped using those loud fireworks every holiday, they might be able to hear stuff too ; )
So traditionally, children were raised by a multitude of experienced adults. They gained skills from various sources, not just the nuclear family. This allowed children who were receptive, to learn at a far higher rate and thus they matured at a far higher rate. Thus six year olds, with the appropriate training methodology passed on down from the generations, are responsible and mature enough to hunt or to utilize firearms, without accidents involving them playing with toys. No matter how many times adults say “guns are not toys”, children do not understand so readily until they experience the power and use of such a tool. Same goes for adults. We can tell them how to do flight checks and how to do flying in a simulator, but it isn’t until they actually get in a simulator and plane that they absorb the knowledge as their own. Some people are athletic geniuses that can learn by mimicking and observing. Others can learn by just reading about a skill and practicing it on their own.
Most people prefer to be taught using traditional methods as they lack the talent and the genius learning speeds.
We raised an autistic son. The one thing that struck me attending parent support groups was that most were single parents. Most marriages fall apart under the extreme pressure of a child with disabilities. Rather than blaming fatherlessness as a cause of violence, perhaps it should be used as an indicator of issues and prompt closer examination of the perpetrator.
Now with single parent homes, the kids don’t even have a source that has wisdom. So they look for stuff online (sub cultures) and for their peers/gangs for protection and survival methods.
JP has an interesting thing in his book concerning why parents should act nicer towards their children. That is due to a lack of growth in the adults, of course. As people who cannot take orders, also cannot give them in a military hierarchy. That’s also why anti authoritarian people dislike giving orders as well as receiving them from their social hierarchy.
Male kids will also play around, and sometimes they are used to obeying the suppression of their mothers, who can’t handle that. When I was taking care of the kids of another neighborhood, they were 3 unrelated male children and started playing around with a chair like it was a camp fire, running around like Indians. I just left them in the upstairs room to do their thing, until they get tired. Then I would periodically check in on them to see if they were killing each other or getting angry about something, to mediate.
One kid was surprised that I didn’t angry that they were fooling around. I told them I would only say something if they needed to go to the hospital.
The Spanish looking kid, a few minutes before they went upstairs to play around, decided that there was a cool looking shrub scissors on top of a counter he grabbed and started making threatening motions with towards the other kids. I was behind him, and I got the “danger sense” from his behavior, so I told him to put it down. Whether he was ignoring me or just didn’t hear, in a few more seconds I increased my voice command to the same level I use on animals barking and charging at me.
The animal and kids usually obey the same instincts, and it worked. The kid froze up with his freddie cougar scissor movements, and I came up behind him and took away the weapon. I told him it was a weapon, and he looked like he was afraid of something…
Don’t be afraid of your peers wielding scissors. Be afraid of the rules.
The cause of society deteriorating isn’t the fathers or the Left. It’s everyone in the human race. They and we all contribute to the problem and the solutions.
Society is used to the blame game because that is how they gain status, wealth, and power. It’s time to ignore social indoctrination and pressure. Especially since the society isn’t worth the paper it is printed on.
Females get nasty because females don’t police their own. Males get nasty because society doesn’t allow males to police our own.
This is a rather simplistic hunter-gatherer model, but is more accurate than most of modern psychology and medical drug treatments for disorders.
As a rule, natural law doesn’t give a flip about how any innocent ended up in a bad situation. Whether the parents are absent because of abandonment, jail sentencing, or died valiantly walking through fire to rescue their babies, if natural law says the baby will most likely die, and be mentally ill for life even if it survives, that’s what happens. No man-made law can counter natural law, it can only work in the places natural law has no rules for, and so civilization fills those spaces with social safety nets of man-made laws, for the betterment of humanity as a whole.
It’s our duty as civilized people to do this, but also to recognize where natural law makes this impossible, because suffocating civilization in a tangle of well-meaning “social justice” laws will destroy us, as surely as throwing ourselves naked off cliffs to try to defy the law of gravity.
I understand that Cruz was adopted at age 2. Is there anything known about his birth mother? Could he have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?
lynndh:
I’ve also read he was adopted at 2. There are many possibilities for all sorts of problems in a case like that, both physical and emotional. But we don’t know whether the report is true; I’ve read another report that says he was adopted shortly after birth. I’ve not read anything official on the subject.
There isn’t really a connection to schools or fathers, except that this man was trying to “father” his community and got shot for his trouble.
