Which murders matter?

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Mass and celebrity shootings become even more tragic when authorities and commentators exploit them to inflame vicious campaigns targeting powerless groups.

Should policy makers value only those lives and dangers the public is most concerned about and focus attention and policies on addressing those concerns?

That might seem understandable at first glance. The public is infinitely more upset at school shootings, mass shootings, and hate killings by disturbed/diabolical murderers, especially when the victim is a well-known celebrity like Charlie Kirk.

Media reporters, agencies, and political leaders prioritize assuaging an inflamed public. President Barack Obama ordered flags flown at half mast to mourn the 20 children and 6 adults murdered in 2012’s horrendous Sandy Hook school shooting. President Trump ordered flags lowered to eulogize assassinated right-wing luminary Kirk. Although Obama’s action was less crassly political, the motives of both presidents are understandable. Large swaths of the public upset at the killings demanded action.

But there’s a sinister side to the obsessive media and authoritative fixation on rare mass and celebrity killings: they invite malice while suppressing discussion of mammoth, real, and uncomfortable dangers, especially to American children and youth. Spectacular and emotional tragedies are exploited by unscrupulous leaders to drive unreasoning, bigoted policies like harshly policing feared groups and banning youths from social media.

That exploitation is a grotesque misuse of the responsibility of experts, policy makers, and conscientious media to provide the context and perspective that foster effective measures – which is why America never seems to solve its grossly outsized problems.

My interests are real dangers and policy

Sensational crimes are very hard to prevent precisely because of their rarity and wide range of motivations. Policy becomes distractive and destructive when it exploits rare tragedies to manufacture generalized claims vilifying entire outgroups and punishments designed to satisfy fearful popular clamor to “do something!” (just not anything that bothers anyone important).

If we’re interested in formulating effective policy to prevent violence, then the scientific index is not rare events, but real and common dangers, especially those unpopular to talk about.

For one difficult example, if the Sandy Hook and Kirk shootings occurred in a typical American week, they accompanied 20 children and teenagers murdered by grownups in domestic violence, 350 Americans (including 30 kids) murdered by guns, all part of the 450 Americans (including 45 kids) murdered overall that same week.

We should just keep the flag at half mast

The harsh reality is that we ignore the day-to-day tragedies because they don’t threaten “us” (until they do), and/or because psychologically, they’re an endemic crisis too big to face.

But we ignore them at our peril in policy discussion. For another difficult example, consider how what seems like an encouraging reality is so devastating to media and political needs it is simply suppressed.

Here’s another un-faceable truth: amid the grim headlines, schools remain among America’s safest places from gun violence, with levels on par with Berlin.

In the worst year, 2023, in the 143,000 primary, secondary, trade, and higher-education schools in the United States, there were 350 incidents in which “a gun (was) fired, brandished, or a bullet hit school property”. That is, a child or teen would have to attend school daily for 400 years to risk any kind of gun incident and 1,700 years to risk being killed by gunfire at a school.

Europeans and Japanese would not find even that level acceptable for their schools, but in the American context, it’s a stellar achievement. If the rest of American society were as safe as the schools and colleges attended by 70 million people daily, the United States would have 90% fewer gun deaths and injuries.

But all sides, far left to far right, have whipped up such a frenzy demonizing schools as bullet-riddled hells that the utterly crazed right-wing cure-all for school shootings is gaining traction in terrified district after district: arming school personnel and officers to patrol hallways.

If leaders succumb to popular fear and anger by arming more adults at school, we will have more school shootings, more dead kids, and more dead grownups – a fact that has already unfolded. Locales with more guns (i.e., Republican counties compared to Democratic ones, Texas compared to New York, etc., cold Centers for Disease Control numbers show) suffer vastly higher rates of gun killings than locales with fewer guns.

Those who advocate arming school personnel – and those who inflame fears leading to drastic anti-remedies – should be honest: “Let’s satisfy our egos by making relatively safe schools as dangerous from gunfire as the rest of American society.”

That’s just one reason that from the endangerment and policy contexts I address in this substack, we should prioritize real, common, everyday dangers, not what upsets the public the most.

There are more reasons. The next substack will deal with the historical trends those left to middle to right ignore and distort in dangerously appalling ways to keep their emotional bigotries afloat.

Here’s a case that might counter my arguments about youth and social media

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

We all love love love “critical thinking”… in theory. We almost never practice it – and never on youth and social media issues.

Union County, New Jersey, prosecutors accuse a 17-year-old boy of first-degree murder for allegedly crashing his Jeep at 70 miles per hour into two teenaged girls riding e-bikes on September 29, killing both.

Liberal-left podcasters are rushing to cite the New Jersey tragedy as an example of a MAGA-influenced teen boy corrupted by “black-pill” social media, specifically assassinated conservative commentator Charlie Kirk and misogynist “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate.

That could be, or maybe not. So far, the evidence – mainly an initial investigation by NJ.com (quoted below) – suggesting why he did it remains complicated.

I single out this tragedy because the only way to analyze an issue is to explore cases that challenge points I make – unlike social-media blamers, who dodge compelling evidence that doesn’t fit their narrow agendas.

The alleged killer was far from a “typical teenaged boy” (a meaningless stereotype in any case). His avid-gamer YouTube and TikTok sites had 40,000 viewers. His “social media presence seemed to revolve around professional baseball and ‘MLB: The Show,’ a baseball video game.”

In a 22-minute video (since taken down) the day of the killing, he claimed a “good family by my side” and complained he had been “bullied, ridiculed” and suffered a school suspension for “ridiculous allegations” (spread, he said, by one of the girls and her mother) of “distributing ‘child porn.’” He “compared himself to former Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, who was suspended over sexual assault allegations in 2021 but never criminally charged.” He apparently was served a restraining order for stalking one of the girls, who he previously dated. His uncle was a police chief.

The alleged killer also resented one of the girls because she “made fun of Charlie Kirk’s death.” In the past, he had “expressed admiration in his livestreams for Andrew Tate, a polarizing influencer who is accused of running a criminal sex trafficking ring in Romania” but had not posted anything recent on Tate. He once “played the violent video game ‘Grand Theft Auto,’” though he mainly “chattered about baseball and simulated MLB gameplay.”

So, pick your motivator. Normally loud right-wing pundits shrank flaccidly. A White possible-Charlie-Kirk-fan murderer? Not interested. Unless the victimized girl is blond and the killer can be demonized as transgender, gay, leftist, immigrant, Black, Hispanic, Muslim, Democrat and/or woke, the Right doesn’t care about dead girls.

