The vicious transgender terrorist attack on Annunciation School in Minneapolis elicited the usual responses from the political left and right. From both sides, politicians and pundits have rushed to reduce the issue to a single causative factor, effectively blaming their political opponents for the shooting. This is not based upon consideration of actual solutions to gun violence in the United States, but on commitments to political ideology. In fact, the shooting has been used — especially, but not solely by the political left — to double down on the divisive political ideology that is a substantive contributing factor to the attack. This exposes the hypocrisy of both sides, of course. They are more interested in advancing an agenda than proposing comprehensive solutions.
More fundamentally, this shooting, like all the mass shootings before it, exposes the fatal flaw in the political theory upon which the U.S. is founded. It is yet another example of the failure of liberalism, which means that it is a failure across the American political spectrum, from far right (conservative liberals) to far left (progressive liberals). The radical individualism of American liberalism — embraced and advocated across the political spectrum — is the most fundamental cause of this kind of violence. All the particular causative factors descend from the basic problem of our common political theory. This suggests that positive solutions must be sought somewhere other than the liberalism that has produced the status quo. The answer to the pathologies of liberalism (of the right and left variations) is not more liberalism.
The question of gun control
On the left, the typical response to school shootings is to blame them solely on the proliferation of guns. Control guns, so the assertion goes, and things like this won’t happen. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, for example, tweeted, “It’s time to take serious action at the State Capitol to address gun violence.” Walz is silent on any other factor. This is not surprising, of course, considering that he is in fact an advocate of these other causative factors in the shooting.
Walz is wrong to reduce the Annunciation shooting to the proliferation of guns. It is not wrong, however, to recognize that the proliferation of guns is an important element. The problem, though, is not any particular state’s laws and regulations related to gun purchasing and ownership. Rather, the barrier to passing broad, sensible restrictions on gun ownership is the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. In order for states to have reasonable latitude to restrict gun ownership, the anachronistic Second Amendment must be repealed.
This is not to suggest that gun ownership should be prohibited. But between the extreme positions of prohibition on the one hand and laissez-faire purchasing and ownership of guns on the other lies a vast range of reasonable restrictions. Except for the problem of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment was designed to address a very specific issue in the late 18th century that no longer exists. But the right it protects is absolute on the face of the amendment. This renders the amendment both anachronistic and an impediment to gun laws and regulations more fitting for our times.
The Second Amendment albatross
The Second Amendment states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” By its plain terms, the right to possess “Arms” is based solely on the need for individual states to be able to raise a militia for the states’ own defense and the common defense of the several states. This is the anachronistic part. When it was passed, there was no federal army to speak of. Even as late as the secession of rebel states in 1860 and 1861, the federal army consisted of about 16,000 men — nothing more than a skeleton crew. Because there was no large standing army at the time of the Bill of Rights, the drafters wanted to ensure that households could possess arms in the event of a call-up of various states’ militias. This was the primary plan of defense for both individual states and federal interests. But “a well regulated Militia” is no longer “necessary to the security of a free State.” The security of every state is protected by our extremely large military, in which approximately 1.3 million people serve on active duty. We no longer need state militias, which means we no longer need the Second Amendment to ensure we have them.
But other than to state its purpose, the Second Amendment places no limitations on the right it protects. This is the dangerous part. If we ignore the purpose of the amendment, as the Supreme Court did in the 2022 case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, there are no qualifications to the possession of “Arms” in the amendment itself. This means that it is difficult for individual states to draft sensible legislation regulating the purchase and possession of firearms.
We do not need the Second Amendment to allow states to permit gun ownership. But by having it, we restrict states from regulating gun ownership in any meaningful way. Thus, even in the most “restrictive” states, it is relatively easy to buy virtually any kind of gun one wishes, including guns whose sole purpose is to kill other people quickly and in large numbers. Both states and the federal government should have sweeping authority to reasonably regulate the manufacture, distribution and ownership of firearms. This can be perfectly compatible with allowing guns for self-defense, hunting and other legitimate uses. But under the Second Amendment, this authority is largely denied. And thus is denied one — but only one — substantial factor in our ability to prevent future mass shootings.
