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Last week (August 27), 23-year-old Robin Westman, armed with an automatic rifle, a pistol and a shotgun, all purchased legally, opened fire on primary school children inside Annunciation Catholic Church in a suburb of the United States city of Minneapolis while they were attending Mass.

He killed two children, wounded many others and then shot himself dead.

FBI director Kash Patel said that the shooting was probably “an act of domestic terrorism and [a] hate crime targeting Catholics”.

School shootings happen with monotonous regularity in the US. After each one, the media works itself into a frenzy, demanding action to stop the slaughter of innocent people.

The usual culprit is America’s gun culture. As a New York Times columnist immediately commented, what the country needs is “Better, Stricter Gun Laws”.

There were other triggers for his madness. Westman loathed Catholics – even though he had attended the Annunciation school as a child; it could have been a Catholic hate crime. He was transgender (his original name was Robert); it could have been internalised transphobia. His politics were progressive; it could have been leftist insanity. He hated Jews; it could have been antisemitism. He hated children; there’s no word in English for that kind of perversion.

All of these will be chewed over by the media and online pundits in the weeks before the next shooting.

However, there is a thread that links him with nearly all other mass shooters and is never, ever discussed — Westman came from a broken home. His parents divorced in 2013.

Broken Homes

In his online manifesto, he said that he admired Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who killed his mother, six adults, and 20 children at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in 2012. Lanza’s parents were also divorced.

Last year, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow shot dead two children and herself at Abundant Life Christian School, in the neighbouring state of Wisconsin. Her parents were divorced and twice remarried. In 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos went on a rampage at his old school in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two teachers. His parents were estranged.

Not all of America’s rampage killers have had divorced parents, but a back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests that many, if not most, do.

About half of American children are going to experience the divorce of their parents before their 18th birthday. Most of them have normal lives. But it does suggest that a background of divorce is a factor which should not be ignored by police and criminologists.

The parents of Australia’s own Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch in 2019, were divorced.

It’s easier to criticise the culture of gun ownership than it is to criticise the culture of divorce. That’s why we hear much more about rifles than relationships.

Only a tiny fraction of the millions of rifles owned by Americans are used by mass murderers. Yet politicians and the media demand gun control laws. Similarly, only a tiny fraction of children of divorce turn into rampage killers. Why don’t we demand measures for shoring up crumbling families?

It needs to be shouted across the rooftops that divorce can really, really screw kids up. Perhaps Americans wouldn’t need more gun control if they had better divorce control.