Leftist “Secular Talk” podcaster Kyle Kuliniski did care — for ideological reasons. He leaped on the alleged killer’s present Kirk and past Tate admiration to the exclusion of everything else. Just a normal baseball-loving kid driven to murder by MAGA-fueled hatreds and a criminal online misogynist, Kulinski declared. These kinds of hate-driven killings, mass shootings, and political assassinations – at least, the fraction perpetrated by young men – are the violence that should most worry us, he added.

That depends on whether you prioritize ideology or bodies. Mass shootings (711 victims in 2024, including 18 in or around schools) and hate-killings (104 victims in 2024) indeed are American tragedies. But put together, they account for fewer than 4% of the 21,014 U.S. homicides the CDC so far has tabulated in 2024.

The other 96% of America’s murders, we ignore

Every year in the 2020s United States, the CDC reports, around 200 girls ages 12-17 are murdered, down sharply from the 300 or so murdered every year 35 years ago. Disgraceful then, disgraceful now. No other Western culture (and even most second-world countries) kills at the levels Americans do – including killing children and youth.

So, who murders American girls? You’d think that would be a pressing question. It isn’t. We’ll soon see why.

Three-fourths of the murderers of teen girls are of the same race (in this case, White), and 90% are male. The most recent FBI tabulations of murder victim and murderer characteristics show the killers are not peer teens.

Just 20% of the murderers of girls age 12-17 are boys and 1% are girls under age 18. In a reality no one admits, four-fifths of the murderers of teen girls are adults – 35% are ages 18-24, and 45% are 25 and older.

FBI tabulations show the proportion of murdered teen girls killed by assailants age 25 and older has skyrocketed from 31% in the 1990s to 45% today. Meanwhile, the proportion murdered by peer youths has fallen from 28% to 21% and the proportion murdered by young adults ages 18-24 has fallen from 42% to 35%.

These facts are terrible news for pop-talkers left to right who need youth, preferably the very few rightly or wrongly depicted as having been “radicalized” by some malign social-media influence, to be the problem.

Now, let’s consider the thousands of murder victims they ignore.

Consider just a few of the girls murdered just in the week of the New Jersey tragedy. You heard of Travis Decker? Father, age 32, gunned down his 3 daughters last week. Darnell Jones? Age 33, raped, decapitated, and cut off the hands of his 13-year-old daughter. Edwin Cruz Gomez? Age 38, plowed his car into 4 people just like the New Jersey teen, killing a 16-year-old girl. Three children and one teen girl shot, 2 dead including the teen, at a Texas truck stop, allegedly by their 31-year-old mother. A teenage boy, 18, and girl, 17, shot to death at an Arizona campground; a 31-year-old man has been charged.

No theories, no commentaries on those murders, which are so common they are barely even newsworthy.

News flash, Gen Z:

NO ONE IMPORTANT IN 2025 AMERICA CARES ENOUGH TO ACKNOWLEDGE MURDERED GIRLS… unless their deaths serve an ideological agenda.

NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHO IS MURDERING THEM… unless their killer’s characteristics suit the commentator’s personal prejudices.

NO ONE IMPORTANT CARES WHAT THE REAL CONTEXTS OR TRENDS ARE… why should anyone care when they can just make them up?

I’ll follow up to see if in this one case, social media indeed proves the culprit. So far, I’m surprised no one has mentioned the standard American-style remedy: us this tragedy to ban teen girls from riding e-bikes.

We know only one certainty in the era of the internet: teenage murderers and violent offenders have plummeted to record low levels compared to pre-internet eras going back 50 years. However, some readers question whether there might be major qualitative differences in murder today, and whether all murders are created equal. I hope to get to those questions this week.

Young men and violence are generating double the lies

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Why are progressives who champion diversity and multiculturalism sabotaging multiracial Gen Z when they should be touting young people’s stunningly positive trends?

Progressives indulge irrational hostility to sabotage young people’s rights and any hope of a future

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Right-wingers don’t care what I say. So, I direct my ineffectual rage at progressives: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Those who harbor liberal-left values have ONE remaining hope: that Gen Z dramatically turns America, the West, and the world around before mounting political, social, and environmental disasters become irreversible.

Older generations (a few forward-thinking individuals excepted) have proven incapable of leading the transition to a multicultural, global, environmentally sustainable culture human survival requires.

The old order has given up, which is why we see today’s extreme politics of resignation and division sabotaging positive action. Whether younger generations (allied with older individuals who get it) will step up remains the question.

But the fact is: If Gen Z doesn’t save us, no one will. And to have any chance of doing that, they need full access to global information, communication, and expression – yes, social media in all forms – beginning at young ages.

Given that reality, I humbly ask progressives, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Progressives’ crude hostility against young people and eagerness to suppress their internet access at every turn is among the most baffling, self-destroying bigotries of our time.

It would be one thing if Gen Z really were as hopelessly MAGA-reactionary, dark-web corrupted, inexplicably mentally ill, and nihilistically murderous as progressive podcasters depict them. In that case, criticize away.

But what makes progressive trashings and repressions against the young doubly crazed is that they have to indulge grotesque ignorance, primitive double standards, and even outright lies to justify their anti-Z rhetoric.

The endless hate/sarcasm vilifying Gen Z teens and young adults gushing from the liberal-left is so brainless, easy to refute, and destructive that a whole new term begs coinage. Now that zoologists have shown that lemmings don’t actually dash en masse off cliffs, I propose a new term for hypothalamic self-destruction: “they stampeded off that cliff like a herd of progressive podcasters.”

Umbraged chatters might insist, how dare you, we love our teenagers. Unfortunately, liking one’s kids (even that’s not always clear, given commentators’ on-air disparagements of their own teens) and a few favored activists can accompany hating the rest of the younger generation. We all love Greta, Malala, and the campus activists – amid daily demeaning of the other 60 million young people branded as brainless 4chan addicts.

The latest double standard at this writing: three mass-shooting suspects, ages 40, 40, and 42, the first two of whom allegedly killed 8 and injured 16 at a Michigan church and North Carolina bar and the third threatened a gay pride parade, are briefly deplored by progressives. One can add a 44-year-old Michigan man who shot his three children, killing one and leaving two near death, should progressives decide to care about the hundreds of domestic shootings killing children and teenagers at home every year.

