Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul on Tuesday said that broken families are to blame for the recent unrest in Baltimore, the Washington Post reported.

"There are so many things we can talk about," he told conservative host Laura Ingraham on her radio show when she asked him to explain the violence. "It's something we talk about not in the immediate aftermath but over time: The breakdown of family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society," the Kentucky senator added.

Paul insisted that describing the incidents as race riots would unduly simplify the issue.

"This isn't just a racial thing," he said. "It goes across racial boundaries."

Cleanup crews have descended on Maryland's largest city, where rioters had looted stores, thrown rocks and bricks at police and set cars on fire, CNN noted. Paul said the situation in Baltimore was "depressing," "sad and "scary"; when he traveled through the city on Monday night, he was "glad the train didn't stop," the 52-year-old admitted.

As part of what the Washington Post called the presidential contender's "outreach to the black community," Paul has mentioned the absence of black fathers before, typically in the context of racial discrimination when it comes to imprisonment.

"If we're for families with a mother and father around, we need to be for fixing the criminal justice system," the senator at an historically black Maryland college earlier this year.

But the issue of single-parent households is not a problem limited to the black community, the Huffington Post pointed out, citing a Pew Research Center study that shows that since 1960, the number of such households has increased across all racial groups.

"There is no significant difference between black and white fathers, as far as time spent with their children," the website summarized the study's findings. Black fathers are more likely to live in separate households, but about 67 percent of them do see their children at least once a month if they do not live with them, the Huffington Post added.