By Jennifer Roback Morse September 09, 2025, at The Blaze
Focusing on guns in the aftermath of the Annunciation shooting ignores a far more pressing issue.
The Ruth Institute grieves with the community of the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis. As we mourn the lives lost and the innocence shattered, our hearts are with the families, teachers, and students who will never be the same.
But our grief must not hinder us from taking a sober-minded look at the situation. A moral catastrophe of this magnitude has multiple contributing factors. Although new information continues to emerge, we can say with confidence that family breakdown, mental illness, and the transgender ideology all played a role.
I have a long history of speaking out on each of these issues. Even before I founded the Ruth Institute in 2008, I was deeply concerned about the impact of family breakdown on children.
Primal bond
My first book, Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village, explained the importance of solid attachments between infants and their mothers. That primal bond contributes to the development of a conscience and self-control. A society cannot manage large numbers of people who do not care about others and who do anything they can get away with.
Since then, I’ve continued to study the risks associated with family breakdown. Divorce can shatter a child’s understanding of their identity, with long-lasting negative effects. I have interviewed numerous people who have left a gay or lesbian identity behind; in many cases, their initial confusion stemmed from their parents’ divorce. “When my parents divorced, I had no identity,” one woman told me. She embraced a lesbian identity, struggled with drug addiction, and was haunted by the idea that she might want to become a man.
A broken family
As has been widely reported, Robert Westman’s parents were divorced in 2013, when he was 13 years old.
Reading Westman’s manifesto reveals a deeply disturbed person, consumed with hatred for others — both individuals and groups — and for himself. I have not seen reports of whether he had any kind of mental health diagnosis. But he was clearly not well, with a documented history of minor mental health-related incidents.