For 40-aged shooters, liberal-left commentators do not indulge generalized vilifications of the kind they regularly hurl at young men. You will not hear any say, “this country has a problem with 40-aged men.”

The self-destructiveness of this vitriol toward the young is appalling. Progressives are so insistent that young men must be mass-classed as dumb, manosphere-poisoned “conservatives” that they must want them to be. This recalls ex-president Obama’s insanity – the same Obama who owes his two elections to young voters – that American crime, drug, sexual violence, and poverty are all the fault of the young and school shootings reflect “poisoning the minds of young people.”

After all, if the Left despises the right wing, shootings, misogyny, and young men, why not lump them all together?

Progressives fabricate myths to hate Gen Z

Supposedly fact-respecting liberal-left podcasters ignore the most recent surveys showing men age 18-29 rejecting Trump and MAGA by 25 points, along with FBI tabulations showing 2024’s mass shooters averaged 39 years old and exit polls showing men ages 30-64 12 points more likely than Gen Z men to support Trump even at the peak of Trump’s 2024 popularity.

One could cite structural reasons explaining why all sides indulge hatred toward Gen Z: (a) the young are America’s leading edges of widely-feared racial diversity and technological acumen, (b) the young, our poorest age, don’t have billion-dollar K-Street lobbyists and bribing super-PACs to ward off scapegoaters, etc.

But progressives, normally acute at seeing beyond structural confounds, ignore them in young people’s case and instead fixate on social-media and pop-culture distractions.

The baffling reality is that Gen Z’s stunningly positive trends make them both natural allies and living manifestations of dynamic, hopeful progressive arguments affirming future-facing benefits, safety, and health of diversity and multiculture.

So, why do I get the feeling that Gen Z’s improvements are another reason for progressives to hate them? Progressives refuse to mention Gen Z’s amazingly positive trends and even deny them with a barrage of derisive negativism.

The next substack will present crucial examples from our largest, most progressive, most diverse state’s young people to ask leftist podcasters and commentators again: WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Psychology professor Chris Ferguson demolishes the media’s latest “ringing endorsement” of school cellphone bans

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

We get it. Politicians and school principals, teachers, and media reporters are flooding news reports with wild enthusiasm about bans on cellphones in schools.

Just as their forebears wildly lauded students lined up in school uniforms, middle-schoolers forced to pee in front of drug testers, violent prison convicts screaming and threatening teenagers in “Scared Straight!” scams, youths expelled for bringing aspirin to school or having a water pistol in their car trunk, and now, the students compelled to surrender their cellphones to confiscation… it all brings quotable joy.

But do any of these easy, one-size-fits-all panaceas that make certain authorities feel so good have any provable benefits? Researchers consistently say: NO. No improvements in mental health, attendance, drug use, academic achievement, crime, violence, dropout, disciplinary cases, or any other important index.

“We know that teachers and administrators are making wild claims of remarkable success for cellphone bans that aren’t supported by public records requests for data from their own schools,” Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson said.

The present study headlined by The Economist as a “ringing endorsement” of banning student cellphones in schools was a perverse interpretation of a trivial result, Ferguson’s analysis showed. The study of schools in India, an unreviewed “preprint version,” reported only one positive finding: the cellphone ban accompanied a negligible improvement in grades – a claim that carries its own lesson.

In studies with large samples and multiple variables, some irrelevant factors will inevitably prove “statistically significant” – that is, they meet the bare-minimum standard of 95% probability of not being random noise. Thus, we might hastily conclude from “statistically significant” findings from Centers for Disease Control surveys that eating vegetables and drinking milk makes students depressed.

Superficial variable significance can result from poor specification, reverse correlation, random interaction with other variables, and other problems. So, conscientious researchers then look at the most important value: effect size. Even if marginally “significant,” does the variable have any real impact on the issue in question? Here, the imposter variables recede. Eating vegetables and drinking milk has no real effect on depression.

That is how the bogus claim that social media causes student depression got started. The most plausible explanation for researchers’ significant-but-tiny-effect finding is that students who are abused by parents tend both to be more depressed and to use social media more. Popular researchers and authorities just leave out the abuse part and clarion that social media causes depression.

In the case of cellphone bans and school grades, testing for effect size yields a resounding “nothing.” Ferguson points out that the study’s negligible effect value (d=0.086) is so close to zero it amounts to random “noise.” “An effect so unreliably tiny should never have been interpreted as supporting cellphone bans,” Ferguson said. (For reference, a d-value has to reach 0.200 before it is considered even barely “small” and 0.500 to be moderately of interest.) The near-zero d-value of 0.086 actually confirms that “this study is better evidence against cellphone bans than for them,” Ferguson concluded.

As with previous panaceas, the research so far is finding that despite the huzzahs, there are no provable benefits from school cellphone bans. “We can now see that journalistic outlets like The Economist are willing to publish careless fluff, so long as it supports the moral panic narrative,” Ferguson said.

As with other useless one-size-fits-all edicts, whether imposed on youths or adults, there is a better, more effective approach: discipline those who are causing disruption, leave those who aren’t causing trouble alone. Weird idea, I know.

Leftist commentators: Stop your dangerous demagoguery demonizing “young White men”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

In the wake of the horrific assassination of rightist celebrity Charlie Kirk, I had hoped the liberal-Left would retain a healthy respect for facts, qualms about indulging in primitive culture-war scapegoating, and calming voices against right-wing lunacies.

Was I ever wrong

The derangements villainizing “young White men” as a generation vented by progressive podcasters I subscribe to and admired like Krystal Ball (Breaking Points), Kyle Kulinski (Secular Talk), Frances Fiorentini (Bitchuation Room), Jennifer Welch (I’ve Had It), et al, are as brainless and baseless as anything rightist-media dispense.

“Radicalized young men are combustible,” warns the leftist Daily Kos staff in an article thoroughly mischaracterizing the NBC Gen Z poll. “The manosphere and its influencers” are “feeding young men a steady diet of grievance,” creating a “toxic and dangerous” young-male culture of “online threats, mass shootings, and the growing overlap between misogynist and extremist communities.”

Check out my Daily Kos column re-analyzing the Gen Z “gender gap,” much more positive than typically depicted (readers of this substack can skip the last half of it!).

The Left’s crude culture-war scapegoating has not advanced a millimeter over Tipper Gore’s infamous 1980s’ crusade to vilify teenagers and metal, punk, and rap music.

