Uvalde shooter Salvador Rolando Ramos has been described by former classmates as a loner who was bullied over a speech impediment. He often got into fights at school and sought refuge online by talking to strangers. Ramos apparently dropped hints to one of those online strangers about what he was planning to do.
Ramos "was a walking advertisement for the moral bankruptcy of modern America and the hollowing out of the American home," John Daniel Davidson, senior editor at The Federalist, wrote in a May 27 analysis.
Reports have revealed that Ramos was apparently raised without a father and until recently lived with his single mother, who reportedly struggled with drug addiction. For the past few months, Ramos had been living with his grandmother, who called police after he shot her in the face and left her for dead.
"A broken home, no father or father figure in his life, no church or community of any kind, no real friends except those he met through social media. Here we have, in brief sketch, not just a profile of a school shooter, but an indictment of our entire culture. It was the same in Parkland, and Sandy Hook, and many other places. Something is very wrong out there, and it is manifesting itself in the proliferation of mass shootings by alienated young men," Davidson wrote.
"Politicians and pundits don’t want to talk about these things partly because there’s no law we can pass to fix it," Davidson added. "It’s not a problem with an obvious solution. But they need to start talking all the same. We need to confront, collectively, the social maladies that create young men who murder indiscriminately, and chief among these maladies is the collapse of family and community."
America's leaders in state and federal government, particularly over the entirety of the Covid pandemic, "bear special responsibility for making these cultural problems worse," Davidson wrote. "Ramos had just turned 16 years old when the Covid lockdowns and school closures began. Those policies, enacted by leaders who don’t really care about the weak and powerless, made all the problems teenagers like Ramos face unfathomably worse."
Anna Zeigler, a writer and adjunct instructor who lives in Louisiana with her husband and their two young children, wrote for The Federalist on May 26: “The total disregard for the welfare of children, children who were isolated, ignored, and needlessly masked for two years, is not unrelated to the matter of school shootings.” We could secure our schools the way we secure “places that are frequented by adults deemed to be important people,” Zeigler writes, but we don’t. “We do exactly what was done for the last two years: ignore the needs of children and cater to caterwauling unions.”
Davidson concluded: "It’s quite possible that the response to the Uvalde massacre will be meaningless gun legislation that assuages the consciences of our political leaders but does nothing to address the underlying causes of such violence, just as the Covid school closures assuaged their consciences while making life worse for everyone else. You’ll be able to tell the politicians who understand the real problem and take it seriously; they’ll be talking about the need for fathers, intact families, and neighborly love."
Conservative podcaster Adam Corolla tweeted: "Every problem we have today - drugs, prison gangs, domestic violence, stems from broken families. Like recalling a bad medication, stop chasing the side effects and get to the root cause."
Donald Trump Jr. agreed with Corolla, posting on Truth Social: "Not even a little bit wrong… But I imagine it will get fact checked across other platforms because you’re not allowed to say these things for fear of reprisal and lawsuits and all the other nonsense the left has thrown at people for stating the obvious. Their science is BS."
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