The problem isn't the guns, it's the dads

Another shooting made headlines this month, this one in Richmond, Virginia, a city near to my heart for a considerable variety of reasons. Two young men with a longstanding feud exchanged words at a high school graduation ceremony; one of them went to his car and returned with a gun, opening fire and killing the other, along with that fellow’s stepfather. Several other bystanders were struck by bullets. The responses, of course, have been predictable, with whole platoons of commentators and angry Democratic presidential hopefuls calling for titanic waves of new gun control and decrying what they claim is an epidemic of “mass shootings” in the country. The local paper of record claimed the U.S. gun issue is “a potent boil of rampant gun ownership, adolescents experiencing mental health crises and wholesale abandonment of our most vulnerable populations.” Well, there you go, law-abiding gun owners: You’re part of the problem, you and your gun-owning rampancy, just a nation of gunnish rampantness.

Here is a polite counter-suggestion: The problem isn’t that you own a gun, or that “adolescents” are suffering from “mental health crises,” or even that we’ve “abandoned” anyone. It’s that we have a nation of deadbeat fathers setting their sons up for a life of chaos, crime, avarice and violence. Solve that problem and the “mass shooting” problem drops to something like a rounding error.

The crux is in how we define “mass shootings.” Media outlets have taken to using an exceptionally broad classification of the phenomenon: Most of them use a definition resembling that of the anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety, which dubs a mass shooting “any incident in which four or more people are shot and wounded or killed.” Most of us, of course, think of a “mass shooting” in terms of the horrific, terrifying incidents in which a gunman shows up at a vulnerable spot—an elementary school, a college campus, a public event—and opens fire, slaughtering a bunch of innocent people before blowing his own brains out. The broadened definition, in contrast, allows activists to preserve this frightening, affective terminology while hugely expanding the shooting data pool from which to draw. The Richmond paper, then, can say that the U.S. has seen “279 mass shootings so far this year,” and people absolutely freak out, even though the data being presented is not what most people really think it is.

In fact most “mass shootings” are nothing more than petty gang-related beefs playing out at violent scale, far removed from the nightmarishly psychopathic incidents that we normally associate with the term. On the Gun Violence Archive’s list of recent mass shootings, for instance, we have the Richmond incident (a conflict between two young men that appears to have been at least resembling gang violence), a shooting in Jackson, Mississippi that was “an interpersonal conflict between two groups,” a shooting in Chicago that stemmed from “a verbal altercation,” a shooting on the Florida Panhandle in which a man showed up to a party specifically seeking to kill someone else, a shooting in Missouri that happened at a party after “a verbal disturbance broke out between two opposing group,” a shooting in Dayton that appears to be drug-related. On and on, down the list, all of them “mass shootings” but nearly all of them resembling the kind of squalid violence we most associate with urban criminality.

That’s the point: You’re meant to think that a “mass shooting” is something that happens 279 times per year and can happen to you and your friends and family at any time, anyplace. But the most popular definition of a “mass shooting” correlates it almost precisely with either gang-related activity or the kind of one-off criminal exchange that is directly adjacent to gang activity. If you avoid getting involved with that sort of thing, and avoid being near any of it if you can, then you chances of witnessing or being injured by a mass shooting are close to zero.

The broadest solution to this problem, of course, is addressing the source of these kinds of conflict, namely preventing young men from getting mixed up in gangs and crimes in the first place. Do this and the problem becomes little more than an afterthought. And all the best data we have indicate that a father’s active, daily, constant, moral presence in his son’s life—most preferably when he is married to the mother of his child—is arguably the best way to accomplish this. Young men who fall into lives of crime and gang uptake are almost universally marked by absentee, deadbeat fathers who abandon their families, never see their sons, and never offer the sort of strong counsel that steers young men away from that kind of lifestyle. You can track this metric one-for-one in most cases. It’s not controversial, it’s just the truth.

Progressives are reluctant to discuss this. They really are. They’d rather talk about guns. Talking about fathers in this context is doubly painful for the Left for two reasons. For one, most absentee fatherhood in the U.S. occurs among black Americans, and any sort of criticism of black people, even very soft criticism, is anathema to the Left. Can’t do it. Two, it is increasingly politically indefensible to suggest that fathers—that men—are in any way important, unique, necessary or indispensable. Can’t do that either. Criticizing the behaviors of black Americans while implying that a man might have something uniquely important and valuable to contribute to a family structure? Forget about it.

Of course, as long as we forget about it, this sort of thing—these “mass shootings”—are going to keep happening. These incidents certainly offer gainful employment for pundits who want to opine about anything other than the easiest and most practical solutions to the problem. A “mass shooting” is just like anything else in the world: There are ways to address it that work, and there are ways that don’t. For some reason we keep opting for the latter instead of the former. And then we act surprised and outraged when it happens again. Expect more of this.