The reports out of Minneapolis are terrible.
Around 8:30am this morning, police responded to a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School and Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Authorities confirmed two children, ages eight and 10, were “killed where they sat” in the pews. Seventeen others were injured, including 14 children between the ages of six and 15. The gunman took his own life, as all of these cowards do, in the rear of the church.
Annunciation Catholic School runs from pre-K through eighth grade and classes began just two days ago. These kids were just back from their summer vacations, from having fun with their families. They were in the midst of the excitement of the first few days of school and seeing their friends again. They were beginning the year in worship, going to morning mass at 8:15am, when a gunman opened fire from outside the building.
These children were literally praying when they were shot at. How is there an explanation? How is there faith in these moments? It is so hard.
The Shooting
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported young children in school uniforms were seen filing out of the building, clasping hands with their parents and friends. Some did not have shoes on. A little boy, who was crying while walking away from the scene, was heard saying to his father, “I don’t feel safe.” These kids experienced quite a trauma this morning, even the ones who were not injured physically.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a press conference the shooter was armed with a rifle, shotgun, and pistol. He approached “on the outside, on the side of the building” and “began firing a rifle through the church windows towards the children sitting in the pews at the mass.” A parent told the Star Tribune he “just pepper sprayed the gun” through the stained glass windows.
“This was a deliberate act of violence against innocent children and other people worshiping,” O’Hara said. “The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children is absolutely incomprehensible.”
God bless the first responders who have to deal with the carnage. It is such a test of human strength that those cops and EMTs had to go in there and pick up a dead eight year old and 10 year old who should have been moving on from mass to go to study the basics of math or reading, and see their friends in PE, and run around and enjoy the beautiful weather that we are having this time of year. Instead, their parents are grieving the kind of grief no parent should ever have to feel.
The Shooter
We don’t name mass shooters on The Megyn Kelly Show because we decline to contribute to their infamy, but we have independently confirmed who it is. He is said to be in his mid-twenties. This does appear to be somebody who was experiencing some sort of gender dysphoria. He has long red hair. He is very unattractive. Some reporting suggests he began identifying as trans as a minor, and his name was changed from a male-sounding name to a female-sounding name.
It appears he was busy posting just this morning to a YouTube page that has since been taken down. He posted, among other things, a notebook with a sticker of a Pride flag superimposed with a rifle and “defend equality.” There are pictures of firearms and magazines with phrases like “Why So Queerious?”, “Extra thicc! Jew Gas,” “Where Is Your God,” “For The Children HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”, “Israel Must Fall,” and “Kill Donald Trump” handwritten on them.
From the looks of it, he seemed focused on those who believe in God. Another picture shows a target practice sheet with a picture of Jesus Christ at the top of it. In one of the YouTube videos that my team got to before it was removed, he appears to have drawn the inside of the church and drives a knife into the page.
There is a separate drawing of someone with long hair and an AR-15-looking gun slung across his back looking at himself in the mirror, and the reflection is a demon with horns coming out of his head. He looks truly demonic. It is a self portrait, obviously, and it is not a huge shock that is how he saw himself.
In one of the videos, you can hear him say “kill myself,” which he also did. The fact that this guy was roaming around among us. You can’t catch them all. It’s a big country, but you and I both know there are going to be people who knew.
The Path Forward
Meanwhile, the left is already out there blaming guns. I am not assuming bad faith from people on the left. I’m really not. I think on this issue, as Americans, we really are united. We all want it to stop. I think the left very much wants it to stop, and I think the right very much wants it to stop. We are just diametrically opposed in what we think the solution is.
Gavin Newsom tweeted, “We cannot even make it through the first week of school without mass shootings…” Everyone is disgusted and exasperated at that. We share in his frustration and lament. But then he wrote, “…And the @GOP will continue to do absolutely nothing while our kids are being gunned down. This is sick.”
I share that exact sentiment, if you replace “GOP” with “Dems.” I feel exactly as he does, except I see his party as the core of the problem because his side will only deal with guns. They will only talk about guns in the wake of this.
They won’t talk about the trans ideology and what the medical profession will and won’t do when they encounter somebody who says they are suffering from gender ideology problems. They won’t deal with mental illness. They won’t deal with institutionalization. They won’t look at President Donald Trump’s executive order trying to make it easier to institutionalize someone who is having a serious mental health problem without having to go through 25 different steps to get them there. They will just say he is an authoritarian fascist.
It is not a solve all, but we need more of these and less of these knee-jerk, meaningless, senseless, waste of time ‘ban the guns’ convos. I am totally open minded if this guy had some sort of mental health history and got a gun anyway. We should definitely be looking into how that happened and try to stop that from continuing to happen in other cases, but another gun law is not going to do it.
We have 400 million guns in the United States of America. The vast majority of them are semiautomatic handguns. They will never be taken away from people. It is too embedded in the foundation and fabric of who we are.
The answer – I’m sorry to my gun control advocate friends – is not more laws on guns. It hasn’t worked, and you are the one stopping the productive conversations. What we need is more good guys with guns at soft targets. And yes, we need to take a serious look at our mental health system.
I don’t know what this guy’s full history is going to be, but I guarantee you there are going to have been signs and we will have done very little about it. It is always someone else’s problem, until it is the problem of a bunch of school children literally praying as they were shot to death.
You can check out Megyn’s full analysis by tuning in to episode 1,136 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.