The police chief in Minneapolis, Minnesota has provided some critically important details about this morning's shooting at Annunciation Church on the city's south side.
According to Chief Brian O'Hara, the attacker approached the outside of the church on the side of the building and fired a rifle through the church windows towards children sitting in the church's pews during a mass.
The shooter was armed with a rifle, shotgun and a pistol. Believed to be in his early 20s, the gunman took his own life in the rear of the church, O’Hara said. Two children, ages 8 and 10, were killed in the pews. Seventeen people were injured, 14 of them children. Two are in critical condition.
“This was a deliberate act of violence against innocent children and other people worshiping” O’Hara said.
We still know almost nothing about the attacker and his motivation, but the fact that he never entered the church itself does suggest, as Heritage Foundation's Amy Swearer theorized, that the killer was either aware of or suspected there would be security measures in place that might have prevented him from carrying out the attack from inside the church.
Of course, there are other possibilities: the attacker may not have wanted to actually see the damage he was inflicting on innocent victims, or he originally planned on trying to get away and believed it would be easier to do so if he remained outside the building. Unfortunately, we may never know why he made these decisions.
Gun control groups like Everytown have already taken to social media to issue generic calls for gun control, with Giffords declaring "This shouldn’t be normal."
It's not normal, of course. If it was, we wouldn't be seeing wall-to-wall coverage on every cable news outlet, and papers like the New York Times wouldn't have live, updated coverage of the attack on its homepage. These events are shocking because they're rare. As criminologist James Alan Fox noted back in May, there wasn't a single public deadly mass shooting in the first four months of the year.
Leading outlets have referred to a mass-shooting “epidemic,” particularly when covering the kind of massacres that rock the nation. These events cause widespread terror, after all, they can happen to anyone, at any time, at any place — without warning.
The percentage of Americans indicating that they are fearful of mass shootings nearly tripled from 16 percent in 2015 to 46 percent in 2024, according to Chapman University. And as many as one-third of respondents in a 2019 survey commissioned by the American Psychological Association admitted to having avoided certain places or events out of concern for a shooting.
The truth is these events are exceedingly rare. Moreover, nearly half of all mass shootings take place in private dwellings, and about one-quarter involve gang conflict, drug trafficking or other criminal enterprises.
We can and should be horrified by the violence inflicted on these innocent school children. We can be outraged and angry at the perpetrator. But the gun control lobby also needs people to believe that horrific events like this are commonplace so they can use these tragedies to disarm tens of millions of Americans who are exercising a fundamental civil right... and that's an outrage all its own.
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