An F in Humanity: The Minneapolis Shooting and the Shitty Brown Stain of Shame

8 minutes read time

There is a Catholic school just down the street from where I live. It keeps to itself. From the road, you don’t see the children coming and going; if it weren’t for the modest sign out front, you might not know a school was there at all. It is a good school, a place of quiet academic excellence and rarely any trouble. For generations, this has been the role of the Catholic school in America. As pioneers pushed west, the church sent priests and nuns with them, building communities, establishing a unique moral base, and educating the nation’s children. They were, and in many ways still are, foundational pillars of American life, sacred spaces of learning and community.

On Wednesday morning, that sacred space was violated in the most brutal and cowardly way imaginable. At Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, as students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade gathered for their traditional first-week-of-school Mass, a heavily armed assailant fired through the chapel windows, killing an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old as they sat praying in the pews. The sheer horror of the act is almost impossible to process. “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now,” a visibly angry Mayor Jacob Frey pleaded. “These kids were literally praying.”

I went to school in a different America, a time when the only “school violence” was a fistfight under the bleachers and the hunting rifles in the gun racks of student pickup trucks were a normal and unremarkable sight. No one ever thought they would be a problem. Those days are gone. They have been gone for a very long time, and they are never, ever coming back. The Minneapolis shooting is not an isolated tragedy. It is the latest, predictable, and utterly infuriating entry in a 25-year-long catalog of our nation’s most profound and unforgivable failure.

The 25-Year Litany of Shame

Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, the United States has been trapped in a horrifying and repetitive cycle of carnage, empty platitudes, and deliberate inaction. The list of the dead is a litany of our national shame, a testament to a quarter-century of political cowardice and moral rot. It is a list that must be read, and read again, until its sheer, numbing weight becomes unbearable:

• Columbine High School, 1999: 13 dead.
• Red Lake High School, 2005: 9 dead.
• West Nickel Mines Amish School, 2006: 5 girls dead.
• Virginia Tech, 2007: 32 dead.
• Northern Illinois University, 2008: 5 dead.
• Oikos University, 2012: 7 dead.
• Sandy Hook Elementary School, 2012: 27 dead, including 20 first-graders.
• University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014: 6 dead.
• Marysville-Pilchuck High School, 2014: 4 dead.
• Umpqua Community College, 2015: 9 dead.
• Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 2018: 17 dead.
• Santa Fe High School, 2018: 10 dead.
• Oxford High School, 2021: 4 dead.
• Robb Elementary School, 2022: 21 dead, including 19 children.
• Central Visual Arts and Performing Arts High School, 2022: 2 dead.
• The Covenant School, 2023: 6 dead, including 3 children.
• Perry High School, 2024: 2 dead.
• Apalachee High School, 2024: 4 dead.
• Abundant Life Christian School, 2024: 2 dead.
• Florida State University, 2025: 2 dead.
• University of New Mexico, 2025: 1 dead.
• Antioch High School, 2025: 2 dead.

And now, Annunciation Catholic School. This is not a list of unavoidable tragedies. This is the historical record of our collective failure, a horrifying drumbeat of inaction. Each one of these massacres was followed by the same empty, cynical, and insulting ritual of “thoughts and prayers” from the very politicians who refuse to do a single damn thing to stop the next one.

The Smoke Screen of Hypocrisy

In the immediate aftermath of the Minneapolis shooting, the MAGA political and media ecosystem, led by the administration’s own top officials, immediately deployed its predictable and disgusting smoke screen. Instead of focusing on the shooter’s arsenal—the legally purchased rifle, shotgun, and pistol—or the fact that they were able to barricade the church doors from the outside, the entire right-wing outrage machine focused on a single, politically convenient detail: the shooter was a transgender woman.

FBI Director Kash Patel, a political appointee, immediately took to social media to frame the investigation not around the weapons, but around the shooter’s identity: “The shooter has been identified as Robin Westman, a male born as Robert Westman,” he posted, a deliberate and transphobic piece of misgendering designed to signal the official narrative to the MAGA base. He and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately labeled the attack a “hate crime targeting Catholics.” This is a cynical and malicious deflection. It is a deliberate attempt to pivot the national conversation away from the uncomfortable reality of easy access to weapons of war and onto the comfortable, familiar ground of the culture war.

The grotesque hypocrisy of this was laid bare this very week. We have seen a level of national outrage, a screaming on social media, and a call for boycotts, over a fast-food chain changing its stupid logo and the recipe for its hashbrown casserole. HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN WE BE? No company’s logo, recipe, or anything else amounts to a hill of beans if we CANNOT PROTECT OUR CHILDREN. The priorities of a significant portion of our country have become so warped, so utterly detached from any sense of basic human decency, that a change in a breakfast menu can generate more authentic passion and anger than the slaughter of children in a church.

Even within the conservative movement, there are signs that this cynical playbook is wearing thin. In a stunning break from the party line, former Republican Congressman and current Fox News host Trey Gowdy rejected the deflection. “It’s always a young, white male. Almost always,” he said, correctly identifying the standard profile before questioning the focus. “The only way to stop it is to identify the shooter ahead of time or keep the weapons out of their hands,” he declared. “How many school shootings does it take before we’re going to have a conversation about keeping firearms out?” When Trey Gowdy is the voice of reason on gun control, you know the Republican position has descended into a moral abyss.

An F in Humanity

This is not just a political failure; it is a profound failure of civility, a systemic rot that has been building for 25 years. Each time we fail to take strong and decisive action to protect our children, the entire country is guilty. We get an F in citizenship. We get an F in civility. We get an F in humanity. We have become a nation that values the unfettered right to own weapons of war more than the fundamental right of a child to pray in a church without being shot to death.

Our national refusal to force this issue, our decline in marching and protesting against this specific and recurring form of violence, our complete and utter inability to hold our elected representatives accountable for their cowardly inaction—this colors our country not in red, white, and blue, but in the shitty brown stain of shame. We have allowed the gun lobby, a death cult funded by the merchants of violence, to hold our entire political system hostage. We have accepted the blood of our children as the routine and unavoidable price of a perverted and ahistorical interpretation of the Second Amendment.

The Only Path Forward

We have to do something, and we have to do it NOW, the president and the NRA be damned. The time for single-pronged, feel-good, half-measures is long past. We need a broad, comprehensive, and aggressive national strategy that treats this crisis with the seriousness it deserves. This must include, at a minimum, a ban on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines to the general public. It must include universal background checks, red flag laws, and mandatory waiting periods.

But it must go further. We must have a national conversation about who has access not just to our weapons, but to our children. We must secure our schools, our churches, our shopping malls, and our entertainment venues. The grim reality of the past 25 years is that NO PLACE is inherently safe, especially not the places we think should be. This is not a call to live in a police state; it is a demand to live in a sane society. The vast majority of Americans know what needs to be done. The only thing missing is the political will, a will that has been systematically eroded by a cynical and morally bankrupt political party that profits from fear and division. It is up to us to change the reality in which we reside. It is up to us to stand the fuck up and demand it.

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