Guns can’t be blamed for mass murders, but neither can broken homes or sexual deviancy. Cause and effect is backwards.
Mass and serial murders are blamed on many things: guns (despite the fact that many such murders are committed without guns), Prozac (even though many occurred prior to its invention) and heavy metal music (which doesn’t explain Hitler’s henchmen gassing Jews to the music of Beethoven) among them. Trevor Grant Thomas, at the often interesting American Thinker blog, debunks the myth that guns are to blame, pointing out that of the ten worst mass murderers in American history only three used guns as their primary means of killing (Seung-Hui Cho, Adam Lanza and George Hennard) and the four worst (Gary Ridgway, Andrew Philip Kehoe, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy) never used guns to kill. While Thomas doesn’t blame Prozac or heavy metal music, he blows it by blaming broken homes and sexual deviancy for creating most mass and serial murderers—not the underlying cause of these issues.
While broken homes and sexual deviancy are common in the lives of horrific murderers, Thomas confuses cause and effect and utterly fails to identify the commonality that likely causes most of them: alcohol or other-drug addiction in either the murderer or a parent. In fact, broken homes and sexual deviancy are two indicators of addiction—even if Jeffrey Dahmer’s adoptive parents remained married throughout. Substance addiction usually explains sexual promiscuity and other forms of what some might call “deviancy,” but unless a 22-year-old virgin could be called deviant, it doesn’t in the case of Elliot Rodger; but it appears he was on a Xanax-fueled murder spree (see “runner-up” in this issue). Cho, whose story is recounted in issue # 29 of TAR and who appears to have had a good family, may have simply been mentally ill. Lanza appears not to have been an addict, but his mother clearly was (“possible codependent of the month” in issue # 73 of TAR. Hennard, Ridgway, Bundy, Gacy and Dahmer were clearly psychotropic drug addicts. Kehoe almost certainly had this disease—cruelty to animals is a near-certain behavioral indication of addiction (check out Kehoe’s fascinating biography).
Thomas also mentions Juan Corona, who likely relapsed into known alcoholism before murdering 25 itinerant laborers in 1971, and Aaron Alexis, whose alcoholism-fueled shooting spree at the Washington Navy Yard is recounted in issue # 75 of TAR.
If mass murders are to be minimized, the root cause of such murders—usually addiction—needs to be identified. Thomas, correctly debunking the myth that guns murder people, links sexual deviancy and bad families to horrific murders. While prevalent, they are not the common thread. Alcohol or other-drug addiction in the perpetrator is the most common cause—and where it doesn’t exist, it usually is found in a parent.