But guns don’t kill, people do!
Everyone knows the mantra in opposition to this point. In fact, some of you have already uttered it in response to my first point above: “Inanimate metal objects do not kill people; other people kill people.” You may also have said to yourself, “If we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.” This, again, is only partly true. While guns don’t have agency, the proliferation of guns whose purpose is to kill other people makes it much easier for people with bad motives or mental illness to obtain them. So, as with the extreme “ban all guns” position, the extreme “guns don’t kill” position is short-sighted.
Having said that, the retort that people (not guns) kill is partially true. Emerging stories about the Annunciation shooter indicate that he had serious mental illness. The fact that he considered himself “trans” is strong presumptive (if not dispositive) evidence of mental illness. His diaries and videos provide nearly irrefutable proof of it. Whether the failure lies with the shooter’s family or the larger community is not yet known, but it seems possible that his mental illness was either ignored or, worse, enabled by his family. Again, however, even with mental illness, the shooter’s ability to legally purchase high-powered rifles and 30-round clips facilitated his ability to kill and injure.
The profound dishonesty of legacy media and the political left
As noted above, the Annunciation shooter was a man identified as a “trans” woman. That manifestation of presumptive mental illness has been ignored in the name of pernicious — and lethal — transgender ideology by leftist politicians and their legacy media propagandists. All the legacy media, and every pundit and politician on the left, have participated in this pathological delusion. Indeed, the initial reaction from the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, was to advance lethal trans ideology, rather than to mourn the deaths of his constituents. Given the opportunity to address the increasing proliferation of violence by men calling themselves “transgender” women, the mayor chose instead to defend the perpetrators. This is consistent with the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, Peggy Flanagan, who has worn a T-shirt advocating trans violence. Along with the fatuous phrase “Protect Trans Kids,” her T-shirt has an image of a large hunting knife, implicitly advocating the kind of violence perpetrated at Annunciation, just with a different weapon.
Similarly, the media have referred to the shooter as “she” and “her,” desperate to proliferate the very deadly ideology that contributed to the shooting. It’s pointless to provide examples because all the major newspapers and new media outlets have been complicit in this. CNN’s Jake Tapper beclowned himself by insisting that the shooter be referred to as “female.” This was more important to Tapper than mourning the deaths of the shooter’s victims. And, of course, he is complicit in the proliferation of this increasingly deadly trans ideology.
Liberalism is the foundation of the whole mess
All of these ingredients in the toxic stew of gun violence, mass shootings and reductionist blame, from all sides of the debate, are the inevitable result of the liberal individualism at the heart of American law, politics and culture. We have rejected the idea that politics has a common end to make men moral and contribute to human flourishing. Instead, the theory that informed our country’s founding — and to which virtually every American subscribes, including most Catholics — is that human beings are in a natural “war of every man against every man.” All we have is a thin social contract by which we conditionally agree to curb our rights to do whatever we please. But because no moral principle transcends that fictional contract, we feel no moral qualms about reneging on the agreement when it becomes inconvenient to keep it.
From both sides of the debate — from extreme right to extreme left — the call is for more of this ideology rather than less. But the cure for the ills of political liberalism is not more political liberalism. Liberalism cannot provide the solution to the proliferation of gun violence because liberalism is its most basic cause. Rather than rethink the entire way that we order our political lives, we entrench more deeply into our particular dialect of American liberalism, both in its right and left accents. Under the well-developed proliferation of the theory that produces our social pathologies, we have no hope — none — of addressing incidents like the Annunciation shooting. It will happen again. And when it does, you can just change the date, state and names in this column, because the self-interested ideological reactions will be the same.