Same old tune, 2025 verse: the 1980s teenage generation corrupted by Ozzy, gangsta, and video games, the armageddons of their day, now aging, insists that today’s apocalypse is young people corrupted by the “dark web.”

Imbecilic panics, shocking truths

America has a “problem” with “young White men,” Ball, Fiorentini, Owens, and leftist colleagues declare over and over since Kirk’s assassination.

No, America does not have a problem with young White men.

Krystal Ball, normally sane, hurls vilifications resembling Fox News’ at its rantiest. We don’t know the Kirk assassin’s motive, Ball admitted seconds before a 4 a.m.-vodka-rambling-mode of grotesque concoctions about his motive.

“We are witnessing the rise of the black-pill killers, predominantly young, White male misanthropes meming themselves into radicalism and violence,” Ball spat. “The all-consuming L-O-L L-O-L L-O-L of contemporary sad-young-man online culture, forum after forum dominated by an endless race to the bottom of nihilism and self-hatred” drives “a whole lot of young men. “The internet is acting as an accelerant” for shootings by “disconnecting us from real life, from real human beings,” a scary new scourge “unraveling” American society.

Aping MAGA illogic, Ball’s made-up speculations about the unknown motives of 5 shooters (who share little beyond young White male demographics) just happen, by merest coincidence, to fit her prejudices.

These speculations require ignoring a lot. Remember ultra-evil Adam Lanza, young White male slaughterer of 20 first-graders and 6 adults at Sandy Hook? Culture warriors broke eyeballs and minds ferreting dark influences. Bummer. Lanza’s online obsession turned out to be… Dance Dance Revolution.

Remember Charles Joseph Witman, the young White man who shot 42 people from the University of Texas tower in 1966, the worst school shooting ever? Eagle Scout, Marine, packing the Boy Scout Handbook. Be very afraid, alarumed singer-satirist Kinky Friedman, “there’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.”

Remember Patrick Purdy, young White male who committed California’s worst school shooting, gunning down 34 mostly Asian children at a Stockton’s Cleveland Elementary School in 1989? He might fit central-casting toxic; he raged against everything, long before the manosphere appeared. His was one of at least 5 big school shootings that year, back before Ball and others admit school shootings even happened.

Ball’s anti-factual, ahistorical rant is itself a sad descent into black-pill nihilism, in stark contrast to the healthy, compassionate messaging of young gamer men on the Kirk assassin’s own online Discord boards (see below).

Escapism – “it must be that horror comic, that tune, that TV show, that video game, that website” – goes on and on, newly perpetuated by the ever-self-destructive Left fabricating ever-new culture-war crap to demonize and demoralize its own young constituencies.

It’s all bullshit

Amid the lying, denial, and scapegoating on all sides, let us examine California, home to “a whole lot” of young White males, ground zero of online culture, and keeper of the country’s most complete statistics, the only ones to consistently record crime by detailed age, race, and ethnicity since 1975.

Homicide is by far the best-tabulated, then and now, combining police and medical examiner investigation. The numbers presented below surprise even me.

Ball says: “Rising nihilism” is driving “a whole lot of young men” to commit shootings. Bullshit.

In 2024, a total of 39 of California’s 1 million young White men ages 10-24 murdered someone, just 3% of the state’s homicides. White men ages 25-34 and ages 35-44 each murdered more people, and White men ages 45-54 (the state’s richest demographic) murdered almost as many as all White male Californians under age 25 put together.

Ball says: “The internet is acting as an accelerant” for more murder. Utter bullshit.

Back in 2000, Krystal’s high school graduation year, California White males under age 25 murdered 92 people. In 1994, those halcyon days of warm human connection before the internet, California recorded 226 murders by White men under age 25 – nearly 6 times more. Back in Happy Days 1975, 332 – 8.5 times more.

Number of homicides by California’s young White men under age 25, from the first year tabulated, 1975, to the most recent year, 2024

Sources: California Department of Justice, Crime in California (1975, 1994), Homicide in California (1994-2024).

That is, California’s murder rate (adjusted for population changes) by young White men decades into the supposedly alienating, murder-accelerating online era is actually DOWN a staggering 75% to 80%. Other violent crimes have also fallen precipitously.

This is a shocking, revolutionary trend, paralleling the giant plunge in murder, violence, and crime by California’s increasingly diverse young people of all races over the last half-century.

Yet, the culture-war Left and Right STILL refuse to admit this fantastically positive trend happened alongside growing racial diversity. Their bleak, fictional agendas so desperately need young people always to be bad and getting worse that real trends are a threat that must be suppressed.

Are today’s far rarer Whiteboy murders different?

Culture warriors might respond that today’s young White male murders, though quantitatively far fewer, are qualitatively scarier and more nihilistic. Fair question, but… bullshit again.

It may be that more shootings take place at schools, though we don’t know. Small-casualty school shootings were considered local news prior to the Jonesboro and Columbine massacres in the late 1990s.

Young, White Manson Family’s creepy-crawlies who murdered celebrity “piggies” and dozens of others in the 1960s and ‘70s claimed inspiration from the Bible, Beatles lyrics, and acid. Young White teen Anthony Barbaro shot 14 people at Olean, NY, High School in 1974 in order to kill “himself.” Young White Barbara Ann Spencer shot 9 at San Diego’s Cleveland Elementary School in 1979 because “it was Monday.” You can pack a lot of scary nihilism into motives like that.

Well over 2,000 White males under age 25 were charged with murder in California alone during the 1970s. Maybe the much larger numbers of young White male murderers in the past were nobler, saner, warmer folks than today’s? Run that theory by survivors.

Glass houses

Ball and progressive colleagues, after banging on endlessly about nihilistic chats and toxic manospheres, sometimes tack on a laundry-list of other ills such as gun availability, lack of mental health care, income inequality, COVID isolation, etc.

Even that quick list leaves out the biggest factor – the deteriorating behaviors of Ball’s and colleagues’ own parent-age generation.

Most of the commentators on progressive shows are members of a parent generation that murders at least 900 children every year in substantiated domestic violence – 30 times more children than are murdered at school even in bad years.

Ball is 43. Co-host Saager Enjeti, who also demagogues on “juvenile crime,” is 33. Fiorentini is 38. Kulinski is 37. Do the parent podcasters take the same collective responsibility for their age-mates’ much larger body count that they would impose on young people?

Hell, no. Even when fixating on mass and school shootings, which account for fewer than 1% of American homicides, commentators lie like last year’s bathmat.

