Yes and no. The Columbine shooter had a very demanding father who was obviously concerned about him...and the kid started his spree by killing both his mother and the father. The same thing happened in WA a couple of years ago. The killer started by killing his parents.
I think a father is more likely to recognize than a mother that there’s something wrong with his kid that may need outside help, and possibly more effective in getting it. But really, the problem lies not only with family conditions but with social expectations. Once upon a time, a kid who was engaging in any of the behavior that led up to the killings would have been institutionalized, not only at the request of his parents, but at the request of schools and law enforcement.
Back in the 70s, some idiot (possibly Abbie Hoffman) announced that “only the mad were truly sane,” because they were reacting to the horrors of capitalism. And then we had books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and others that all made heroes out of the mentally ill, heroes who were just exercising their right to express themselves.
Mental illness is real, but we stopped admitting that because mental illness could be used as an attack upon capitalism and supposedly bourgeois, conformist American society. Of course, marriage, parents and intact families were all part of the evil against which the mentally ill were expressing themselves.
Yes there are outliers in any population. Rowe’s point still stands.
“The Columbine shooter had a very demanding father who was obviously concerned about him...and the kid started his spree by killing both his mother and the father. The same thing happened in WA a couple of years ago. The killer started by killing his parents.”
Interesting. I didn’t know that.
Harris and Klebold didn't kill their parents prior to the Columbine shooting. Not sure of their current status, but both sets of parents were alive after the shooting in 1999.
No, they did not. Neither of the parents of Eric Harris nor Dylan Klebold were killed. Harris' father was a pilot in the Air Force. Klebold's dad was a pacifist.
There are certainly except, but the fatherless was issue dwarfs anything else.
Incarceration rates. Poverty. Victims of violent crime. The difference in racially measured outcomes is almost entirely accounted for by fatherlesness. There’s still racism, and it still hurts us, it it is waaaaay down the list.