Rob Plunkett, a retired labor lawyer and a Catholic, joined dozens of fellow Minnesotans to gather on the grounds of Annunciation Church a day after a lone shooter attacked schoolchildren praying at Mass. There was no police tape, no barricades. Just boarded up church windows and broken stone where bullets had struck the edifice.
Mr. Plunkett came to the site to honor the two students killed and to mark the tragedy that wounded 17 other children and elderly parishioners. The atrocity was assisted, in his view, by federal court rulings favorable to expansive gun rights. Like many Minnesotans, he feels shaken by the violence and searching for the best methods of prevention.
In recent months, Minnesota has been the site of multiple incidents of brazen violence. In June, a gunman posing as a police officer fatally shot a state lawmaker and her husband at her house and wounded another lawmaker and his wife in a separate incident. Summer saw a string of shootings in outdoor spaces in Minneapolis before Wednesday’s attack on children during the first week of school. In a state with strict gun laws and where “Minnesota nice” is a cultural stereotype, lawmakers and residents are having a difficult time coming to a consensus on what’s driving – and what could stop – the tumult.
Why We Wrote This
The shooting of children at Annunciation Catholic School in Minnesota comes after a political assassination rocked the state earlier this summer. The events have surfaced divides over how to lower gun violence – and a desire to emerge stronger.
State residents are in “just a deep well of sadness and kind of existential confusion: How could this happen?” says Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “It doesn’t comport with our reality.”
This week’s shooting at Annunciation Catholic School has in particular launched debate about the roots of exposure of children to school violence, and whether that has more to do with gun access or treatment of mental health, with a flash point on what role gender dysphoria might have played in the state of mind of the shooter, who police say killed themself after the attack. The individual in this case was born a biological male but had reportedly identified as a female.
“No city wants to be in the middle of this debate,” says Mr. Plunkett. “But it’s our turn.”
Political fissures come to the surface
In 1973, Time magazine described Minnesota as “the state that works,” held up as a model for farmer-led political centrism, an active citizenry, and good governance.
Today, as Americans appear deeply polarized on issues from immigration to the economy, consensus in Minnesota has also been harder to reach. Though the state is often portrayed as a liberal bastion, that’s more true in the urban Twin Cities area of Minneapolis and St. Paul then in broader Minnesota, where corn fields spread to the horizon and fishermen pull walleye from deep, clear lakes. The state’s congressional delegation is evenly split.
“Even among those who support [progressive] programs there’s a strong theme of social conservatism given that religiosity in Minnesota is high,” says Dr. Jacobs. The Twin Cities reliably vote Democratic, he adds, and a democratic socialist is a contender in the Minneapolis mayor’s race.
The spate of recent violence has brought some of those political fissures in Minnesota, and nationally, to the surface.
The FBI is investigating the shooting at Annunciation, where a Catholic school shares grounds with a church, as an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime against Catholics. “The shooter appeared to hate all of us,” acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said at a news conference on Thursday, citing writings of the suspected shooter that exhibited hatred for many ethnic and racial groups.
State Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, on Thursday called for a federal ban on assault rifles and on high-capacity magazines. U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., also called for such a ban. “It is a simple ask,” given the scope of the damage caused by such weapons in cities like Minneapolis, she said.
Minnesota is currently ranked No. 14 in the U.S. among states with the strongest gun control laws, according to Everytown, a gun-control advocacy group. The state requires background checks for all gun purchases, has an “extreme risk” or red-flag law temporarily banning access to guns for those in crisis, and has a gun violence rate below the national average.
Democrats in Minnesota say they will introduce a bill to ban assault-style weapons in the state, but it would face major hurdles in the closely divided legislature.
For others, the shooting this week raised questions about the assailant’s background and has rekindled debate about hardening school security and, in this case, the role of gender policies in society’s well-being.
Controversy over gender identity
The Annunciation Catholic School attack came two years after police identified as transgender the shooter in an attack on Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, which killed three children and three staff members.
The Annunciation shooter legally changed their first name from a male to a female name in 2020 because they identified as a female, according to court documents. The assailant had attended Annunciation Catholic School, and their mother worked there until 2021, according to a police statement and a previous school Facebook post.
Mayor Frey said at a news conference that anybody “using this to villainize our trans community … has lost their sense of common humanity.”
On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched an inquiry into whether drugs the shooter might have taken during their transition could have played a role in the attack.
And Republican Rep. Tom Emmer called on his state to repeal its “trans refuge law” signed by Gov. Tim Walz in 2023. The law shields those seeking sex-reassignment surgery or hormone treatments in Minnesota from facing arrest warrants, subpoenas, or extradition requests from outside the state.
“We’ve got to have compassion,” Representative Emmer, who represents some of the Twin Cities’ outer suburbs, told the New York Post. But mental health issues “are being exacerbated by these types of messages” from Governor Walz and lawmakers who supported that legislation.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said on Thursday that the shooter did not have a history of diagnosed mental health illnesses or police record.
Looking for the path ahead
Yet, for some, this quiet corner of Minneapolis offers hope that Americans can work together to stem the exposure of children to mass violence.
For Sarah and John McGarvey, the neighborhood is a “generational place,” rooted by the church. “It’s the kind of place where young people go off, get married, and come back to buy a house,” says Ms. McGarvey.
On Wednesday, the couple said goodbye to their daughter, Orla, on her first day of school at Annunciation. Barely an hour later, John McGarvey got a call to come to the school.
Orla survived. Her best friend was one of the two children killed.
“As the adults, we don’t think it can happen here,” says Mr. McGarvey through tears. “Yet the children knew exactly what to do. They found cover, protected their friends. They had to be the heroes. That tells me there’s something seriously wrong in our society.”
Answers are difficult, he says. Yet the scenes of vigils and embraces reflect not only the strength of this community, but perhaps a larger statement from the Land of 10,000 Lakes.
“This won’t tear us apart,” he says. “This will only make us stronger.”
