F&F: The Newtown Shooter: The Conversation You Won’t See Anywhere Else

Article here. Excerpt:

'After our tears dry for the twenty little darlings and seven others who were mowed down by Adam Lanza, we begin to ask “Why?”

There is always a dominant narrative to explain the unthinkable. Now it is mostly about the absence of effective gun controls, or about mental illness. Or, we hear about the effects of violence on television and video games.

We don’t hear about the effects of fatherlessness, especially on young men. We don’t hear that the most reliable predictor of crime is neither poverty nor race but growing up fatherless. We don’t hear that a large majority of violent criminals were fatherless. We don’t even hear that young male elephants go on violent rampages unless they are kept in line by the old bulls.
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The Daily Mail reports quotes several of Adam’s former classmates to the effect that his problems got much worse after the separation. “He was always weird but the divorce affected him. He was arguing with his mother. He was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.”
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In fairness, most rare and awful events are the result of numerous influences acting together. The accident happened because the driver was intoxicated and the brakes were worn and the pedestrian was careless and the road was slippery and the lighting was poor. No one factor explains all. If just one of these factors had been different, there would have been no accident.

But fatherhood is not even on society’s list. This is especially sad because a simple change in divorce laws towards shared parenting would take a big chunk out of this factor at no cost. This is a much cheaper fix than a bureaucracy to enforce new gun laws or more mental health services, not that these might not be good ideas.'