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When a young man was shot to death three weeks ago at Hickory Trails in Greensboro, this newspaper's editorial board declared the broad-daylight killing "unacceptable." Rightly so. "Also inexcusable," the editors continued, "is the neglect by the institutions responsible for the safety and welfare of the residents of this public housing complex."

Those who dig deeper into this and other senseless killings, said the editors, will find that "the stories get darker: gangs, drugs, guns and fear."

Nudged and nearly trampled by an unacknowledged elephant in the room, I clipped and saved the editorial. With all due respect to the editorial board, the institution most "responsible for the safety and welfare of the residents" of Hickory Trails is neither the Greensboro Housing Authority nor the Greensboro Police Department; rather, it is the families themselves -- fathers, in particular. The hot breath on the back of your neck is from the elephant in the room: the absence of fathers, not only in public housing communities, but in most poverty-stricken areas, in Greensboro and elsewhere.

More often than not, those who investigate serious crimes uncover an ugly truth swept under the rug: About 70 percent of the perpetrators hail from single-parent households. "The stories get darker," indeed. Mentioning the cultural catastrophe brought about by single-parent households may be "insensitive," but ignoring the source of the problem will solve nothing.

The inevitable consequence of fatherless households, and fatherless public housing complexes, is "gangs, drugs, guns and fear." Neighborhoods overrun by drug-dealing, cap-busting thugs are neighborhoods deficient in fathers.

This is not to say that it is impossible for a single mother to successfully raise children. Many kids from fatherless households do well in school and steer clear of trouble. But the deck is stacked against them. Statistics on the matter are indisputably grim and render obvious the ideal environment in which to raise children: a stable marriage, in the presence of both biological parents.

There are innumerable sources available from which statistics on the children of single-parent households may be derived. Some of you prefer liberal sources, such as President Obama, who said the following in his Father's Day remarks last year: "Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of schools, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison."

Some of you prefer conservative sources, and Ann Coulter certainly qualifies. In her latest book, "Guilty," she writes that, "Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways, juvenile delinquents, and child murderers involve children raised by single mothers." Coulter cites a 1990 study by the Progressive Policy Institute which found that, "after controlling for single motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates disappeared." (When Coulter presented these and other facts to the public policy experts that host "The View," she was attacked and ridiculed. No one attempted to debunk her evidence.)

Despite its harm to children, the single-parent family is becoming the norm. The Associated Press reported in March that births were higher in 2007 "across the board," but "especially among unwed mothers." Children born to single mothers, the AP reports, "reached an all-time high of 40 percent." This does not bode well for orderly, safe neighborhoods.

A report on child health in North Carolina released last month suggests that we have joined the ominous, national trend.

News & Record reporter Jason Hardin reported that, although the state improved on six of 10 measures of child health, "it also slid in three areas, including the percentage living in poverty and in single-parent families." Poverty and single-parent families are nearly synonymous.

In the latest National Review (Aug. 24), Duncan Currie observes that "the poverty rate among married-couple families is about five times lower than it is among female-headed families with children." When neighborhoods are destroyed by a culture of drugs and violence, poverty is often cited as the source. And certainly, poverty fuels the desperation that can lead to lawlessness.

But if we ignore a primary cause of poverty -- the single-parent family -- we will achieve nothing. Social services, because they merely alleviate poverty in the short term, are the equivalent of mowing over the weed-infested lawn; so long as the root is intact, the weed will return. The temporary fix is doomed to fail.

The notion seems quaint today but, as recently as a half-century ago, single mothers were stigmatized. Unfortunately, we can't "turn back the clock," but it is possible to retrieve from the past the attitudes and practices that benefit children and serve the common good.

Charles Davenport Jr. (cdavenportjr@hotmail. com) is a freelance columnist who appears alternate Sundays in the News & Record.