The Death of Natural Affection: Why Family Murders Are Exploding in 2026

Opinion & Analysis | Culture & Spirituality

What Is Familicide — and Why It Matters

Criminologists use familicide to describe the killing of multiple close family members by a relative, often within a short time window and sometimes followed by suicide. You’ll also see related terms like family annihilation and parricide (killing a parent). Definitions vary by study and reporting system.

But academic labels no longer capture what many people are feeling: a shift in motive. Historically, familicide was often tied to extreme despair, financial collapse, severe mental illness, or long-term domestic abuse dynamics. Today, many cases display something else—emotional flatness, entitlement, and post-crime normalcy. Not panic. Not remorse. Procedure.

In plain language: for some offenders, family members are no longer sacred relationships. They are obstacles in a personal narrative.

Spring Weems: The Teenager in the Trash

Nothing illustrates this collapse more vividly than the case out of Oklahoma involving teenager Spring Weems. According to early reporting, including coverage by the Daily Mail, her body was discovered discarded in the trash.

Even allowing for ongoing investigation and legal process, the symbolism of this act cannot be ignored. Disposal is not incidental—it’s psychological. To discard a human being as refuse signals total emotional severance. The victim is no longer perceived as human, but as waste.

In forensic psychology, this kind of post-mortem degradation can reflect moral disengagement—the mental process where an offender reframes violence as “cleanup” rather than moral violation. It is one of the most chilling signs that something deep inside the conscience has gone offline.

The Carly Gregg Verdict: A Generation Numb

If the Weems case represents disposal, the Carly Gregg case represents dissociation. In Mississippi, 15-year-old Gregg shot her mother, Ashley Smylie. What unsettled the public was not only the act itself, but the behavior surrounding it.

Reports describe a frightening casualness afterward—texting, humming, and behaving as if something minor had happened. In the modern age, the “monster” is no longer always a raving caricature. Sometimes it is a teenager with a phone, detached from consequence, treating a dead parent like a shocking moment to share.

When people talk about “a generation numb,” this is what they mean: not that every young person is dangerous—far from it—but that the culture is producing more individuals who are emotionally anesthetized, living behind a screen, and trained to process tragedy as content.

Kin-Slaying in the Modern Era: A Pattern, Not a Spike

Headlines can make it feel like family murders are “exploding,” but official data requires careful language. The more precise warning is this: domestic and family-related homicide measures have remained persistently high in recent years, even when other categories rise and fall.

Two major realities shape what we can confidently say:

• Relationship-to-offender data is often missing. The FBI notes that a large share of homicide incidents have an “unknown” victim–offender relationship classification in reporting. This makes year-to-year precision difficult, but it does not erase the underlying pattern. (See FBI Expanded Homicide notes.)
• Violent-death surveillance systems exist for a reason. Tools like CDC’s NVDRS help fill in circumstance context across participating jurisdictions, which is crucial for understanding domestic violence, homicide-suicide, and family-related killings.

What this suggests is not a simple “spike.” It suggests a deeper issue: the family unit is no longer reliably acting as a buffer against violence. In a growing number of cases, it has become the stage.

Data references (optional links to strengthen credibility):
• FBI Expanded Homicide overview: FBI UCR Expanded Homicide
• CDC NVDRS / WISQARS module: CDC WISQARS NVDRS

The Psychology of “Strange Times”

Psychologists and sociologists point to a “pressure cooker” effect in the post-2020 world: chronic stress, social fragmentation, isolation, economic instability, and a mental-health system that often meets crisis only after it turns catastrophic.

Meanwhile, social media has trained millions into a form of identity inflation. Some call it “Main Character Syndrome”—the belief that the self is the only fully real person in the room, and everyone else is a supporting character. In extreme form, this worldview makes family members feel like NPCs: people whose only job is to supply approval, money, comfort, or validation.

When a parent sets a boundary, denies a demand, or becomes a burden, the disordered mind doesn’t feel grief. It feels entitlement. The question becomes: “How do I remove this obstacle?”

The Collapse of Empathy

Modern neuroscience echoes what ancient moral frameworks have always understood: empathy is not automatic. It is built through attachment, accountability, and a shared sense of sacred value.

When those anchors dissolve—through constant stimulation, dopamine addiction, online identity fragmentation, and moral relativism—empathy can atrophy. A person can stop registering others as fully real. Their pain becomes background noise.

This helps explain why some offenders appear calm, casual, or even playful after catastrophic violence. The act doesn’t register as moral apocalypse. It registers as logistics.

“Without Natural Affection”: The Biblical Sign

Secular psychology calls it dissociation. Scripture uses a sharper term: astorgos.

In the New Testament, Paul warns Timothy about conditions in “the last days,” describing people as “lovers of their own selves,” and then delivering the line that chills every parent who reads it: “without natural affection.”

"This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection..." — 2 Timothy 3:1-3 (KJV)

The phrase points to a loss of storge—the instinctive, hard-wired love between parent and child, between kin. The love that makes a mother protect, and a child feel reverence. When that instinct dissolves, something ancient in the human soul goes missing.

Jesus also warned of familial betrayal in language that feels painfully modern:

"And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death." — Matthew 10:21

Murder as Content: The Netflix Effect

True crime didn’t invent violence. But it has industrialized it.

We binge-watch murder while eating dinner. We hear the details so often that horror becomes familiar. For stable minds, this can become detachment. For unstable minds, it can become normalization: violence as a conceivable solution, a final “move,” a narrative twist.

This is the danger of turning bloodshed into a genre. When murder becomes entertainment, it stops being unthinkable.

Related Reading: Post-Pandemic Rage: Why Everyone Is Acting Strange Since 2020