Routine evil and the culture that creates it

In May, an 18-year-old gunned down 21 people—including 19 children—at a school in Uvalde, Texas. Like most Americans, it is difficult to express the horror and sadness I feel in response to this tragedy. However, it was not the only tragic school event I was concerned about.

At a shopping center next to the public high school a mile from my house in Northern Virginia, an 18-year-old student was stabbed and killed that same day. The stabbing occurred in the middle of a brawl that involved 30 to 50 students—there is even a video of the fatal melee online. There’s no suspect in custody. And there’s been virtually no national media attention directed at the incident, partly because of the Uvalde shooting that came soon after and partly because a stabbing doesn’t allow people to get on their soapbox about gun control. (For what it’s worth, there was a shooting between students at the same shopping center at the beginning of the year, and the school has chronic violence.)

To be clear, following a conscience-shocking event such as what happened in Uvalde, I’m willing to entertain nakedly political solutions I wouldn’t otherwise entertain. I’m very pro–Second Amendment, but even I am so horrified that I’m amenable to hearing what new laws can actually stop an entire classroom from being gunned down. What gives me pause is that, right now, only political solutions are entertained in the face of such horrifying violence.

Millions of Americans would pretend we’re just one new gun control law away from stopping another incident like what happened in Uvalde, but that’s no solution for my local high school, which is routinely plagued with violence. There’s only so much you can do to curb the violence in this country without addressing the cultural rot enabling it.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing the day after the Uvalde rampage, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, urged his colleagues to ask, “Why is our culture suddenly producing so many young men who want to murder innocent people? … 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?”

These are questions very much worth asking, and yet we see plenty of people in the media who are almost offended that Lee would ask them. The Huffington Post said Lee’s concern about broader cultural factors was “glossing over the problem with the sheer number of guns in America.” Incredibly, their article went on to say, “There are no studies that clearly support a connection been fatherlessness and a tendency toward gun violence.”

Common sense and about five seconds on Google will disabuse you of the Huffington Post’s claim that broken homes are unrelated to violence, even if we shouldn’t pretend that determining the causal relationship between dysfunctional families and violence is easy.

The bottom line is that we live in a culture churning out way too many violent 18-year-olds. When my father was in high school in the 1950s, he and his friends used to store rifles in their lockers so they could go hunting immediately after school. Gun ownership per capita has gone down in America since then, and the so-called scary “assault weapon” used by the Uvalde killer is the most popular rifle in the country and has been owned by Americans since the 1960s, decades before anyone associated AR-15s with mass killings.

There is no easy solution to any of our vexing cultural problems, and it’s even more daunting to try and address all of them collectively in an attempt to address generalized concerns about violence. This makes focusing on political concerns seem seductive—passing laws is at least a concrete action that you can take, even if there’s no simple gun control solution in a country that already has nearly 400 million guns in circulation.

I’m not going to dissuade anyone from passionately arguing for political solutions in good faith. But it needs to be understood that addressing the problem of violence is not either/or—it’s all of the above. I’m more cynical about politicians than most, but when Sen. Lee says we need to address social isolation and broken homes, he’s giving voice to tens of millions of Americans who have valid concerns about cultural values. It should not be dismissed as a distraction by people who pretend politics are the answer to every question, just as the other side should give a fair hearing to legislative ideas.

But laws alone won’t ever be the complete answer to addressing violence in Uvalde or anywhere else. When 50 kids at my local high school spontaneously brawl and stab each other as part of an ongoing pattern of violence, that’s an evil so basic there’s no way to avoid looking at the culture causing it.