There was a recent school shooting in Minneapolis, MN, so in this post, I’ll reflect on how to prevent more school shootings. People on the left say that we need to confiscate the weapons owned by law-abiding people, so that only the criminals and police will have guns. People on the right want to allow adults at the schools to train and carry weapons. But I have a different idea: let’s ban divorce.

First, how many of the shooters are from divorced homes? This new article from The Federalist is very popular, and it has a lot of data. It starts off by mentioning that the Minneapolis school shooter’s parents were divorced. But he’s not the only one!

It says:

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.

So, when arguing social issues, it’s not good to argue from one case here and one case there. We need a study that covers all the cases. If you don’t use a study, then people will always say “well, I am special, I won’t end up like that one person”.

More data from the article:

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.

If you’ve ever spoken to a police officer or read a book by J. Warner Wallace, then you’ll know that a huge majority of men in prisons were raised fatherless.

The article says:

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.

One of the things that people on the left like to do with studies is to say “well, this study is not applicable because it doesn’t look at a large enough sample size” or “this study is not applicable because it doesn’t look at a long enough time period”. That’s what they love to do with studies of fatherless kids. But some of the studies cited in that article are about over a million children, and over decades of time. So, you can’t dismiss these studies.

So, the next time that you get into a discussion about school shootings, ask the people on the secular left if they are willing to ban no-fault divorce. Typically, they will say no. Most divorces are initiated by women, and people want women to have divorce as an option. We don’t expect women to have to do the work to measure the man and then take responsibility for their choices. Society wants women to have a “get out of accountability free” card, just like they do with abortion. But as you can see, making divorce easy causes a lot of problems for children.

Now, some feminists will say “do you expect women to stay in unhappy marriages?” And the answer to that is, of course not. I think that the person who initiates the divorce should leave the marital home with the clothes on their back. Not one penny of family money, and no more access to kids, except if the remaining parent agrees to it. The parent who remains should keep everything. That would end divorce pretty quickly, and all the problems that arise from the fatherlessness that divorce causes. What do you think?