When news broke of the Minneapolis shooter who opened fire on children attending mass at a Catholic school, news media carried the same photo of the suspect’s mother, no mention of a husband or father. It was a dead giveaway — “Robin” Westman’s parents were divorced. This important fact was only casually mentioned by a handful of media, days later.
To date, 434 school shootings have occurred since Columbine, resulting in 218 deaths, 510 injuries, and 397,000 children experiencing gun violence at school.
A 2018 international academic study found a strong link between childhood separation from parents and an “elevated risk for later violent criminality.” (The study specifically excluded children with deceased parents.) A subsequent nationwide analysis bolstered these results, finding a strong association between two-parent households and cities with markedly less crime. Indeed, nearly every school shooting in 2013 involved young men with divorced or never married parents.
“The social scientific evidence about the connection between violence and broken homes could not be clearer,” says Brad Wilcox, Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and considered a leading authority on marriage and family.
Westman’s parents divorced in 2013. Westman would have been about 12, on the cusp of adolescence. After the split, Westman, a biological male who later identified as a woman, bounced from school to school. And dad remarried — the shooter’s manifesto mentions the step-mom.
Journalist Andy Ngo reported on his Substack that the shooter’s mother moved to Florida in 2022 after the divorce. A source close to the Westman family told Ngo that “[Robert] was the youngest of five children and experienced a difficult divorce between his parents,” and that “Shortly after [their mother] signed the form for Bobby, she moved to Florida after he turned 18. She was heartbroken over all of this.”
Like Westman, the 2024 Georgia school shooter struggled with his parents’ divorce. Likewise, the Sandy Hook, Centennial, Colorado, and 15-year-old Michigan school shooters.
Decades of research also demonstrate solid connections between divorce and single-parent households, on the one hand, and other serious child outcomes, on the other. For example, boys in single mother households have twice the rate of juvenile delinquency. Divorce increases the risk for depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide, which can be particularly acute during adolescence. The evidence Westman left behind exhibited deep levels of stress, self-loathing, and hate. Westman alluded to school suspensions and smoked marijuana. Then, after killing two children, Westman committed suicide, just like the Sandy Hook and Colorado school shooters.
According to a central finding from a 2024 marriage report, “young men from non-intact families are more likely to land in prison or jail than they are to graduate from college.” Westman appears not to have even graduated from high school. Still, divorce rates remain high, marriage rates plummet, and innocent children die.
Some critics contend that the evidence of correlation between family structure and violent behavior doesn’t rise to the level of causation. They misunderstand the nature of social science research to begin with, which rarely isolates single causes and effects. Nevertheless, it has long guided public policy decisions on everything from economics to public health to education and crime. Even criminals are put to death using a legal standard that doesn’t require certainty.
Moreover, the 2018 study about family structure and violence referenced above examined a cohort of 1.3 million children! And the most extensive longitudinal study of longevity ever conducted, which found that children of divorce died on average five years earlier than those from intact families, analyzed eight decades worth of data. And yet, parents and policymakers continue shutting down even modest divorce reform efforts aimed at giving struggling parents the help they need.
Quite clearly, no amount of certainty or science will satisfy parents hell-bent on placing their own fleeting “happiness” above the best interests of their children. Instead, school shootings bring out the same calls for gun control, elimination of the Second Amendment, and allocation of more taxpayer dollars for mental health and gender-affirming care. Anything but a call for parents to also step up and be parents.
But won’t reforming divorce laws and keeping more families intact produce more volatile home environments in which shooters flourish? No.
The phenomenon of school shootings sits squarely within the milieu of family breakdown. Indeed, the 1999 Columbine massacre is widely considered both the starting point and benchmark for these events.
Most divorces involve low-conflict marriages. But when those same parents remain married, the odds overwhelmingly favor the health and welfare of their children. And the grave and growing epidemic of fatherlessness, which produces poor outcomes for boys, results from the absence of fathers in the home, not their presence.
Obviously, most boys with divorced parents won’t become school shooters. But the prevalence of divorce ensures we’ll have higher levels of violence than if we made obtaining divorces more difficult.