Mostly, I just shake my head over the headline.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/north-carolina-man-shot-dead-on-facebook-live-suspect-in-custody/ar-BBJDn4b?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp#image=BBJDn4b_1|3
North Carolina man shot dead on Facebook Live, suspect in custody
“WINGATE, N.C. – A man here who spent his time trying to improve his neighborhood was shot to death on Monday while streaming on Facebook Live, authorities said.
Prentis Robinson, 55, was gunned down roughly one block from police headquarters where he had just stopped to report a stolen cell phone, according to Wingate Police Chief Donnie Gay.”
According to a report I read, he was adopted at 2, and his brother was adopted at birth (same mother, probably different father).
Fatherlessness is a bad. A non-nuclear family is a bad. Parental alcoholism and child abuse are other bads. Fetal alcohol syndrome is a bad. Smoking while pregnant is a bad. They correlate with less-good outcomes for the kids.
But that does not mean any is ipso facto causative of X or Y nasty behavioral event(s).
My dad worked long and hard; he seldom ate with us. So all his kids, boys and girls, made a big point of family dinners and closeness to Papa in their families. Successive generations can heal themselves if not too deeply wounded at the get-go.
Military kids, with dads on distant duty, do not all become squirrelly. Far from it.
Cruz was a vile piece of work from his earliest days. That is where the link to further bad behavior is. And it was effectively ignored. Because, you know, all kids are special and all have special talents. Like poking sticks in frogs’ eyes. Or strangling cats and puppies.
There was an interesting question in the latest Harris/Harvard poll:
Do you think that murder by gun in America in the last five years has gone up, gone down, or stayed the same?
Up……….65%
Down……12%
Same……23%
So people definitely feel like violence is going up.
(Page 201)
http://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Final_HHP_20Feb2018_RegisteredVoters_Topline_Memo.pdf
I don’t think even the original Slavery 2.0 owners could sell 2 year old children for 20-50k US dollars.
What kind of human trafficking is that I wonder… before Americans go apeshat over guns, maybe people should look in on the human trafficking problems.
Cruz was a vile piece of work from his earliest days. That is where the link to further bad behavior is.
After you pass through the Veil, frog, I’ll be sure to bring that comment up at your Divine Trial and adjudication procedure. We’ll be able to call all kinds of expert witness testimonies.
Prentis Robinson, 55, was gunned down roughly one block from police headquarters where he had just stopped to report a stolen cell phone, according to Wingate Police Chief Donnie Gay.
Probably some kind of gang initia. He got too much heat on FB and the gang lords didn’t like the attention either.
Now do you see why people like me are in Yellow security awareness 99% of the time?
Humans are all around us, and any number of them could go psycho or be filled with demonic killing intent. The solution is easier: kill them all first.
People hearing voices in their heads demanding them doing awful things most surely are paranoid schizophrenics in acute psychotic state. The problem here: it is not easy to tell the true auditory hallucinations from just pseudo-hallucinations, that is, some imaginary sensory inputs of non-ordinary brightness, which can happen to almost everyone in a state of emotional turmoil. There are also reports about strange things NC did while a child: dissect frogs or birds “to see what is inside”. This is more indicative of sadistic psychopath in the making.
I’ve seen comments elsewhere that indicate many (probably MOST)
of these young school shooters were prescribed SSRI’s (anti-depressants) and that it’s KNOWN that a significant percentage
of males in their late-teens/ early 20’s develop “violent ideation” when they take these meds.
What if, instead of banning guns, we mandate MUCH CLOSER MEDICAL SUPERVISION of young men using SSRI’s?
A_Nonny_Mouse:
What you’ve heard is a popular internet meme. But like many such memes, it has no foundation in fact.
See comments here.
Drugs affecting one’s neurotransmitters have the risk of making things worse for two reasons.
1. If you don’t get used to controlling your emotions early on, the drug is now your crutch and you go insane/violent when you go off them. Which will happen sooner or later.
2. Affecting one’s neurotransmitters makes it easy for one to be spiritually affected, as you no longer have your normal spiritual defenses (as you have no control over your emotions as you have no emotions)
Neo – ref “internet meme” regarding SSRIs
I was basing my comment on an article by Karl Denninger at his
Market-Ticker.org blog:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=233015
and I’ve read the British Medical Journal article he cites as his
source:
http://www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h4629
As far as “What Is The Truth?” about the subject, I admit I don’t have the background to judge — at all.
I sure wish I had been offered coursework (somewhere in those long years of schooling) to the effect of “Separating the Wheat from the Chaff – How to determine Truth, and How to tell Correlation from Causation”. That knowledge would have saved me much frustration and confusion over these many years!!