Every child's life matters. Let's get that clear right from the start, because if I don't, someone will try to claim that I'm fine with dead kids due to their own lack of reading comprehension.
Why? Because a protest in Minnesota meant to draw attention to children being killed kind of shot itself in the foot.
This is sparked by the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, which we can all agree was terrible and never should have happened. So, to draw attention to the supposedly greater problem, protestors put empty desks outside the state capitol to represent kids killed by gunfire.
Parents of students at Annunciation Catholic Church and School installed 60 empty desks outside the Minnesota State Capitol on Tuesday to represent the children killed by gun violence and call for action to prevent future violence.
The installation comes as DFL leaders are planning to unveil a package of gun control bills on Tuesday morning.
Reminder of children killed by gun violence
What we know:
The installation of 60 desks outside the Capitol will be on display from Feb. 24–26, with organizers saying it represents the more than 200 Minnesota children killed by gun violence since 2021 and "serves as a quiet, unavoidable reminder of lives lost and futures stolen."
Now, that averages out to around 50 kids per year.
In a state with a population of a smidge under 5.8 million.
Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't seem to be massively alarming. Every one is a tragedy, sure, but that's also around the same number of people killed in car crashes in the state in the month of September, 2025.
I'd see if it was akin to the numbers killed in car crashes for young people in total, but they don't break down the numbers in a way that will let me assess that, unless I want to play the game of counting legal adults age 18 and 19 as kids. If I did--and I don't know that they didn't here--then the numbers are pretty close.
Unfortunately, there's always going to be a certain amount of tragedy that exists in the world. While we can try to mitigate it as best we can, it does no one any favors to pretend a problem is bigger than it is.
Especially since we know there's a good chance that at least a good chunk of those deaths to "gun violence" were suicides, which are different than school shootings or gang violence.
Yet even with that, we're looking at a percentage of the population with an insane number of zeros after the decimal place. It's just not this major problem that warrants curtailing people's gun rights when it's really just statistical noise, in the grand scheme of things.
Yes, each one is someone's baby, and I'm sympathetic to that. I hate it for them, and I know they wouldn't want their child thought of as "statistical noise," and for good reason. To them, he or she was no such thing.
But we shouldn't engineer or premise laws on statistical outliers.
Minnesota seems to be an insanely safe state for kids. While the desks will probably move some lawmakers and make them push for gun control even harder than before, the truth is that it shows just how little of a problem it really is there.
What's more, that would be relevant even if the gun control worked. However, we've seen over the last couple of years that despite the protestations of the anti-gunners, homicide rates plummeted in 2025 despite (or because of) more guns on the streets than ever before.
Couple those two facts together, and it's pretty clear that Minnesota doesn't need to do a damn thing.
Tim Walz just wants to.
