Another School Shooting, Another Rush to Blame Zion Patriot, August 27, 2025September 9, 2025 On the morning of August 27, 2025, the unthinkable happened at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. During morning Mass, a gunman stood outside the sanctuary and fired through the stained-glass windows at children and parishioners. Two children were killed and seventeen others injured before the attacker died by suicide in the parking lot. Families, classmates, and an entire community are reeling in grief. Immediately, politicians and pundits rushed to assign blame. Minnesota Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar went on CNN and pointed the finger at Republicans, saying: “All the work we’ve done to ban these automatic rifles, and do something when it comes to background checks… we keep getting thwarted.” That framing is not only factually wrong—the weapons involved were semi-automatic—but also deeply premature. The facts are still being gathered, and speculation helps no one. And it’s worth noting: Minnesota already ranks 14th in the nation for the strength of its gun control laws, according to Everytown for Gun Safety. The state requires universal background checks (paging, Senator Klobuchar), transferee permits for handguns and semi-automatic rifles, and enacted a red flag law in 2023. Yet even with these laws on the books, this tragedy still happened. Rather than focusing on the how, we should focus on the why. 1. Gun-Free Zones and Determined Killers Annunciation was, like most schools, a gun-free zone. But as today showed, signs on the wall don’t stop a person intent on committing evil. This was not a tragedy that more restrictions on law-abiding citizens could have prevented. A man determined to murder children at prayer is not going to be deterred by another gun law. 2. Wait for the Facts We still don’t know how the attacker obtained the weapons. Were they bought legally? Did background checks fail? Until we know, it is reckless to blame an entire political party for this act of violence. If—as is often the case—the guns were acquired legally, then the conversation shifts. It becomes less about laws already on the books and more about enforcement, mental health, and identifying red flags before tragedy strikes. Another piece we may never know is whether the attacker was on psychiatric medications such as SSRIs. These drugs are often prescribed for depression and anxiety but carry black-box warnings for suicidal and homicidal thoughts—the very impulses that surface in mass shootings. Yet whenever these attacks happen, the role of medication is rarely examined with the same intensity as the weapon used. As the facts are starting to come in, one thing is unmistakable: this individual was deeply disturbed.. That should shift the conversation away from the weapon and toward the underlying crisis of untreated mental illness. Already, reports are surfacing that the attacker left troubling posts on social media and YouTube before the companies rushed to take them down. This raises a serious question: how many warning signs get ignored or erased in the name of optics, rather than used to intervene before lives are lost? 3. A Troubling Pattern: Transgender Shooters and Christian Schools Reports indicate the attacker was biologically male but identified as female, having changed his name in line with that identity. If true, this mirrors the Tennessee Christian school shooting of 2023, also carried out by a transgender-identifying individual targeting a Christian school. This raises hard questions. Our culture insists that affirming gender confusion is the path to peace. But for decades, the psychiatric community recognized gender dysphoria as a mental illness. Telling someone they can become something they biologically never will be is not compassion—it’s delusion. And here’s a key irony: one factor that might have raised a red flag is gender dysphoria itself. For decades, this was recognized as a mental illness. But cultural pressures have pushed it out of that category—not because the underlying struggles disappeared, but because politics demanded affirmation over reality. If the shooter purchased firearms after adopting a transgender identity, a system that treated gender dysphoria as a disqualifying mental health condition could have triggered a second look, perhaps even prevented the purchase. If someone said, “I am a bird,” we would not encourage them to jump off the roof and flap their arms. Yet in the case of transgenderism, society tells people to surgically alter their bodies, flood themselves with hormones, and deny reality—expecting wholeness to follow. That is not compassion; it is cruelty. The tragedy is that this confusion doesn’t just destroy the individuals caught in it. Sometimes, as we saw today, it endangers the lives of others—innocent children and families in places that should be sanctuaries of safety and prayer. And this is where the divide shows most clearly: gun control advocates want to focus only on the weapon, while gun rights advocates point to the mental health crisis at the core of so many of these shootings. Ignoring the role of mental illness and medication—while insisting that banning guns is the only answer—overlooks the very root causes driving these attacks. Meanwhile, nearly 400 million firearms in America were not used to commit a crime today. 4. Thoughts, Prayers, and Real Action Some say, “thoughts and prayers are not enough.” And in one sense, that’s true—comfort for the grieving does not replace real solutions. But let’s be clear: thoughts and prayers are not meant to be a shield against bullets; they are meant to be a comfort to those in despair. Yes, we need action. But banning guns or blaming half the country will not stop evil from walking through the doors of a church. Evil will always find a tool. The real question is whether we have the courage to address deeper issues: broken families, untreated mental illness, cultural glorification of violence, and the refusal to acknowledge truth in the face of ideology. We provide armed guards at airports, courthouses, even sporting events. Yet our nation’s most valuable treasures—our children—remain unprotected. Critics argue that schools with guards would look like prisons. But the alternative is far worse: schools that look like prisons are still better than schools that are crime scenes and morgues. Closing Thought Sadly, two children lost their lives while praying. That fact alone should bring every American to their knees in grief. But let us resist the rush to politicize this tragedy before the facts are known. Let us comfort the hurting, investigate the truth, and only then demand accountability where it belongs—while confronting the evil that targeted children in God’s house. Because in the end, the problem is not a tool—it is the brokenness of the human heart. Update: A Selective Outrage In the aftermath, Minneapolis Mayor Frey cautioned: “Anybody using this as an opportunity to villainize the trans community has lost their sense of common humanity.” Yet, in the very same news cycle, gun owners across America are once again broadly vilified—as if the millions of firearms that harmed no one today are irrelevant compared to the one wielded by a murderer. That double standard is striking. One group is shielded from collective blame, while another is told that the very exercise of their constitutional rights makes them complicit. This isn’t about compassion or consistency—it’s about politics. And politics, rushed into the raw hours after tragedy, blinds us from addressing the deeper issues: mental illness, cultural decay, ignored warning signs, and the erosion of accountability. Meanwhile, the narrative ignores another reality: guns are not only used to take lives—they are also used to save them. Estimates range from 500,000 to 3,000,000 defensive uses per year in the United States. Yes, it is tragic beyond words that two children were taken from us today. But take away the guns, and how many more children would die with no one there to protect them when the police are minutes away? Gun Control Politics