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Claim: Twenty-six of the deadliest 27 mass shooters in the U.S. came from fatherless homes. In August 2019, as the topic of mass shootings again gripped the United States after back-to-back
massacres, numerous pundits and social media users attempted to suss out the reason why such attacks keep happening. Some blamed gun-control laws and a rise in white supremacy, while others
laid the blame on mental illness, video games, a lack of thoughts and prayers, gay marriage, and fatherless households. The latter assertion about fathers isn't uncommon. One supposed
statistic often circulated after a mass shooting is that 26 out of the 27 deadliest mass shooters in the U.S. came from fatherless homes. On Aug. 5, Fox News played a clip of Dr. Warren
Farrell offering this statistic before an interview: [embedded content] This statistic is both outdated and incorrect. The number is most often shared via a link to an article on Real Clear
Politics. That article, however, is simply a blurb linking to a post on Patheos, which in turn cites heavily from an opinion piece by Suzanne Venker that was published on Fox News in
February 2018. If we follow the trail a bit further, we arrive at a 2015 article in The Federalist about the impact fatherless homes may have on young men (and more specifically mass
shooters). However, _that_ article did not state that "26 out of the 27 deadliest mass shooters came from fatherless homes." Instead, that article claimed that seven of the
deadliest mass shootings were perpetrated by males under the age of 30, and out of that seven, only one was raised by his biological father: > On CNN’s list of the “27 Deadliest Mass
Shootings In U.S. > History,” seven of those shootings were committed by young (under > 30) males since 2005. Of the seven, only one — Virginia Tech > shooter Seung-Hui Cho (who had
been mentally unstable since > childhood) — was raised by his biological father throughout > childhood. When The Federalist first published the article, the most recent shooting
listed in CNN's article, "27 Deadliest Mass Shootings in U.S. History," had occurred on June 17, 2015. Since then, 12 more mass shootings have been added to that list. The
most recent mass-shooting suspect in the U.S., Connor Betts, who allegedly killed 10 people in Dayton, Ohio, on Aug. 4, 2019, was raised by both a father and mother. We examined the original
CNN list the Federalist article cited and attempted to find out if any of the other listed shooters was raised by a father. This information was not readily available from previous studies
or databases, and newspaper records didn't always provide specific information about familial relations. Furthermore, it's unclear if the "fatherless" household claim
would include stepfathers, adoptive fathers, or divorced parents. Because the Federalist article originally pointed to males under 30, it's also unclear if this "fatherless"
examination should include mass shooters over the age of 30. For the purposes of this article, we searched contemporaneous news reports to see if any of the shooters originally listed in
CNN's "27 Deadliest Mass Shootings in U.S. History" article grew up in households with a father. We found that several of them did. Seung-Hui Cho, a 23-year-old who killed 32
people at Virginia Tech in 2007, was raised by both a father and a mother. So was George Hennard, who killed 23 people in Killeen, Texas, in 1991; Charles Whitman, who killed 17 people at
the University of Texas in Austin in 1966; Nidal Malik Hasan, who fatally shot 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009; Jiverly Wong, who killed 13 in 2009 in Binghamton, New York; and Aaron Alexis,
who fatally shot 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013. James Huberty, who killed 21 people at a McDonald's in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego, California, in 1984, was
raised by a single father (and later a father and stepmother) after his biological mother abandoned the family. In short, the claim that "26 out of the 27 deadliest mass shooters came
from fatherless homes" is based on a misreading of outdated statistics. Furthermore, this claim was based on a list of the "worst mass shooting" incidents (what appears to be
eight or more deaths), and so did not include all of the mass shootings in the U.S. As this list only represented a small portion of the total number of mass shootings as of the time it was
compiled, it simply does not provide enough data to come to any conclusions about how a mass shooter is impacted by a fatherless home. SOURCES McBride, Jessica. "Connor Betts: 5 Fast
Facts You Need to Know." _Heavy_. 7 August 2019. Hasson, Peter. "Guess Which Mass Murderers Came From A Fatherless Home." _The Federalist_. 14 July 2015. _Real
Clear Politics_. "Of 27 Deadliest Mass Shooters, 26 of Them Were Fatherless." 27 February 2018. Meckler, Mark. "Of the 27 Deadliest Mass Shooters, 26 of Them Had One
Thing in Common." _Patheos_. 20 February 2018. Venker, Suzanne. "The Desperate Cry of America's Boys." _Fox News_. 18 February 2018. Watts, Jonathan.
"Gunman's Brooding Disturbed His Family." _The Guardian_. 19 April 2007. Gushee, Steve. "Whitman’s Father Copes by Suppressing Memories." _The
Statesman_. 4 August 1996. Terry, Don. "Portrait of Texas Killer: Impatient and Troubled." _The N__ew York Times_. 18 October 1991. _The New York Times_. "The Life
and Career of Major Hasan." Retrieved 5 August 2019. Chen, Peter. "Jiverly Wong's Father: What Prompted Mass Killing in Binghamton Remains a Mystery."
_Syracuse.com_. 13 April 2009. Vargas, Theresa; Hendrix, Steve; Fisher, Marc. "Washington Shooter Aaron Alexis: Buddhist '9/11 Rescuer' Had Anger Issues, Friends
Say." _The Sydney Morning Herald_. 17 September 2013. Wallace, Kelly. "After Mass Shootings, Do Parents Shoulder Some of the Blame?" _CNN_. 7 October 2015.
Wilcox, Bradford. "Sons of Divorce, School Shooters." _National Review_. 16 December 2013. Fry, Wil. "Maybe It’s The Missing Fathers? No, It’s Not."
_wilcfry.com_. 25 March 2018. _CNN_. "Deadliest Mass Shootings in Modern US History Fast Facts." CNN Library." 5 August 2019.