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“An assailant armed with three guns fired through stained-glass windows into a Catholic church where parish school students were attending Mass on Wednesday, killing two children and wounding 17 other people, officials said… The shooting ended when the lone suspect, identified as Robin Westman, 23, ‘took his own life’ at the rear of the church, according to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara…
“Online videos reviewed by Reuters showed the text of a suicide note in which the shooter expressed feeling depressed and wanting to carry out a mass shooting. Names of previous school shooters were scrawled on a rifle magazine, along with erratic and wide-ranging political grievances… Court records showed Westman's name was changed from Robert in 2020 because Westman identified as female.” Reuters
The left argues that further gun control laws are needed.
“The Minneapolis shooter had eclectic politics ranging from explicit Nazism to hate for Trump to transgender equality… In a YouTube video now taken offline, Westman had magazines with a variety of slurs and right-wing slogans written on them, including ‘kick a spic,’ ‘fart n***,’ ‘McVeigh,’ and ‘Waco.’ Westman also had smoke grenades with… the antisemitic, pro-Holocaust slogan ‘6 million wasn’t enough’ written on their gear…
“Westman’s social media presence also revealed a sticker with the trans pride flag and a machine gun captioned ‘Defend Equality.’ The fact that Westman’s statements are so scattered point to the obvious: that they are a deeply unwell person who committed an incredibly heinous act for political reasons that may never be known. It’s more important to actually commit to passing gun control laws than it is trying to parse through Westman’s inflammatory statements.”
Malcolm Ferguson, New Republic
“The basic facts are shocking. From 1998 to 2023, the United States had 126 mass shootings in which four or more people were killed, according to Jason Silva at William Paterson University. That’s five times the total across all of Britain, Canada, Germany, France and Italy, which have a combined population similar to ours. It’s not just mass shootings, either. The U.S. gun homicide rate, accounting for population, is 450 times as high as Britain’s…
“The cause is no great mystery. America has more guns than any other country — in fact, it has more firearms than people — and that means more gun deaths. Researchers have found the link between the number of guns and deaths to be true for homicides, suicides, mass shootings and even killings by police officers…
“The laws aren’t perfect and won’t stop every shooting. But they would help. America’s leaders can do something to reduce the number of these horrific stories. We should push them to do so, no matter how hopeless it might feel.”
German Lopez, New York Times
“It isn’t yet possible to conclude why the suspected killer [chose] to do what she did. But what we can say is that, despite the probable identity of yesterday’s attacker, there is no evidence that transgender people are any more likely to commit mass shootings. Rather, multiple independent databases tracking mass shootings confirm the opposite… Most mass shootings are carried out by cisgender men.”
Abby Vesoulis, Mother Jones
The right argues that the shooting was an anti-Catholic hate crime.
The right argues that the shooting was an anti-Catholic hate crime.
“You can see news organizations like the New York Times writing this morning that the gunman’s ‘motive is a mystery.’ I think when you shoot dozens of rounds through the windows of a Catholic church, while children from the adjoining school are attending Mass, at least one motive, of murderous hatred toward Catholics, is self-evident…
“When a mass shooter justifies their heinous actions in some twisted version of right-wing ideology, the issue that interests the media and Democratic politicians the most is the right-wing ideology. When a mass shooter justifies their heinous actions in some twisted version of left-wing ideology, the issue that interests the media and Democratic politicians is gun control.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“Since May 2020, some 400 Catholic churches have been attacked. ‘Incidents include arson, statues beheaded, limbs cut, smashed, and painted, gravestones defaced with swastikas and anti-Catholic language and American flags next to them burned, and other destruction and vandalism,’ according to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops…
“Catholics in America don’t expect or demand special protected-community status and no Christian wants to see sacred spaces turned into security zones. But there can be no denying that, as the latest reports suggest that American Catholicism is now entering a period of renewed growth, we are witnessing a concomitant outbreak of virulent anti-Catholicism in the land of the free.”
Freddy Gray, Spectator World
“Those were Catholic kids who were murdered for being Catholic by a trans radical. Why is that important? Because the ideology that lies behind trans, language that is routinely used by the trans radical community and now the entire Democratic Party, is an inherently violent ideology. It says that if you personally refuse to acknowledge that a man can become a woman, you have engaged in an act of violence…
“If you claim that people who oppose your ideology are trying to kill you, that really leaves you very few responses. I’m not saying that everyone trans is going to become a murderer or that everyone who’s promoting trans ideology is spurring people to murder. But as always, when it comes to the connection between rhetoric and ideology and actual action, if you keep raising the temperature on that boiling pot of water, it will bubble over.”
Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire
