There is no defensible position against gun reform.

Trigger warning for gun violence, child death, and child injuries.

One of my siblings was in the room when the Annunciation shooter emptied 3 firearms into a catholic church during Wednesday morning mass on August 27th, 2025. 

Annunciation Catholic School is a private institution in a wealthier neighborhood of south Minneapolis. I, and Great Plains Action Society both, have been loudly outspoken about our disapproval of many branches of Christianity and Christian nationalist attitudes in this country. That said, I acknowledge and really appreciate that many Christian folks in the US are perfectly lovely people who would and do fight for people like me and my rights– meaning people who don’t look like them or believe in their god. One such Christian institution that has held my family has been this school. 

The community that surrounds the school is incredibly tight knit and the school itself offers many scholarships for lower income families. The school hosts a variety of events throughout the year, including charity drives, an autumn festival, and a huge Christmas pageant that every student performs in, and families are highly encouraged to attend or participate in these events. Thus, nearly everyone in the city either went there, worked there, or knows someone who went there or has kids there even despite the school having less than 400 students attending on any given year. So as gun shots rang out on that Wednesday morning, people from all over the neighborhood– and city– ran out of their houses to see what was happening. 

911 was first called at 8:27, reporting shots fired. Police entered the building at 8:31. In a matter of minutes, everything was already over before anyone truly understood what was happening. The school has Wednesday morning mass every week, which nearly the whole school attends at their own on-campus church, except for the preschoolers and kindergarteners. They also have a mentoring program among the students: eighth graders are paired with a first grader to be their buddy, and designated role model. During the first mass of the year, they sit together to make the first graders feel less alone. My sister recalled hearing the first shot, thinking it could have been a super loud balloon. Once the second shot was fired, she instinctively grabbed her little buddy and ducked under the pews. Reportedly, shots being fired in the church was such a confusing, horrifying concept that few people could react quickly, and it took time for everyone to duck to safety. The school had only ever prepared for school shootings in the school building, never the church. The shooter knew that because they had gone to Annunciation, and graduated 8 years ago. 

The shooter emptied 3 guns into the windows of the church from the outside. Everything was over in a matter of minutes. My sister told me even after the gunshots had stopped, people were too scared to move right away, in case the shooter would start again. One of her friends had peeked above the pews enough to see the shooter enter the building. The shooter saw the damage they had caused, likely saw the bodies of the 2 children they had murdered, and left to shoot themselves in the parking lot behind the church.

In the time since, the city hasn’t really been able to stop talking about it. Even with the 3 other shootings that happened all less than 24 hours before the Annunciation school shooting, this horrific tragedy will not be recovered from or swept away quickly. In the time I’ve taken to talk to family, friends, and community members, I’ve heard many things about the incident. Other kids’ experiences, everyone’s anger and grief, horrified sympathy, concern, but primarily “what can we do?” and vengeful expressions of how cowardly the shooter was.

I have not named the shooter deliberately. At this time, I think it’s incredibly important to highlight the detrimental harm glorification of terrorists and school shooters does to our society. This glorification is most potent where the shooter is villainized and dehumanized to the point of some kind of reverse idolatry– until they are sympathized by people who identify with them, and feel similarly scorned by society. Copycats thrive off of the notoriety of an idol, as the shooter reportedly did. Her name was Robin Westman, a 23-year-old woman living on their own. As investigations into Westman’s motive continue, people are snatching at any pieces of this person they can find: Fox news clings to the fact that she hated Trump and was trans to further their fearmongering anti-trans campaign; ABC News describes her as “expressing hate for almost every group imaginable”; notably it has been brought to light that she had an obsession with other school shooters, and it seems to me she took this opportunity to join her “heroes”.

Thanks to footage from a nearby gun shop, it has come to light that Westman had been seen purchasing a gun only a few short days before the shooting. She was jovial and showing no red flags to the employees– the shop owner reports that they had no reason to suspect that Westman had any horrible plans. The gun purchased in the security cam footage is reportedly not one of the weapons that was used on August 27th, but police have reason to suspect all of the firearms were similarly acquired recently and at a variety of shops. 

