School Shoots and Daddies

More accurately, '....and no daddy around.'

Another shooting, another son of divorce. From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. 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.

This is not exactly "news."  Rockford Institute has reams and reams of studies on the effects of divorce on children.  None of them are good-news stories.

By the way, the results are totally different when fathers are absent due to premature death, such as soldiers in combat.  Interesting, no?