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Praise and prayers to all the fathers who raise their children well and teach them ethics, morality, and right from wrong. Happy Father's Day, and a big thank you for raising good kids.

You want to fix the "gun violence" problem? Clue: it ain't the gun. Start by looking at what's happened to the American nuclear family since WWII, particularly inner-city families. The number of single-parent households has tripled since 1965. America's ratio of children living with a single parent is 3 times the worldwide average of 7 percent.

In 2020, there were a total of 72.8 million children under the age of 18. Of those, 60.3 million were under the age of 15; 47.7 million under the age of 12.

The U.S. has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households. More than 80% of U.S. children in single-parent families live with the mother only. From 1960 to 2020, the percentage of children living in mother-only households nearly tripled from 8% to 21%. Demographically, 21% of white children live with a single parent; 28% of Hispanic children; and 51% of Black children. In 2018 the poverty rate for single-mother households was a staggering 34%.

I remember when pickup trucks drove in metro Houston with a rifle rack in the rear window, rifles included. In one of the first school mass shootings, a deranged Charles Whitman stabbed his mother and wife to death and then climbed the University of Texas clock tower in 1966. It was students and faculty who went out to their vehicles, got their own rifles, and pinned Whitman down that prevented more deaths. Good guys with guns.

There will always be the occasional psychotic break in an unbalanced mind like Whitman's resulting in the targeting of a school. That's not unique to America. We saw it in Perm, Russia, in September 2021; in Kabul, Afghanistan, in May 2021; in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019; in Suzano, Brazil, in March 2019; in Kerch, Crimea, in October 2018; in Goiás, Brazil, in October 2017; and the list goes on. But the U.S. mainstream media don't bother telling us about all of those.

And the differentiator here isn't the number of guns. When he was a senator and still had all his mental faculties, Joe Biden himself said, speaking on the floor of the Senate in 1985, "During my 12 1/2 years as a Member of this body, I have never believed that additional gun control or Federal registration of guns would reduce crime. I am convinced that a criminal who wants a firearm can get one through illegal, nontraceable, unregistered sources, with or without gun control."

The differentiator in America is that we have a people problem and a societal problem. That's never going to be acknowledged by politicians because it means it's the voters who are the problem...not a gun, or knife, or hammer, or baseball bat, or kitchen fork. I don't subscribe to the notion that any kid is born inherently evil. Statistically, there certainly will be mental issues of psychopathy sociopathy, but even then I'm uncertain how we could really weigh the nature versus nurture issue. Was the kid genetically evil, or did he learn to be evil?

I have no answers, but it certainly seems logical to me that, even if not causative, we have a definite correlation of the increase in mass-casualty, single-actor events and the increasing number of single-parent households. Almost one-forth of all the kids in the U.S. live with a single mother, 34% of those households are at the poverty level, and most are in our increasingly dense urban areas. "Adulting" classes became an actual thing as of the Millennial generation. Social media doesn't help, either.

Bottom line, a whole lot of the nation's children aren't being raised by their parents and being raised well. And the schools themselves have become a massive part of the problem thanks to "wokeness": you deserve everything; you are entitled; everything should be given to you; you can be snowflake-sensitive and no one should be able to criticize you; conservatism is bad, Marxism is good; you don't need to learn ethics, morality, or critical thinking. And let's add that people who say they attend church fell below 50% in the U.S. for the first time ever: in 2020, 47% of adults belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque, compared to 70% in 1999.

So if we can't expect a 10-year-old kid to get responsible parenting at home, to get stable direction and moral instruction at school, and the majority no longer have any religious affiliation, how exactly are we helping that 10-year-old grow up to be a responsible, productive, and law-abiding citizen?

Sorry. Rant over. But Father's Day is a really big deal...but not about the cards and gift socks.