Not every kid who grows up without his father will turn into Roof, and not every mass shooter grew up without his dad. Now, this isn’t to say that every single mom is doomed to raise a mass shooter. But when the conversation turns to mass shootings, we seem to forget that link altogether. In contrast, conversations about black-on-black violence often raise the link between broken households (or fatherless homes) and juvenile delinquency. school attacks’ involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.” His observation is largely ignored. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s ‘list of U.S.

It ignores the roots of the problem: the household.Īs University of Virginia Professor Brad Wilcox pointed out back in 2013: “From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. But to focus on these characteristics is to focus arbitrarily on the 12 to 24 months before the shooting. In the aftermath of tragedies like Charleston or Sandy Hook, Americans hear the shared characteristics of the shooters: typically they are young males who obtained a gun (duh), used drugs ( legally or illegally), dropped out of school, and committed or planned suicide as the grand finale to their murders.

We Explore Every Angle Except Father Absence Scapegoats serve another purpose, too: they ensure the media can avoid the uncomfortable truth that unstable homes produce unstable individuals.

Of course these scapegoats are designed to fit the politically correct narrative, and they are an easy sell (especially when it’s all Donald Trump’s fault, as Americans increasingly love to blame the proverbial 1 percent for their sorrows). The media loves to find an easy scapegoat for mass shootings, whether it be the pharmaceutical industry, the National Rifle Association, or even Donald Trump. Roof’s parents divorced three years before he was even born, later reuniting just long enough to produce a child who would later become a mass murderer. As more information slowly seeps out about Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old who murdered nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, one fact should surprise exactly no one: Roof came from a broken home.

Mass mother murderer