Ian wrote:That argument is trotted out a lot by people like Rush and Tucker when talking about black youth, though. Funny, most of the mass shooters seem to be white.
Most of the shooters are white, but I think you're mixing two things up here: fatherless households in relation to problems with blacks that Rush and Tucker talk about (in regard to what? it may be another topic), and my suggestion that single parent moms might be a common factor of correlation or causality, among a host of other factors, for male mass shooters.
Those two areas might be connected by one or more of the same problems, like the divorce rate and its accompanying disruptions to a healthy society. My idea is that social problems, like the divorce rate and associated factors with things like who is parenting, that they affect male and female children in significantly different ways, and that there is some significant problem for which mass shootings are an extremely rare symptom that has only been done by males up until now.
I just don't see any reason to believe that being raised by a single mom makes someone a mass shooter. There are a lot of us. Do you know what the divorce rate is?
There is a correlation of fatherless households having boys end up in jail, a lot of it probably just related to poverty, so considering that link to anti-social behavior, I think there is something to look at regarding what the mass shootings have in common.
It doesn't make sense to dismiss common factors, like single parent moms, just because of the extremely low percentage of coincidence or correlation. I mean, that's precisely what you'd be looking for in a study of an extremely low percentage phenomenon like mass shootings. We don't dismiss those because of the rarity of their occurrence, but instead focus on them because of their importance, so the common factors should not be summarily dismissed because of being statistical outliers.
You brought up "uniform common sense gun law reform". The usual response to this is to ask for specifics because there are already a large number of regulations and restrictions. I got this from Tucker Carlson in the past few days, haven't checked it myself, but he said there was a so-called assault weapons ban for 10 years from '94-04 that was studied by the DoJ and it concluded there was no change in gun crime, so that's on example of a common sense gun law reform that had no effect.
You said, "Come to think of it, gun laws in most industrial nations are also very effective when they are strict and strictly enforced." This seems to be part of the premise for people reacting to mass shootings in America, but there are still mass shootings in other industrialized countries by crazy people, including one in Russia in the past week.
There was a
shooting in Germany in 2009 by a former student that killed 16 high school students, very similar to the one that just happened in Florida.
The attack left Germany, which tightened tough gun controls after a similar attack at a school seven years ago, struggling to understand the carnage that had again befallen it, a country with relatively little violent crime. In 2002, a gunman killed 16 people before killing himself at a school in Erfurt, in eastern Germany.
There are also mass killings with vehicles and knives in industrialized countries, and even authoritarian countries like China, where mass knife killings seem to occur regularly somewhere in the land, often by disgruntled men who suffered some injustice, or by terrorists. These will continue to happen, not primarily because of the availability of guns or other weapons, but because of mental illness, religious zealots, etc.
Even in a very low crime society like Japan, mass killings by nutters do occur:
1982 intentional plane crash by pilot, 24 dead
1995 nerve gas attack in subway, 13 dead
2001 knife attack kills 8 children
2008 truck and knife attack kills 8
2016 knife attack at care center for disabled kills 19