After my mom had gotten my sister home and I rushed over to be with my family, we spent the day watching every news broadcast we could find. I think my parents needed to find some explanation, some piece of information that would make everything make sense. Over and over I kept hearing “what can we do?” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey took this opportunity to urge legislators towards safer gun control laws, but over and over news stations spoke of the notion as if it were an impossibility and measures like that would do nothing. 

My step dad pointed out to me that every school shooter he’s ever heard of was some kid under 25. So I started looking into it. According to the Violence Project, 98% of all mass shooters are male. Less than 1% are trans. Data from the study, “Defining the Problem: 53 Years of Firearm Violence Afflicting America’s Schools” published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons also shows that from 1970-2022, around ⅔ of school shooters were under 17.  Including the annunciation school shooter who was a trans woman and also would have been socialized as male for most of her childhood, these statistics show that something's happening to people socialized as boys. I am not a psychologist, and it would likely take a decade of study to truly understand why this is happening, but I have to imagine that the rise in fearmongering and “red pill” content is a significant piece of it. 

But as needed as understanding the reasons behind school shootings is, I think it’s more pressing to figure out how to prevent them from happening altogether. In the last few decades, government answers have been to place Student Resource Officers (SROs) in schools, school shooting drills, security checks like concerts and TSA have, even arm teachers (I don’t think that’s happening anywhere outside Florida, but the idea is too exhausting to think about let alone research). Of course, as with even the best laid plans, there are holes in the practices we are too slowly developing. What happens if a kid grabs a weapon off an SRO or teacher? What if a former (or current) student takes advantage of school safety protocols in their mass shooting plans? What if, like what happened on August 27th, the shooter doesn’t need to enter the premises, thereby bypassing any possible security screenings? What happens if no one gets there in time because it’s already over?

These are all “what ifs” that are hard to plan for, and mainstream news is always at a loss during these incidents to name any solution, and so hesitant to say the obvious thing out loud: These people should have never had access to a gun to do this in the first place. 

Gun reform has been a too slowly expanding movement over the last several decades, legislatively. Everytown Research, a group dedicated to expanding gun control laws in order to end gun violence especially in domestic abuse cases, provides an interesting snapshot of the state of gun policy vs gun violence per state, and their methodology ranks gun policies by effectiveness. It’s interesting to note that by their metrics, California has the “strongest gun safety laws” while the aforementioned study from the American College of Surgeons notes that California had the highest number of school shootings (though not per capita). While the number of school shootings grows every year, sometimes it feels as though all one can do is hope the kids in your life aren’t next. I refuse to be defeated by these horrific events.

How do we control the use of guns better than the strongest gun safety state in the country? Many folks both online and in conversations I’ve had with other organizers have put out the notion that guns should be regulated like cars. You must be of a certain age (we can try 21, with exceptions for active military personnel) and must pass a licensure test that shows how to use one safely, understand all of the dangers and safety protocols that come alongside owning and using a gun– adding, of course, that obtaining your license is contingent on passing a background check. Each gun would then have to be registered, under your name and license, with insurance so there are penalties should someone else who isn’t the owner uses the gun. This could and likely would use similar infrastructure as provided by the DMV and as it would create new offices under departments of public safety, it could possibly even use the same facilities. Alternatively, it could create a lot of new jobs and development projects to build new offices should this system be put into place. In order to incentivize registration of guns owned prior to rolling out these regulations, there could be cash rewards or other incentives. 

I’m going to point out that some of this infrastructure already exists– it's just not consistent and a lot of it is incredibly underfunded. As stated in the Everytown ranking page, a state’s gun safety policy’s effectiveness is easily undermined by the weakness of its neighbors. We need federal minimum safety requirements. Even then, I live in a state with relatively strong gun safety laws, and it’s still very easy for any 14 year old to attend a gun show in suburban Minnesota and purchase a firearm.