The FBI’s latest, 2024 report on mass shootings shows, “the 25-34 age category had the most shooters” and “the shooters’ average age was 39 years old.” It’s not just individual homicides; more children are murdered in mass shootings at home than at school, JAMA Pediatrics reports.

More murders, more mass shootings, more violence… what dark cultures are over-25 generations consuming?

Despite the fact that liberal-Left podcasters’ over-25 generation is better off economically, with higher incomes and lower poverty rates that traditionally protect against risks, America’s 25-44-year-olds are perpetrating more crime, more violence, more suicide, more drug and alcohol overdose, more abusive behaviors, more bullyings, beatings, and murders victimizing children and youths, more mass shootings, and more crazed politics wrecking the futures of young people and the planet, both in gross numbers and per-capita rates compared to younger ages.

Today’s parent generation violently abuses one-third of its kids, emotionally abuses 60%, and subjects one-third to 40% to parents’ and family grownups’ drug/alcohol abuse, criminality, and severe mental health problems in their homes, the 2023 Centers for Disease Control survey reports. Today’s 25-44-year-olds are the first reliably-documented parent generation that is more likely than their teenagers to be arrested, including for violent crimes, public disorder, and even dumbass stuff we used to think only teenagers committed like vandalism, arson, and shoplifting.

Gen Z’s one negative statistic is that they’re more anxious and depressed. They’d be crazy if they weren’t.

Am I being reverse ageist?

Not fair, the average parent might react, we don’t commit crimes, overdose, or (god forbid) abuse or murder our kids. We’re lovely individuals, stellar moms and dads. We don’t hate our teenagers.

True, and that’s the double standard. We grownups demand to be judged as individuals, not as a faceless mass collectively guilty for all the crimes and shootings our agemates do.

Remember the raging that elder America had gone off the rails after that 64-year-old shot more people in Las Vegas in 15 minutes than are shot in ALL 130,000 American schools in 4 years? Oh, wait, there wasn’t any anti-elder raging. Old people have power. Older people vote.

Then, we turn around and deny that same individuality to “young men,” glazing the demographic scapegoat as “young White men” to dodge media euphemists’ use of “young men” and “youth violence” as codewords for “Black.”

What monsters

Amid the crapshow, reporter Ken Klippenstein took a radical step: actually interviewing the assassin’s closest Discord platform friends and obtaining their messaging. What a letdown. Klippenstein found nothing that supported vivid official/media fantasies of godless dark-web manospheric Nihilist Violent Extremist cells slobbering for mayhem.

“The picture that emerges bears little resemblance to the media version,” Klippenstein wrote. He found friendly gamers chatting in Discord forums who were horrified to learn of one of their friend’s murderous deed. Close friends described the shooter as quiet, well-liked, and apolitical. “The friend group who he interacted with on Discord, far from some kind of militia camp or Antifa bunker it’s been portrayed as, represented a range of different political views but mostly talked video games.” Cats were a frequent topic as well.

One of the killer’s online friends led a prayer others joined for Kirk and his family. Far from inflaming murderous conspiracies, the young men online seem deserving of all sides’ praise for reactions far healthier than those of dominant Right-Left conspiratorial foamers.

Enough

To sum up what should be obvious ethics: no collective guilt, no mass generalizations from rare events, no wildly prejudicial assumptions and stereotyping, no scapegoating.

It’s not okay to vilify young people because they have no means of organized response to defamation. Indignance at cultural outrages – yes, there’s bad stuff online, and also in churches, schools, locker rooms, Sunday night poker, on and on – does not justify substituting grossly fabricated assumptions for diligent research.

Krystal Ball, Daily Kos, and other who demagogue this volatile issue owe young men an abject apology.

How the Left is getting Gen Z men and the “gender gap” wrong

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025

Assassinations, unmentionable dead kids, and mass unpersoning

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

This isn’t going to be wimpy both-sidesism. The liberal-Left establishment has universally and vehemently grieved podcaster and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s horrifying assassination, even sanitizing Kirk’s hate-filled legacy while managing to ignore recent nuances.

The liberal-Left’s responses to Kirk’s shooting stand in glaring contrast to the Right’s furious attacks on “the radical Left” and dehumanizings toward Democratic victims. Examples of many: President Trump’s mocking of the near-fatal hammer attack on Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s husband (Kirk himself called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the hammer-wielder), Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee’s and other right-wingers’ smirks (“Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street,” ridiculing Minnesota Gov. Mike Walz) after the assassination of a Democratic legislator by a far-Right gunman. Beyond disgusting.

Mass unpersoning

The links between the mass dehumanization of children and teens whose deaths don’t served established interests that I covered (“the dead kids we don’t care about”) and this week’s larger political hatreds abound. Kirk himself was a gung-ho advocate for releasing the Epstein files documenting elites’ sex-trafficking of children… until Trump’s White House ordered: back off. Then Kirk abruptly went silent. Political exploitation, not young rape victims, took priority. (After lambasting by his fans, Kirk reversed again…sort of.)

Before a shooting suspect had even been identified and motive established, President Trump, in a nationwide address on Thursday, angrily blamed the “radical left” for Kirk’s killing while listing only those few political shootings that victimized Republicans or CEOs and omitting the much longer list of right-wing shooters victimizing Democrats, minorities, and liberals.

Likewise, Fox News host Jesse Watters and dozens of other prominent conservatives declared the right wing is now “at war” with the “radical Left.” Only conservatives are victimized in political violence and only by the Left, they chorused one after another, lies so outrageous on their face they can only signify indifference to liberal and Democrats being injured and killed. “Charlie was one of us,” Watters snarled, the only demographic his brand of Rightist sees as real people.

Trump’s and right-wing pundits’ glaring omission was not because of dementia, ignorance, or even cynical calculation. Take what they said at face value. The president and minions simply don’t see people who hold liberal-Left views as real human beings; therefore, their victimizations by right-wing assailants deserve no notice. Trump said he wouldn’t “waste time” expressing condolences after a Minnesota Democratic leader was assassinated and other Democrats injured by a right-wing killer – nor did any other Republican I’m aware of.

I’m looking for similar statements of indifference or urgings of violence by prominent liberal or left-wing leaders and will publicize if found. One moderate commentator who said Kirk’s “awful words” incite “awful actions,” mild stuff, was summarily fired by MSNBC as “insensitive.” We’ll see if Fox fires Watters and other right-wing regulars like Mark Levin for unhinged ragings and ominous incitements to “avenge” Kirk.

