National Public Radio (NPR) looked at the school shooting data referred to by ACLU. There must have been something seriously wrong with how the data were gathered. I can well imagine that the NPR reporters were wondering how it was possible that this many shootings occurred without breathless reports from the news media.
The NPR reporters’ intuition proved correct. When they called most of the schools that reported a shooting had no idea where it was or whether it even involved students or staff in the school. If it was truly a shooting that took place on school property, you’d think everyone would have remembered it.
I have a suggestion for the good people at ACLU: Instead of looking at race, how about looking at the frequency of single parent households and how it correlates with crime rates. I’ll bet the correlation is much higher than race or any other factor.
It is a fact that single parent households are very commonplace in the Black community. This is a huge red flag. In other words, this is not an indictment of the Black community or law enforcement in any way. It’s an indictment of the notion that single parent households are not the problem.
In my children’s school we know families whose mother or father died from unfortunate circumstances. In every case, other families stepped in to help. Coaches, neighbors, parents of friends, all stepped up. They couldn’t replace the missing parent, but they could bring those kids along with their kids and help out.
That’s what’s missing in neighborhoods where a high percentage of households are also single parent. When there are no whole families to help out, to provide a moderating influence on children, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that they go out of control and become part of the thug life.
We need to find ways to encourage whole families. We need to encourage good parenting practices. It used to be done through religious institutions. It used to be openly encouraged by popular culture. Today, you look at father figures in popular culture and we see broken men, clueless idiots, but rarely a decent man trying to do the right thing. And don’t get me started about the decrepit state of our religious institutions…
