To Prevent Tragedies Like The UVA Murders, Focus On Broken Families Not Firearms

New details about the recent murder of three University of Virginia (UVA) football players by one of their former teammates are further distressing — including a witness statement that suspect Christopher Darnell Jones Jr. shot one of the players while he was sleeping. According to reports, UVA knew Jones had a gun conviction before the triple murder but never started a discipline process. My alma mater is reeling and canceled their last home game of the season. Yet the pundits of corporate media are laser-focused on one, predictable thing: gun control.

“Our dysfunctional relationship with guns rears its ugly head in Virginia,” was the title of The Washington Post’s Nov. 15 editorial. “It is important that the public not become inured to these tragedies. The nation has logged another gruesome episode in its dysfunctional relationship with guns,” declared the WaPo’s editorial board. The White House meanwhile called for a ban on so-called “assault weapons” (though the weapon seems to have been a handgun, not a modern sporting rifle of the kind smeared by the left as an “assault weapon”).

Some pundits sought not only to grind their axes over gun control but to repudiate conservative attempts to curb the teaching of radical sexual ideology to children. “After Deadly UVA Shooting, Republicans Are Really Worried About … the Pride Flag in Schools,” was the title of a Nov. 16 editorial in The New Republic. “While too many parents — and politicians pretending to care about parents — have been busy conjuring manufactured crises over school curriculum, their children have been in training,” wrote Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak in a Nov. 14 editorial that demanded more gun control. “Kindergartners have been cosplaying their own slaughter as their parents focused on trying to ban books that said ‘gay.’”

Yet pundits are leaving out quite a few important parts of the story, ones that point to other, deeper crises in our American social fabric.

Broken Family, Absent Father

According to a separate WaPo report, accused shooter Jones spent his early years in Richmond public housing complexes, “where it was often too dangerous to play outside.” Jones was primarily raised by his mother, who was forced to work evenings. The boy was regularly responsible for feeding his three siblings, even walking to nearby grocery stores to buy ramen noodles or bologna.

When Jones was 5, his parents divorced and his father departed the scene, a loss the former UVA football player called “one of the most traumatic things that happened to me in my life.” A close friend of Jones who was his teammate in middle and high school told the Washington Post: “He grew up in an unfortunate situation with his dad not being in his life too much and his mom not being the best off financially.” As he entered middle school, Jones’ relationship with his mother deteriorated, and by 2016 he was living with his grandmother in Petersburg, Virginia.

A broken family, an absent father, a strained relationship even with his

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