Making dead kids unpersons

However, in the area I write about, the liberal-Left also stands shamefully derelict along with centrists and rightists in their selectively-valued versus who-cares?-unperson status accorded children and teenagers deemed unworthy as political commodities.

Over the past 5 years, the FBI reports, 260 people (overwhelmingly children and teenagers) were murdered at school. Allegations in attorneys general’s court filings indicate a half-dozen more died in suicides plaintiffs blame on cyberbullying and homicides by predators they met online. Given that 35 to 40 million teenagers each average 40 hours at school and 25-30 hours using social media every week – and given that they live in the violence-happy United States of America – schools and social media account for astoundingly tiny fractions of the violent deaths of children and teens, confirmed by multiple analyses as statistically negligible.

Their rarity, of course, doesn’t mean these deaths don’t merit grief and media coverage. Rather, our society’s deep shame is on the opposite side of the issue – the wholesale silence, denial, and even dismissal of American children and teens who died in 8,500 suicides and 11,200 homicides (including at least 4,000 substantiated murders in violence by parents and caretakers) over the last 5 years.

Those kids’ briefly-and-barely-newsworthy deaths failed to serve the immediate, bottom-line agendas of important interests. None even cite the vital context that a child or youth heads into vastly greater odds of violence and shootings when they leave school and go home. Unpersons are unworthy of individual status, collective innocence, and careful analysis.

Official and media indifference to these deaths of young people is not just explained by their commonality, nor their (usually) non-public nature, not even officials’ ignorance and incompetence. Rather, it reflects real societal cruelty. Americans, sociologist John Demos concluded, emotionally invoke the young but in reality don’t care about “other people’s children.” Children and youth become newsworthy only when their suffering and deaths buttress some powerful interest-group’s political and funding needs.

Larger unpersoning trends

Whether expressed against young people by established officials or against liberals and besieged people by right-wing demagogues, several interrelated trends have led to the climate of widespread unpersoning.

One is the large share of Americans who feel personally threatened by America’s increasing racial, cultural, and technological diversification, manifest most visibly in children and youth. In Culture and Commitment (1970, 1978), her career summation, anthropologist-emeritus Margaret Mead warned of the increasingly dangerous “alienation of the elders” whom social change had rendered “immigrants in time” in their own homelands. Aging traditionalists were becoming more hostile against multiracial, technologically savvy young people they saw as “strangers.” “Teen-agers gathered at a street corner are feared like the advance guard of an invading army,” Mead wrote 55 years ago; today, she would add, “teen-agers at keyboards.”

The second, related development is the bizarre extremism fostered by debate over Israel. The daily video onslaught of atrocities in Gaza creates horror in increasing majorities of Americans alongside jarringly contradictory indifference among large majorities of political leaders who continue arming Israel to carry them out. We hear supporters of Palestine condemn hundreds of times the barbaric killings by Hamas of 29 Israeli children and several hundred civilians on October 7, 2023, yet there is no similar outrage by Israel’s supporters against the Israeli Defense Force’s ongoing massacre of tens of thousands of Palestinian children and civilians beginning long before October 2023 and now rising in terrifying intensity.

Modern media independence means today’s public sees American leaders arming an Israel whose leadership openly celebrates the targeted killing of children. Past atrocities such as the Holocaust occurred in appalling volume, but never before has the public been forced to see them graphically unfold in real time.

While growing majorities of Americans recoil in horror at what they see, a significant fraction of Americans react in the opposite way: visuals of Gaza and Middle East slaughter seem to organize and whet their racialized hatreds, building for decades, into an intractable wall of separation.

To Zionists, Palestinians are not real people, and their extermination is acceptable. To President Trump, Watters, and like-minded right-wingers, liberal, minority, and Democratic victims of right-wing assailants are not real people and their murders aren’t worth the breath to mention. To established interests and media, the thousands of children and teens whose deaths from family violence inconveniently hinder powerful interests’ popularity-driven exploitations are not real people deserving of notice or even citation for context.

Today isn’t worse, but… changed

That official, mainstream America foments and prospers from unpersoning does not mean today represents a deteriorated age. In fact, even amid mass shootings and political assassinations, America’s gun murder rate today (5.5 per 100,000 people) is an impressive 23% LOWER in 2023 than at its peak in 1993 (7.1) and looks to fall another 13% in 2024. Americans, especially school-age children and teenagers, are safer from being gunned down now than in the 1990s, 1980s, or 1970s.

As for unpersoning, the pre-1970s Jim Crow era was extraordinarily ugly in its open dehumanization of entire races. The difference is that then, Whites were the large majority everywhere, and so established dominance was assured even amid challenges.

Not so today. In 2025, aging Americans see the young under age 25 as the first generation ever that has no racial majority. It’s not just cities or states like California in which Whites have been a racial minority for years; it is now the country as a whole. As Mead worried, the elders (especially Whites and the fraction of Nonwhites who benefit from right-wing governance) are increasingly radicalized by the increasingly organized belief that the liberal-Left facilitated this viscerally threatening racial diversification purposefully to eradicate Whiteness and traditionalism.

Elders’ hardening attitudes toward the young rooted in fear of the racial change they represent has built as minority populations increased and became more visible, even in rural areas, and now drives today’s harshly indifferent, repressive attitudes. Their multiracialism helps explain why American young people are unprecedentedly attuned to the Palestinian cause while older conservatives and leaders who emerged from the selection process that awards power are so extraordinarily bonded to Israel and frantic to suppress dissent.

Charlie Kirk, though young himself, was at the forefront of the Right’s organized terror crusade against diversity. Gay people should be stoned to death, he said; women should submit to men, transgender people are murderers, Palestine doesn’t exist, Black women lack brains, Muslims and minorities are existential threats, empathy is woke sniveling; all the litany of hate. Still, Kirk was visibly sobered by the surprising opposition to Israel’s atrocities voiced by his own young, conservative supporters (which should give pause to liberal-Left snob-elitists who sniff that young people slavishly ape Kirk and “manosphere” influencers). Kirk should have been allowed to live to rethink his dogmas.

Kirk, who once said “unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year” (“some” = 45,000) are “worth it” to “have a Second Amendment,” was shot to death at a college forum while espousing on gun violence. Conservatives urge prayer as the balm for Minnesota children shot to death while praying. Families, where thousands of American children are murdered, are praised as safe while schools, our safest havens from violence, are vilified as terrifying. We are a country bullet-riddled with irony.

