By John J. Duncan Jr.

duncanj@knoxfocus.com

On my first day as judge in 1982, Gary Tulloch, then the Chief Probation Counselor for East Tennessee, told me that 98% of the defendants in felony cases came from broken homes.

He would have been much more accurate to have said they came from father-absent households.

He was a little high, but the overwhelming majority did come from homes where the fathers had left.

In my almost 7 ½ years as a judge, probably 98% of the defendants pled guilty and applied for probation.

I went through over ten thousand cases, and everyday I would read statements like "defendants father left to get pack of cigarettes and never returned," or "defendant's father left when defendant was two and never came back."

I thought about all this in relation to the horrible killings of 19 children and two teachers at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.

It seems that most of the mass killings that have been done over the last many years have been done by loners who have spent most of their lives staring at computers and playing video games.

We have addicted young people to the computers, "smart" phones, iPad, etc.  Many young people cannot look people in the eye and have much more interaction with machines than with other live human beings.

I wrote in one of my newsletters to my constituents several years ago that I wish the schools would go technology-free at least one day a week and force the kids to think

There is so much addiction to phones and computers that people's brains seem to be turning to mush. Some people can't even remember a phone number. Some are turning to games like Sudoku to help stave off early dementia.

I don't know what public relations genius came up with the words "computer literate" but I have noticed that some who know how to use computers are dumb as dirt about everything else.

Former Judge Bill Swann, one of the smartest men I know, sent me some interesting statistics after the killings in Texas.

The report he sent said the U.S. is third in murders throughout the world. But if you don't count the murders in Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., St. Louis, and New Orleans, the U.S. is then 189th in murders and all five cities have the toughest gun laws in the world.

Whenever there is a mass killing in the U.S., the liberal media is quick to point out that most other countries don't have the murder rate that we do.

It may not be politically correct or even socially permissible to point out that the real problem is too many young Black and Brown men are growing up in father-absent households. A report in one recent but unfortunately typical year said 53.5% of U.S. murders were committed by Blacks and 20.8% by Hispanic or Latino people. And Black leaders who conduct demonstrations and press conferences the 22 or 23 times a year that a white policeman kills a Black person say nothing about the over 90% of Blacks killed by other Blacks.

When families stayed together, and kids were not addicted to computers, we did not have the mass shootings of recent years.

The late Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, said he used to take his shotgun on the New York City subways to go hunting.

There is not much crime and drug addiction from young men with hunting licenses.

I don't even own a gun, but I believe we would have fewer murders if boys, of whatever race or ethnicity, were out in the woods hunting with their fathers instead of spending so much time alone in their bedrooms playing violent video games on their computers.

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