Writing in March 2018 and after much careful analysis, Professor Paul Kengor noted that, “what is clear is the vast majority of shooters came from broken families without a consistent biological father throughout their rearing and development. Very few had good, stable, present dads.”

Another shooting, another son of divorce, Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn. Also, 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.

The social scientific evidence about the connection between violence and broken homes could not be clearer. Dr Michael Brown research 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.

Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has written that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” His views are echoed by the eminent criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, who have written that “such family measures as the percentage of the population divorced, the percentage of households headed by women, and the percentage of unattached individuals in the community are among the most powerful predictors of crime rates.”

God established in Genesis the basis for a stable family: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined with his wife and they shall become one flesh.” Genesis 2:24 God made Eve from Adam to enforce the importance and binding nature of the marriage union. Marriage and families built on Biblical principles will produce stable loving communities.