Broken Homes, Unbroken Silence

Social Outcries Following Shootings Miss the Mark

On the morning of December 16, 2024, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow opened fire at Abundant Life Christian School, a small K–12 school in Madison, Wisconsin. In the space of a few minutes, she killed a student and a teacher and wounded many others before apparently turning the gun on herself. Two guns were recovered, and at the time of this writing, police are not releasing information as to where or how she obtained them. Of note is the fact that she is female. In a 20-year review of active shootings, the FBI identified 333 incidents and 345 shooters. Of these, only 13 were women.¹

Boilerplate Reactions

In the immediate aftermath, the media focused on the usual suspects when it comes to school shootings. Before the shooter’s social media accounts were taken down, some commentators noticed she seemed to be fascinated with other shooters. In a recent photo, she wears a shirt bearing the name of the German rock band KMFDM, whose song lyrics Columbine shooter Eric Harris posted on a website before his own shooting spree. A photo on her father’s social media shows a picture of a girl—presumably Natalie—at a shooting range.

Finally, there were the usual calls to “end gun violence.” At a vigil in Madison, one father of two told reporters, “It’s an epidemic, and I’m not a big believer in the thoughts and prayers crap—I don’t think it works.… We need action, legislation and laws to make sure that guns don’t get into the hands of people who don’t have them.” Similarly, Nicole Hockley, who co-founded the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise after her child died in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, told the media, “We must work together to protect our families and communities from gun violence.”²

An Overlooked Factor

The focus on guns has some shortcomings, however. Generally, when activists call for an end to gun violence, what they are asking for is legislation making it more difficult for Americans to purchase firearms. But the fact is, there are already a great many “common-sense” restrictions on purchasing firearms. State laws vary, but federal law requires that potential buyers in all 50 states, whether buying at a store or gun show, pass a background check through a system operated by the FBI.

There are important discussions to be had about legislation, but there is one crucial detail of shooters’ lives that the media tend to ignore, and this particular shooting is a clear instantiation of it. Court records show that Natalie’s parents had married and divorced each other twice and shared a complicated custody arrangement. NBC News reports that Rupnow “endured what appeared to be a tumultuous home life marked by divorces, custody battles and a series of court-mandated mediation sessions to resolve disputes over her care, according to court documents.”³

Natalie came from a broken, unstable home.

In far more cases than not, those who commit atrocities like school shootings are the children of divorced, separated, or never-married parents. But you have to veritably scour the internet to discover this information.

Do you remember Adam Lanza, who massacred 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012? His parents had separated in 2002, when Lanza was still in elementary school, and finally divorced in 2009. Or Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in an African American church in Charleston in 2015? He was born to divorced parents, who had gotten together again long enough to conceive a child before breaking it off again. Then there was Salvador Ramos, who killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022. He was living with his maternal grandparents at the time of the shooting—his father had never been in the picture, and his mother was “going through bad times,” according to a neighbor.⁴

A Clear Pattern

These are not cherry-picked instances. In a 2013 article for the Institute for Family Studies, Brad Wilcox writes,

From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.⁵

Wilcox goes on to cite his own research, which “suggests that boys living in single mother homes are almost twice as likely to end up delinquent compared to boys who enjoy good relationships with their father.” His is not the only research demonstrating such findings. A 2010 study by researchers at Towson University in Maryland tracking children from first grade through middle school found that, for the boys in the study, “high levels of neighborhood violence and percentages of single males and female-headed households are related to an increase in aggressive behavior.” For girls, the correlation is even more pronounced.⁶

More recently, a 2018 study found that “separation from a parent during childhood is strongly associated with elevated risk for later violent criminality,”⁷ and a 2022 literature review found that “growing up in a single-parent family and adolescent involvement in crime are related since a large majority of the studies shows a positive relation between single-parent families and the level of crime.”⁸

These are only a handful—there are many more such studies. So why don’t we hear about these connections?

Decades of Decisions

Because if the media were to acknowledge that children growing up in broken homes tend to become more violent, it would require them to admit that they—and the pseudo-sociology they reported on—were wrong. Politicians would have to admit that they erred when they allowed no-fault divorce to wreck the fabric of American home life. Psychologists would have to admit that they were wrong when they insisted that kids would surely do better growing up in the more “peaceful” environments of their divorced parents’ separate homes. And many parents themselves would have to admit that they may have caused harm when they allowed “irreconcilable differences” to split their children’s lives in two.

But the media are erring now in sweeping under the rug the bloody carnage that has resulted from these decisions, instead of calling a spade a spade and acknowledging the dire results of decades of misdeeds. Let’s not allow political correctness to stop our ears and keep us from taking a good, hard look at factors that could be influencing the vulnerable and hurting among us to turn to evil.

Notes
1. “Active Shooter Incidents 20-Year Review, 2000-2019,” FBI (May 2021).
2. Karen Tsui et al., “Wisconsin School Shooter Was in Contact with a California Man Accused of Planning Separate Attack, Report Says,” CNN (Dec. 19, 2024).
3. Chloe Atkins, Selina Guevara, and Daniella Silva, “Teenager Accused in Wisconsin School Shooting Had a Tumultuous Family Life, Court Documents Show,” NBC News (Dec. 21, 2024).
4. Luis Pablo Beauregard, “Who Was Salvador Ramos, the Young Man Who Sowed Terror in a Texas School Shooting?” El País (May 25, 2022).
5. Brad Wilcox, “Sons of Divorce, School Shooters,” Institute for Family Studies (Dec. 16, 2013).
6. Beth Vanfossen et al., “Neighborhood Context and the Development of Aggression in Boys and Girls,” Journal of Community Psychology, vol. 38, is. 3 (Mar. 1, 2010), 329–349.
7. Pearl LH Mok et al., “Experience of Child–Parent Separation and Later Risk of Violent Criminality,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine, vol. 55, is. 2 (Aug. 2018), 178–186.
8. Janique Kroese et al., “Growing Up in Single-Parent Families and the Criminal Involvement of Adolescents: A Systematic Review,” Psychology, Crime & Law,vol. 27, is. 1 (2020), 61–75.