I propose an idea. As I am no expert, nor a lawmaker, this is just an idea that I think is worth putting out there. Instead of regulating guns like they’re cars, regulate them like they’re drugs. You can still purchase a firearm, but a psychiatrist has to approve and evaluate that you are at little to no risk of misusing a firearm. This approval is subject to re-approve every so often– my prescriptions have to be renewed every 3 months, but for firearms we could say 6 months. This would mean renewing your license bi-yearly, which is only mildly more annoying than renewing your tabs every year on your car. Only licensed professionals can sell firearms or buy resold guns. Every single purchase of a firearm or bullets comes with a mandatory reminder by the licensed professional about firearm storage safety. Gun shows would then have to be events registered with the state, like lotteries, to ensure all sellers tabling the event are licensed. Licensed sellers could then also set up collection agencies for people who lose or no longer want their firearm ownership license.

This idea is incredibly difficult to execute not just because of the sheer labor that would come from establishing these departments. With the state of our currently overburdened healthcare infrastructure, it would be a disservice to the work mental healthcare workers already provide to expect more out of them without first changing the infrastructure around them to support better working conditions and subsidize their work. This idea is also an incredibly long term solution: the fruits of this law and labor would likely not be seen for decades. 

I have been held by my community this past month and have been discussing the changes we want to see and more importantly how we think they could be executed– which I highly encourage all readers to do the same. When I posed my ideas to my community, a friend of mine made an incredible point.

“Pushing for this [gun accessibility] to be on therapists/psychiatrist in an already broken healthcare system that takes astronomically long to even get a normal appointment is null. Adding an entire program to it would just make it even more inaccessible for everyone. Instead of trying to argue what systems and hurdles we have in place for people; we should assess our new reality. Recently, I went to a meeting where we spoke about gun safety and how to best prepare for such violence…. We shouldn’t be trying to scramble and figure out how to bandaid this or implement TSA in public schools, but instead we have to accept that this is our new reality. We are living in a post-gun safety world. The unfortunate reality is that we can’t put the snakes back in the can so to speak. We can never take back all the innocent lives and return to where the event is a mass tragedy — because now it’s just another Tuesday so to speak. The best plan to implement would be something as dystopian as putting children and teachers through courses like "Stop the bleed", self-defense, and make-shift medical supplies (splints, bandages, alcohol wipes). We have been pleading for gun reform for years, but we have gone unheard for all of them and it’s no longer 1999 (columbine) or 2012 (sandy hook). Our cries go ignored. Instead of crying out to closed ears, we should be training our children to save each other. I know it’s so fucking dystopian to think about, I think it’s fucking ridiculous what this nation has come to.

“This is not me putting the responsibility on children to keep themselves alive,” they went on to say. “This is me accepting that we live in a F***** up place that isn’t going to help us, so we should equip our children with all of the tools they need to survive.”

This is not a call to be defeatist. This is not a call to lay down and pretend nothing is wrong and keep going like nothing has changed. This is a call to start acting like we fucking live here. Like going to school is a risk every parent and child has to make every day.

I don’t really care if these ideas on gun regulation and school shooting protocols are extreme or scary. Two children, barely even a decade old, died on August 27th, 2025 to gun violence. They died in front of my sister and 300 other students and staff and community members. They died in a church, while praying to God and celebrating their first mass at school for the year. Their deaths are leaving unbridgeable holes in their families, in their friends. My sister’s friends have injuries that will impact them for the rest of their lives. There are multiple children who— at 11 and 12 and 13— are living with shrapnel and bullet fragments inside their necks and spines and skulls and will live with that for the rest of their lives. And this is just one incident out of 47 that have happened before September 10th in this year alone.

There truly is not any defensible position against gun reform. There will always exist people who seek to do harm and there will always be outliers who get around protective systems, but there will always be less events like this where there are more protections. It will never be worth it to sacrifice children and other victims so our government spending can be more optimized or so that it's easier to hunt bears for 3 months out of the year. I am so grateful for my brave, incredible sister who has gone back to school and continues to live her life– not fearlessly nor naively, but knowing what she can and can’t control with every step. I am enraged and numb and furious and despondent that there is not more I can do to protect my little sister. We can’t keep being the only country in the world with a school shooting epidemic. We just can’t.