I held my breath when details of the 14-year-old alleged Georgia school shooter’s home life began unfolding in the news. I was not surprised when I learned his parents were divorcing — a red flag for boys. And Colt Gray struggled under the pressure. He’d recently changed schools and lived with his dad while his mom had custody of his two siblings.
More than 400 school shootings have occurred since the Columbine massacre in Colorado in 1999. The rate has risen precipitously since 2018, excluding 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic shut schools down.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter who killed 20 children and six adults, after first shooting his mother in the head, also came from a broken home. So did the Centennial, Colorado, school shooter, and the young man who walked into a Georgia elementary school with 500 rounds of ammunition. Although the parents of 15-year-old Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley still lived together, reports indicated the marriage was troubled; his mother was having an affair.
Accordingly to an international academic study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine in 2018, “separation from a parent during childhood is strongly associated with elevated risk for later violent criminality” in contrast to children “who lived continuously with both parents.” The study surveyed a whopping cohort of 1.3 million individuals up to age 15, specifically excluding children with deceased parents. Males accounted for 90 percent of violent offenders.
A 2023 nationwide analysis conducted by the Institute for Family Studies found that “strong families are associated with less crime.” In cities, the crime rate was 48 percent higher
