Fatherless homes, bitter divorces resulting in the kind of arrangement we see in the case of the awful Adam Lanza case, are more often seen in a far more generic kind of criminality
than this unparalleled and sickening tragedy. What you are doing is cherry-picking your favorite Agenda Item, “no father in the home”, and highlighting that as the pre-eminent “cause’ for the New Town massacre. In fact, if anyone wants to play Captain Obvious in his search for “causes” , all one has to do is pick any of these recent events, this one, Aurora, Jared Laughner, Columbine, the Va Tech shootings, etc. etc., look at all the background details and the particulars of the perpetrator, his psychological and social context, and ascribe “blame” and “cause” to anything and everything we find in their “backgrounds”. THEY ARE ALL DIFFERENT, and what happens in these cases is both sides rush to push, with a kind of numbskull enthusiasm, their particular agenda, whether it’s
“no father in the home”, “No God in the school”,
“no access to meaningful Mental Health oversight”, “No security in the school”, “not enough serious oversight into who owns guns, and how carefully they are stored in a home which has a person like Adam Lanza living there”,metc. etc. In the case of Adam Lanza, we already have enough facts to be able to surmise that it was ALL OF THE ABOVE, and “then some”, since tens of thousands of people all suffer from being stuck in the same societal milieu, and yet precious few of them ever erupt into this kind of cataclysmic violence. How about the family situations of Klebold and Harris of Columbine fame? How about all the rest of them which seem to be coming so thick and fast lately I’ll bet most of us can’t recall half the names?
I have no “agenda”. I am simply pointing out an obvious fact and suggesting that this fact MIGHT have something to do with this horrific crime.
That being said, there are two facts that jump out at me:
Violent crime is way up among young men ( and I include teenaged boys when I say that).
There has been a great increase in the number of single parent households headed by women.
While I can’t say that this is the only reason for what happened, I believe the lack of a father at home played a part in this.
As a former youth pastor, I can tell you that I interacted with many young men who were being raised solely by their moms. Almost to a man, they had anger issues their peers raised in two-parent homes did not have.
It is true that many things were going on in Adam Lanza’s head that no one can be sure of. I am not discounting any of it.
I am simply saying that the fact he did not have a father at home probably played a bigger role in his actions than anyone cares to admit.