You’re pushing incorrect information again, as usual. Why is that not surprising?
Maybe It’s The Missing Fathers? No, It’s Not.
2018.03.25 Wil C. Fry
In recent days, I’ve seen 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. 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.
• Missing fathers and America’s broken boys – the vast majority of mass shooters come from broken homes (Fox News)
• Guess Which Mass Murderers Came From A Fatherless Home (The Federalist)
• Rick Santorum Blames Absent Dads And Broken Homes For Mass Shooters (Huffington Post)
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?
If it IS true, is it a contributing factor?
If IS a contributing factor, what do we do?
• 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 a father?
In the Fox News opinion piece, 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, citing both Peter Hasson (see above) and Brad Wilcox (Hasson’s source). Finally, I was able to find Wilcox’s 2013 article (here), 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:
• Shooter 1, father died before he was born
• Shooter 2, unknown father
• Shooter 3, father left when he was two
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):
• James Eric Davis Jr., 19, 2018, grew up with both parents (father was one of his victims)
• Nikolas Jacob Cruz, 19, 2018, adopted at birth, adopted father died when he was six
• Gabe Parker, 15, 2018, parents divorced when he was five [unknown whether father was still in his life]
• William Edward Atchison, 21, 2017, lived with both parents
• Kevin Janson Neal, 44, 2017, [father situation unknown]
• Caleb Sharpe, 15, 2017, lived with both parents [obtained guns from father]
• Cedric Anderson, 53, 2017, [father situation unknown]
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?
• Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, 2017, lived with both parents
• Cleophus Emmanuel Cooksey Jr., 35, had a step-father [one of his victims]
• Stephen Craig Paddock, 64, 2017, father was arrested for bank robbery when Stephen was seven
• Esteban Santiago-Ruiz (suspect), 27, 2017, [father situation unknown]
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. 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.” 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.
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 a father (many millions of children), yet we’re only seeing dozens of mass shootings. It means 99.9999% of children growing up without a father 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 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 a father 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.
