Gun crime and single parent families: a challenge

(in response to this post)

Dear Shuggy,

All through Britain's liberal media over the past couple of days a rhythmic chinking of pennies dropping has been heard. It's disappointing to see as perceptive a blogger as you stuck in the ostrich position.

To take a side issue first. The point as I take it about the drug laws is not necessarily that they have a huge positive impact on the control of gun crime, but that liberalization would simply be irrelevant. If the bottom falls out of the drug market because smackheads can get their stuff from the local corner shop, the gang members are not going to magically turn into model citizens. There's always prostitution. Or protection rackets. Or whatever.

And now the main issue. I take the point that the total amount of gun crime is small in proportion to the number of single parent families. What you're overlooking is that gun crime is just the tip of an iceberg of alienation and underachievement, and yes, pretty much all of it does correlate more or less strongly with single parent families, as not even the leftie Unicef researchers can deny. You're also missing the critical mass that is reached when boys start forming peer groups in which hardly anybody has a male role model whom they see on alternate Saturdays, let alone one they live with.

It has to be possible to discuss all this without being accused of stigmatising those who are single parents more through misfortune than by choice. For clearly we're talking about 'families' being started in circumstances where there isn't even a theoretical possibility of Dad sticking around. For boys it's even worse than no role model at all - they're well aware that they are not products of parthenogenesis, so the example they have been set is that of the man as someone who buggers off because he doesn't give a toss.

I could trade anecdotes about children from hell based on my experience of living on a council estate for ten years, but actually there isn't any point. Trying to refute statistics with anecdotal evidence is the last refuge of people whose ideological comfort blankets are wearing thin. Of course nobody is saying that all boys from single parent families turn into thugs, nor that only those boys do so, nor that single parent families are the sole cause of gun crime. But we have to be prepared to look at all the causes, not just the ones that give us an ideological buzz. I realize the single parenthood issue touches a lot of raw nerves on a personal level, but the issue's too important to allow that to get in the way. We're talking about the squandering of young lives that started with as much promise as yours or mine. The liberal establishment has betrayed them with politically correct self-censorship for long enough.

Chris Dillow is an economist, apparently. He reckons the causes of gun crime are economic. Now there's a surprise. I'd say his take is at least as one-sided as an exclusive focus on single parents.

Collapse in the demand for unskilled work? Well, who says that's all these kids are good for? Plenty of them ought to be going on to university - instead, they get caught up in the gangs.

And what economic reason is there for the massive educational gap between black boys and girls? 'Awful education'? Why isn't it awful for the girls too? Racist teachers? It's still an article of faith among many in the race relations industry that white teachers practise a fiendlishly subtle form of racism which, whilst it allows black girls to thrive and Chinese and Indian kids to outperform their white peers, uniquely blights the prospects of black boys. You're a teacher: do you take this seriously?

What about 'the high aspirations encouraged by capitalism and celebrity culture'? Nicely all- embracing, that one: 'it's the system, innit, man?' Really, the only connection between capitalism and celebrity culture is that the former (unlike socialism) is rather good at giving us what we tell it we want. We get the culture we deserve - God help us. And exactly the same argument applies as Chris raises against the single parent family connection: we all, more or less, consume celebrity culture, and most of us know we're never going to be celebs, but we don't all work off our frustration by shooting people.

Finally, you quote this from Chris Dillow: 'Insofar as it focuses upon single parents, the stupid party therefore acts like a bully, attacking the vulnerable whilst cringing towards power'. I don't hold any brief for the Tories (I've never voted for them either), but this is just emotional manipulation. Vulnerable does not equal powerless. We live in a society where contraception is freely available. Those who elect to create single parent families have exercised their power to choose. It is, of course, their children who are truly powerless.

Best wishes,

Grumpy