The Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis was disturbing on so many levels. It never should have happened, obviously, and there were supposed to be all kinds of laws to prevent that. The killer was seeking mental health treatment, and the state has a red flag law that could have been used.
Unfortunately, it seems no one thought this would be the eventual outcome of that individual's life.
So, of course, some people want more of what didn't work. Those include the parents of students who were there that day, and they are pretty loud about what they want.
Annunciation Catholic School parents and community members gathered at Mounds View City Hall on Saturday for a town hall hosted by the mayor and the Minnesota attorney general to discuss gun violence and reform.
Mayor Zach Lindstrom, who ran as a non-partisan candidate, said it feels like silence has fallen over the tragedy, a few months after the deadly mass shooting. Meanwhile, a dozen parents described the trauma that has forever changed the lives of students and families as they made a public plea for change.
“Weeks later, my daughter would find the words to tell me more of her own story from that day,” one parent shared. “She saw her friends get shot. She saw her dear sweet friend die in front of her… She is eight years old, and her grief is so heavy.”
The vast majority of parents speaking before a crowded City Hall specifically called for a ban on assault-type weapons and high-capacity magazines. Among them was the wife of Annunciation Catholic School Principal Matt DeBoer.
I get them being upset. If someone tried to kill my kid while attending mass at their school, I'd be upset, too. They have every right to be upset.
But they don't have the right to take away the rights of an untold number of people in Minnesota who did nothing wrong.
For one thing, even if an AR-style rifle wasn't used that day, there was no one to stop the killer. He could have fired the same number of shots in about the same matter of time with a handgun. No one was there to end his rampage, so even if it took him a little longer to fire the 116 rounds everyone focuses on, would it matter all that much?
I can't see how. Everyone in the school was disarmed by force of law. They couldn't fight back, so all that mattered was the police response time, and it wasn't nearly fast enough to have stopped it, even if we were talking about a madman using a revolver.
Banning a kind of weapon and setting an arbitrary limit on how many rounds in a magazine isn't the safe move many like to think. After all, how many states have those laws already, yet still have actual mass shootings just as often, that are just as deadly as before?
These parents are upset. They're emotional. I get that.
And the anti-gun politicians and media are preying on that to try and guilt the rest of the state into accepting restrictions that are a clear violation of the Second Amendment.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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