Of course fatherlessness contributes to violent crime, including mass shootings

The worse a problem is, the more likely commentators are to attribute the problem to a single cause.

And the flip side of this logically fallacious coin is that when someone mentions X as a contributing factor to the problem, angry or snarky commentators will say: “How could you possibly say X is the cause of this problem?!!”

So now when you posit that the breakdown of the family and the community, the crumbling of the forces that young men and women need in order to build a happy, successful life, contributes to America’s problem of gun violence, you get berated by angry liberals who assert that it’s a dishonest “distraction” to talk about anything besides stricter gun laws.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posited a possible connection between children raised with only one parent and particularly senseless crime. He asked, “Why is our culture suddenly producing so many young men who want to murder innocent people?” Then he suggested a few possible answers: “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?”

That “fatherlessness, the breakdown of families, and isolation from civil society” would be harmful to our young men does not strike me as at all controversial. Yet the suggestion has triggered many people on the Left.

Sure, the prevalence of high-powered rifles seems like a contributing factor to our high number of mass shootings. It is right and proper to debate what regulations of gun ownership, if any, could reduce gun violence.

But the firm belief that nothing besides regulating guns could possibly bring down the number of shootings, or that the only cause of our extraordinary rates of gun violence is the legality or prevalence of guns, is baffling. All large problems tend to have many contributing causes. Why not this one?

The “don’t talk about anything but guns” crowd leans on the assertion that the only thing that distinguishes the United States from other wealthy countries, where gun crimes are far rarer, is the presence of guns.

But this argument (deeply believed on the Left, if Twitter is any indication) is wrong. For example, fatherlessness is more widespread in the U.S. than it is in any other country. And the countries that are close behind us also have bad gun violence problems, just like we do.

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This doesn’t mean that “fatherlessness is the cause” of our gun problems, of course. But Lee didn’t say that. I didn’t say that. Nobody has to say that in order to say that fatherlessness, like other instances of social breakdown, contributes to antisocial and violent behavior, with these mass shootings being the most horrific examples.

My Washington Examiner colleague Kaylee McGhee White, a culture writer, points to family breakdown as one of many examples of a cultural breakdown that feeds our violent crime problem.

And there are tons of data to show how civil breakdown, including family breakdown, causes violent crime.

From the Justice Department website: “The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency reports that the most reliable indicator of violent crime in a community is the proportion of fatherless families.”

A 2019 metastudy in the journal Psychology, Crime, and Law found that “growing up in single-parent families is associated with an elevated risk of involvement in crime by adolescents.”

Here’s a line from a study published by Princeton’s Public Policy School in collaboration with the Brookings Institution: “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.”

I could go on for 10,000 words quoting research that shows how children suffer from not having two married parents raise them. It’s inarguable that children raised without a father present are statistically more prone to violence and criminality.

One could object that “fatherlessness” is imprecise to describe this disadvantage, as some children grow up with two married parents who are both women. That’s a semantic point, though — growing up fatherless almost always means growing up raised by a single mother. Any single mother will tell you that raising boys without a husband is difficult.

Mass shootings, or the narrower and more horrifying category of mass school shootings, are obviously examples of criminality, gun violence, and antisocial behavior. Criminality, gun violence, and antisocial behavior are all pathologies that become less likely for young men in the presence of love, support, role models, stability, purpose, and the other goods that young people get from intact families and close-knit communities. So why is it so controversial, the point of inducing rage, to posit that maybe fatherlessness, in which the U.S. literally leads the world, could be a factor contributing to mass shootings?

I think many liberals simply don’t like anyone bringing up anything other than gun control because they believe that gun control is the only way to curb these shootings. And so they falsely accuse those of us concerned about the culture of throwing out red herrings. Others, for culture-war reasons, are very sensitive to anything that holds traditional family norms in high regard. And other very materialist-minded people think that cultural explanations of anything are inherently bogus.

It’s all very sad and distressing since a problem this serious obviously has many causes and many possible remediations. To cut off any line of inquiry is to give up on the problem.