It’s Not Necessarily The Parents’ Fault When Teens or Young Adults Kill

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April 9, 2023

While we strive to understand how three beautiful 9-year-olds and three adults could be blasted away by transgender murderer Audrey Hale in Nashville, it’s truly difficult, if not impossible, to attribute a single cause and a single cure to prevent such horrors. In addition to the usual attack on guns, leftists (and some conservatives) have frozen their target: Hale’s parents, but that’s simplistic and, therefore, wrong.

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With her manifesto kept secret, we know just a few things about the Nashville shooter: She was a mentally disturbed individual, confused about her gender, and suicidal. We can guess she was taking a cocktail of hormones and psychotropic antidepressants. Leftists, though, blame her (Christian) parents for being unsupportive of her LGBTQI+ status. They ignore that, while it can be isolating and emotionally disturbing when one’s transition isn’t supported by family, school, or community, most LGBTQI+ with similar backgrounds, many even bullied and abused, do not haul an arsenal to shoot up a school.

Some conservatives also blame parents. Rush heir Clay Travis thinks Hale’s parents are to blame for not knowing their 28-year-old was harboring seven deadly weapons in their house. As a parent of three, he explained, he’d know if his kids spent money on guns and hid them in his house.

Image: Parent and older child by bearfotos.

This focus on the parents is common with mass shootings. The Sandy Hook murderer’s mother was posthumously blamed after reports that she tried to bond with her son by taking him shooting. In Uvalde, blame was placed on a mother on drugs, an absent father, and grandparents who weren’t paying attention.

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Law enforcement must investigate the parents of a mass murderer to ensure they haven’t been abusive or directly facilitated the murders, or indirectly provided aid and comfort to their murderous child. But absent credible evidence of parental complicity, abuse, or neglect, blaming parents whose lives were also destroyed is wrong.

Clay’s kids are much younger than the 28-year-old Hale. Those who have already raised kids in loving, intact homes, know that older kids mean less control. Good kids go bad; healthy kids crack up; loving kids become hateful; honest kids begin to lie.

These are the painful lessons from Life 101 and the inexactitude of parenting. Even the best parents have children who are flawed, inclined to disgrace, and sometimes downright evil.

You might have control over your little kids, but once they’re in high school, you have less control over them and their money than you think. There are hiding spots in attics, crawl spaces, basements, and sometimes in plain sight. And what parent hunts for guns in the hidden recesses of their home, anyway?

Clay intimated that “good” or “involved” parents would know if an adult kid was having suicidal or murderous thoughts, but he is misguided. While ObamaCare mandates that parents must finance their child’s medical care until the age of 26, other laws shut parents out once the children are 12. School districts across America also have affirmative policies keeping secrets from parents. Short of witnessing your child violently act out, threaten violence, or express disturbing thoughts in online rants or a diary, even good or involved parents are often oblivious.

If your child needs mental health counseling or medication in college, parents might be the last to know…or never know, as they are forced to trust a child’s care to strangers. All you know is what your kids tell you through their filter of fear and confusion or the tidbits doctors and therapists can share without violating HIPAA.

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A parent may never know that a child experienced suicidal ideation or contemplated self-harm or harm to others. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that children shared their thoughts with a trusted and well-meaning therapist. Not all therapists have your child’s best interests at heart. Many have a training-driven agenda and can skillfully manipulate your medicated child, rewriting his/her upbringing to the point of being unrecognizable.

Often, these tragedies are the result of an amalgam of multiple individual and societal ills. The best we can do is identify factors (including breakdowns in societal norms) that appear to drive an individual to commit such horrors and come up with a list of deterrents to minimize risk.

Outside the home, our culture is sick and slouching toward Gomorrah. We need to reassert morality and the rule of law, bring back G-d and family, raise people out of poverty, blow up and rebuild the educational and mental health systems, and protect children from harmful parenting and sickening propaganda. Tall orders. We can lower risks, but there is no quick fix for these deep, societal problems.

We also must be mindful of overreacting and punishing the student who makes a gun with his fingers, threatens a fellow student or teacher because he/she is having a bad day, or is just an odd duck. Adolescents push buttons and say and do stupid things. We need fair and just processes to distinguish isolated incidences from serious threats.

Clay Travis believes armed guards at schools will serve as a deterrent. Maybe. But the individuals who do this are suicidal—by cop or their own hands. They don’t care about deterrence, only the havoc they can cause, the fame they can garner, and the destruction they seek. They’ll kill the guards first.

We cannot police all internet “speech” and outlaw all potential weapons, without creating a police state. And, while it sounds cool to use technology that locks the perpetrator between doors as soon as a gun is spotted or fired, the killer will simply kill our children outside during recess.

We rarely have advanced notice that someone is prepping to do something gruesome like this. Mental health professionals will speak out only when there is an imminent and credible threat. A manifesto online, a warning email to a friend, or acting out in school, are mere crumbs of evidence that don’t always lead to prevention. Maybe our systems don’t talk to each other; maybe it’s timing; maybe patients successfully hide their plans; maybe it’s too hard to find the breadcrumbs and make the connections; or maybe, we just want to believe in the best and not the worst in our young ones.

No matter how weird, awkward, or troubled a child is, our default setting is not to suspect our children of the unthinkable.

But the left wants you to believe that Hale’s Christian parents created this monster and bear the blame because they couldn’t accept her transition. Apart from parents like Jamie Lee Curtis, who thinks her son’s transition is celebratory, most parents struggle when a child embarks on an LGBTQI+ journey.

Yes, we can do better preventing these massacres, but that starts with honest conversations about mental health treatments for those experiencing gender dysphoria who do not have a medically-diagnosed intersex condition; and the deleterious effects of hormone therapy mixed with mood-altering medications.

The left refuses to go there but, as they encourage increasingly younger children to undergo radical transitions and thrust normal, well-adjusted children into the tizzy of selecting their gender from a dizzying list of choices—something children never had to and never should have to do—nervous breakdowns, suicide, and violent responses will become the norm.

Locuta is a pseudonym.

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