Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) suggested that “fatherlessness” and a breakdown in the family– not easy access to firearms–are the root causes of mass shootings after an 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday.
“Every time one of these tragedies occurs, I think we, for far too long, fail to look back at the root causes of rampage violence,” Lee said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday.
“Questions involving things like, why is our culture suddenly producing so many young men who want to murder innocent people?” he continued. “It raises questions like, you know, could things like fatherlessness, the breakdown of families, isolation from civil society or the glorification of violence be contributing factors?”
Since the massacre at Robb Elementary Republicans have blamed everything but lax gun laws for mass shootings—from mental health to the school having too many doors and now ‘fatherlessness.’
The idea that mass shooters are from fatherless homes is false. Payton Gendron the shooter who murdered 10 Black last week at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo N.Y. was from a two parent household.
The National Council on Family Relations concluded in a 2019 that “there are no studies that clearly support the argument that fatherlessness is to blame for gun violence.”
“It’s almost a case of blaming the victim and not blaming the person who is able to walk in and buy a weapon that should be used on a war zone, not in a school zone,” Vermont Democratic senator Patrick Leahy said in response to Lee. “We are the only civilized nation on Earth that watches our citizens, our children gunned down, and we do nothing to prevent it from happening again.”