The “teen suicides” and tragedies we don’t care about, Part 2

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

First: the never-mentioned context

Popular discussion of what we call “teenage suicide” and drug overdose is so horrendously messed up that we have to begin with basic context. Below is the CDC’s latest tabulation of suicides and overdose deaths by age group for 2024 and around one-fourth into 2025:

Source: CDC 2025. Overdoses refers to illicit, non-prescribed drugs.

The population sizes from 10-14 through 60-64 are similar, so these numbers indicate relative odds of suicide and overdose by age.

These are tragic numbers, much worse in the United States than in other nations. I would not argue for a second that 4,300 teen age 10-19 deaths from suicides and overdoses in approximately 15 months aren’t heartbreaking, both for the youths and those who cared about them.

Having said that, I will never understand the relentlessly destructive crusade by authorities and media to convince teenagers that suicide and drug abuse are normative to adolescence. In fact, teenagers are substantially less likely to commit suicide or overdose than adults are, a fact that should top all analyses.

In that respect, wouldn’t the 44,500 deaths from suicides and fatal overdoses among 40-49-year-olds – the average ages of teens’ parents, relatives, and nearby adults – also be terrible tragedies occurring at a level 10 times higher?

Deaths are just the iceberg tip of much larger abuse, mental health, addiction, absence, and violence issues that afflict troubled families in which millions of teenagers are growing up.

Have media-featured psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Jean Twenge, other popular commentators, political leaders, health professionals, and news reports shown any sensitivity or caring toward children and teens suffering parents’ and nearby adults’ suicide and drug abuse? Have any reported CDC survey findings that teens with troubled parents are much more likely to be troubled themselves? Somewhere between rarely and never.

Second: Teens have told us what drives suicide – we just don’t like their answers

The “teen suicide” discussion veers farther off the rails when we examine authorities’ rampant distortions of causal factors.

As I point out regularly (because no one else is), thousands of America’s teenagers told our largest, most definitive CDC adolescent health survey in no uncertain terms – twice – what the biggest factors contributing to their suicidal feelings and attempts are.

Teenagers’ answers on the massive 2021 and 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Surveys were so consistent and compelling that CDC analysts concluded in the in-house Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that three major childhood experiences – parents’ and household grownups’ “emotional abuse”, “physical abuse”, and “poor mental health” – were the driving factors in teenagers’ “suicide attempts (89.4%), seriously considering attempting suicide (85.4%), and prescription opioid misuse (84.3%).”

That is, for the factors we know about, nearly all teenage suicide and opiate abuse are associated with parents’ and household adults’ abuse, violence, and troubles. Virtually none are driven by social media.

So, how do authorities (mis)characterize these cold numbers?

Again, let’s look at all the things public commentators and authorities leave out. The 2023 CDC survey finds, not shockingly, that teens who are abused by parents and household adults and have violent homes are far more likely to suffer poor mental health, make suicide attempts, and harm themselves.

Sources for tables: CDC, 2023.

No ambiguity there. Before skeptics shrug that teens always think their parents are crazy and abusive, consider that these are the same teens on the same survey whose answers authorities incessantly cite as proving the teenage “mental health crisis.”

The CDC survey contains another never-mentioned bombshell: abused teens from abusive and violent families, particularly girls, use social media considerably more than teens from healthy families.

I wish I was making this next part up…

… because I can’t believe it, either. The pretzel-twisted consensus of leading officials and commentators from this compelling information seems to be:

· Teens are being truthful when they report their levels of depression and social media use; therefore, social media is causing their depression.

· However, those same exact teens on the same surveys are not being truthful when they report widespread abuse and violence by parents and household grownups; therefore, those survey answers can just be ignored.

Are top health, political, interest-group, and media-quotable authorities like Haidt and Twenge simply incompetent charlatans ignorant of the basic data shown on major health surveys, or dishonest distorters of crucial facts? We can certainly see the mentality that enables the Jeffrey Epstein perfidy.

Now it gets really bad

The CDC survey further shows that for abused teens, more social media use may be associated with less suicide and self harm.

At first glance, this table would seem to validate concerns about social media. Looking only at the top three lines, abused teens who seldom use social media (less than daily) are considerably LESS likely to report frequently poor mental health (48.4%) than abused teens who use social media several times a day (62.4%).

Officials and popular commentators abruptly stop there: look, social media use and the cyberbullying it fosters makes teens more depressed. Don’t go any further!

Of course, that could be a reverse correlation: perhaps depression makes teens use social media more. What evidence suggests this is the more likely scenario?

Look at the next 6 lines. Abused teens who seldom use social media report being LESS depressed but MORE likely to attempt suicide (16.6%) and harm themselves (5.7%) than abused teens who use social media often every day (14.4% and 3.1%, respectively).

Presented more starkly and singling out teenage girls about whom authorities vent so much concern: 40% of abused girls who seldom use social media attempt suicide and 14% harm themselves, compared to 25% and 6%, respectively, of abused girls who use social media several times a day. Those are large differences reported by the most troubled population.

Talk about turning discussion on its head. We’re constantly hammered with zero-evidence emotionalities that more social media use drives more teens to suicide and self-harm when the best evidence indicates the opposite is more likely.

Again, though, we have to be wary of which way associations and correlations (especially ones that conveniently seem to validate our pet theories) really go. Perhaps teens who use social media more are simply more social, more inclined to seek help from others, in the first place. That would make social media less a savior of troubled teens and more just one of their self-help tools.

In any case, I can’t be the only one who looked at the CDC’s 2021 and 2023 surveys who noticed this obvious but fascinating pattern. So, wouldn’t you think these intriguing numbers from our largest, best surveys of teenagers would give authorities pause – at least provoke calls for further investigation – before rushing to demand wholesale bans and restrictions on teens’ cellphone and social media use?

If so, please send me your bank account passwords

I credit authorities, politicians, and media-beloved figures like psychologists Haidt and Twenge with scholarly awareness of teens’ complicated answers. It doesn’t take a post-doctorate stat-phenom to do cross-tabulation and regression analyses.

The CDC even tried to help them by issuing a colorful public report weakly blaming social media, cyberbullying, and peer bullying for teen troubles. Unfortunately for that cause, the report’s own numbers showed that even assuming social media and peer bullying are the only factors in teens’ lives, they are still associated with only trivial fractions of teens’ poor mental health and not at all with teens’ suicides… nothing like the 84%-89% associations the CDC found for parents’ abuses and afflictions.

