The rise in school shootings correlates with the destruction of the family and the declining number of fathers in the home, with the consequent decline in the moral values of young people.  The idea that fathers are essential to the proper moral development of young men was undermined by the Marxist idea that the traditional family is an evil patriarchy where the father oppresses the wife and children in a way analogous to the way evil capitalists oppress the workers.

As a consequence, the idea that there can be all kinds of families, single mother families and female-female families and transgendered-parents families came to be celebrated on talk shows from coast to coast.  It was all so … inclusive!  It never occurred to any of these all-knowing social activists to ask what the long term effects of conducting these social experiments on American society might have.

Washington Post journalist William Raspberry tells how, in the late 1970’s, rangers in South Africa's Pilanesberg Game Park began to find large numbers of dead white rhinos.  Naturally, their first thought that these had been killed by poachers but that didn’t make sense.  The rhino horns prized by the poachers were intact. Cameras were set up to identify the culprit, leading to a shocking discovery.  The rhinos were being killed by elephants.  But why?  The same elephants causing the violence had been there for years with no problems. 

It turned out that years earlier Kruger National Park, another South African game park, had too many elephants.  It was decided that some of the excess would be shipped off to other parks and that some of the older larger males too difficult to transport would be shot.  The natural order of things had been disrupted by human beings who thought they knew more than they did and it was only a matter of time until the violence exploded.  What the cameras revealed was that young bull elephants, teenage male elephants that had been shipped to Pilanesberg, were chasing rhinos over great distances before stomping them to death.  Further, these violent teenagers were being led by a handful of particularly bad actors, one of these a particularly nasty young male nicknamed Tom Thumb by park rangers. Young sexually active bulls, "suffering from an excess of testosterone," became increasingly violent.  The sexually over-stimulated teenage male elephants formed gangs led by the most violent males.  The other males, the followers, imitated their violent leaders. 

Park rangers considered that it might be necessary to kill the young males.  However, eventually it was decided to reintroduce some mature bigger bulls to Pilanesberg with the hope that these mature males could rein in the violent teenagers.

The experiment worked. Not only did the mature bigger bulls inhibit misbehaviour by the violent teenagers, but something more subtle happened.  The large mature bulls became the dominant sexual partners for the females resulting in a drop in the testosterone levels in the young bulls and a consequent reduction in their violent behaviour.  Further, after a few instructive fights with the mature bulls, in which the teenage bulls, so to speak, in the school of hard knocks, learned some important life-lessons, the teenage bulls began following the older bulls around and imitating their more mature behaviour.  The bigger mature bulls re-established the natural hierarchy and the violent teenager gang leaders were replaced by mature males that taught the teenage bulls discipline and proper male elephant behaviour.

Unfortunately, influenced by Marxist teachers who think that because of the theories they memorised at university they know more than they do, the United States has been engaged for several decades in a social experiment with our children.  The Marxist view has become common, in some places an unquestioned axiom, that the traditional family is an patriarchy in which the father oppressed the mother and children on analogy like evil capitalists (allegedly) oppress the workers.  The state of women and children in the family is compared to slavery.  As Marx puts it in the Communist Manifesto,

The bourgeoisie has … reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. … Abolition of the family! … The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course … with the vanishing of capitalism.

In order to be “tolerant” and “inclusive” one must redefine the family to eliminate the oppressive patriarch.  One must countenance families with unmarried parents, single-mother families, mother-mother families, transgendered families or communes with no family structure at all.  Women, without a male provider, must often “marry the government,” which then commands their vote, while sexually over-stimulated males, unrestrained by the traditional family gender roles, tomcat around irresponsibly, perhaps in gangs showing off with guns, looking for victims to “stomp” and more females to impregnate, leading to even more angry young males.  The violent consequences of destroying the natural order of fathers and mothers and children are no different in the human community than the elephant community. 

Finally, having created this problem of undisciplined violent young males roaming around with guns by destroying the natural order of the traditional family, the Left seeks to “solve” the problem by the band-aid of gun legislation that penalizes gun owners that have done nothing wrong.  That is far easier than self-reflection.  Unfortunately, that leaves one with the violent young males created by the leftist destruction of the family.  

The hateful Marxist view of the evil patriarchy is patently absurd and can only be believed by people suffering from ideological blindness.  Most people remember a very different kind of father, not the oppressor of silly Marxist propaganda, but a self-sacrificing father that gave up all his dreams so you could have yours, a father who grinds himself down working to provide for his family and never complains, a father who would unthinkingly take a bullet to shield his family, a father whose life was doing the impossible, a father one cannot let go when he is gone.  A father, a man, in the good sense, does make all the difference. 

His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, this was a man!

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (Scene V)

Graphic credit: public domain