Rick Santorum, former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, suggested that absent fathers and broken homes could be part of the reason for mass shootings.
“Gun control is a debate that we need to have,” Santorum said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. However, he also said there was “another debate” we should have, and that’s “the fact that these kids come from broken homes without dads.”
“That is not something we’re talking about and that is the commonality,” Santorum said. “We want to talk about things we can work together on? How about working together to try to see what we can do to get more dads involved in the lives of the kids.”
See the full discussion in the clip above.
Santorum has a history of making disparaging comments about single mothers as well.
“What we have is moms raising children in single-parent households simply breeding more criminals,” he said in 1994 per Mother Jones.
Santorum also said single mothers just needed politicians who weren’t afraid of “kicking them in the butt.” His plan at the time would’ve denied benefits to women who did not identify the fathers of their children.
In 2011, Santorum dismissively called single mothers the base of the Democratic Party because they need government.
“So if you want to reduce the Democratic advantage, what you want to do is build two-parent families, you eliminate that desire for government,” he said at the time.
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