Then, former Surgeon General Vivek Murtha issued a generally informative report on parents’ disturbingly widespread, rising mental health, drug/alcohol, and abusiveness that, well, just might, sort of, maybe, in the nicest wording possible, help explain teens’ mental health problems. That report, like the CDC’s survey analysis, was largely ignored by popular authorities and commentators.

Bummer

Even if science decidedly is not on their side, political leaders, pop-commentators, and media reporters can still invoke the old fallback: wildly hyping rare anecdotes in which a teen’s suicide or overdose possibly could be blamed on social media, peer bullying, and/or Artificial Intelligence (AI) and embellished as a “wake-up call!” revealing a heretofore hidden teen crisis.

The New York Times and dozens of popular media recently featured a teenager who committed suicide after receiving bad advice from an AI robot. The New Yorker ran a lengthy article on a teen who committed suicide after encountering bullying on social media, also a media theme when a case can be found.

Their stories deserve coverage (which they get) – and, even more, their full stories and context (which they never get).

The best evidence suggests small fractions of teens and adults have prior troubles that make them vulnerable to exacerbation by social media and AI technology, just as to family abuses, religion, harsh schooling, and other aspects of life. (For example, 82% of teens who tell CDC surveys they’ve been cyberbullied also report being emotionally abused by parents and household adults, yet another never-mentioned fact.)

If we only consider externally-driven destroyers of young lives, why aren’t stories like the mentally disturbed mother who hounded her severely troubled husband and young son into killing themselves – exactly what the NYT feature accused one teen’s AI robot of doing – as well as more parent-inflicted murders and suicides victimizing children featured just the week this is written, far more prevalent “wake-up calls”?

Because we care only about child and teen deaths that buttress profitable political agendas. “We are rushing into the same mistakes we made with social media,” declares a prominent commentator regarding AI and youth. I agree – for exactly the opposite reasons he cites.

We are allowing rampant misinformation and extremely rare, sensational cases (including those in which key facts have to be suppressed) to throttle discussion and policy that vitally affects children and teenagers. This isn’t caring about young people. It’s betrayal and cruelty.

The murdered kids we don’t care about, Part 1

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| September 2025

The nation remains fixated on last week’s shooting at a Minneapolis school, in which 2 children were killed and 17 children and 1 adult injured. Mass shootings deserve the anguish they engender and the vital context they rarely get.

Around 25 to 30 American children and youths are killed in mass shootings every year, including in school shootings. If we take the worst recent year on record, 35 children and teens died in homicides at school, including both mass shootings and individual murders.

School shootings garner massive press, politician, and public attention, each fostering emotional declarations that schools are so drastically dangerous compared to the presumed safety of homes that parents must fear sending their kids to school, along with demands that parents monitor their “children’s” internet behaviors (the Minneapolis shooter was 23).

Survivors and parents victimized by school shootings understandably focus on these tragedies. But health officials (especially the Surgeon General), medical and mental health professionals, academic “experts,” and political leaders owe a larger duty to young people to advance sound policy that prioritizes dangers.

Even if we consider only mass shootings, one 64-year-old shot more people in Las Vegas in 15 minutes than are shot in all 130,000 U.S. schools in four years.

Very few provide crucial contexts – and they’re ignored

One rare exception is the Giffords Law Center: “Schools are generally safe havens from the gun violence that is so prevalent elsewhere… at least 50 times as many murders of young people ages 5–18 occurred away from school than at school.”

“Mass shootings account for less than 1% of all firearms deaths in the United States,” adds Dr. Los Lee, Harvard Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine professor. “For children, it’s also less than 1%… a very small number.”

No one touches that reality – and it gets worse.

The Centers for Disease Control reports that 1,996 children and youths under age 18 were victims of homicides in 2024, 1,355, or two-thirds, by guns. The United States’ child homicide rate is 10 times that of Canada, 15 times that of France, 20 times that of the UK, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Australia; and 60 times that of Japan.

Where, then, are most children murdered?

While 25 to 30 children and youth are killed in mass shootings (including at school) every year, 850 to 900 are murdered in substantiated cases of violence at home. Another 1,000-plus children, nearly all infants, die from criminal neglect every year, often the result of parents’ poverty, mental illness, addiction, jailing, and/or absence.

“When American parents are surveyed about their concerns, everyone is worried about school shootings,” a JAMA Pediatrics study author said. “The message from our data is really simple: Our fears are incorrectly placed. Our homes may, in fact, be more dangerous than schools.”

May be? Thirty times more children and teens are murdered, and 8 times more school-age kids are shot to death, at home by grownups than at school.

Nine in 10 of the killers are parents, parents’ partners, or other legal caretakers. In fact, 6 in 10 children killed in mass shootings (the ones you don’t hear about) are murdered by parents, not by school shooters, gangs, other kids. FBI cross-tabulations show 85% of child victims are murdered by adults; half of the murderers of children are 25 and older.

We see fleeting mentions of their deaths: “Father admits lining up 3 young sons, shooting them;” “Father in custody after 3 boys, mother shot to death… 8 year-old girl also shot, in serious condition;” “Father who murdered daughter shot son in head;” “Stepdad in custody after boy, 9, is shot dead;” “Stepdad fatally shoots 15-year-old stepson over unfinished chores” … the devastating headlines just from recent months march on and on, quickly shrugged off.

No agonized commentaries, zero official attention, in contrast to the avalanche that followed the Minnesota and every other school shooting. Mass shootings that get intense attention are rare, sensational, devastating, and public, the definition of “news.” That doesn’t excuse the fact that few care enough about “the children!” to talk honestly about the most fundamental issue: who is murdering them, and where.

Instead of acknowledging the harsh truth that the biggest single reason guns are “the leading cause of external death for America’s children and adolescents” is because American adults are shooting them, officials and commentators indulge pleasing pretenses. 99% of the official/media discussion fixates on children killed by other children, teens, or “young men” – powerless groups at whom it is easy to point accusing fingers.

Confronting the enormous toll household grownups take on children and youth raises questions no politically-attuned entity would ever raise: are American grownups responsible enough to keep guns, especially in homes?

The result is that decade after decade, thousands of murdered American kids remain unrecognized, uncared-about, too inconvenient for America’s fragile politics to acknowledge.

The same rush to exploit the tiny number of youths’ suicides that anti-youth and anti-online critics believe they can blame on social-media or Artificial Intelligence versus the vastly larger numbers connected to abusive and severely troubled parents and families will be the subject of Part 2.