What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less the gun lobby’s money than the ideology that it’s been spreading for years.
People gather at Lynhurst Park where a candlelight vigil was being held for the victims of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis that left at least two dead and 17 others injured, in Minnesota, United States on August 27, 2025.
(Photo by Christopher Mark Juhn/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Frank Smyth
Aug 29, 2025
Common Dreams
“Not again,” countless Americans have said for decades after another mass shooting like the one on Wednesday, August 27 at a mass in church at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Some experts say we should focus more on the “red flags” that potential shooters may give off so authorities could have a better chance of stopping them. Others say we need to fortify schools and deploy more armed guards to deter them.
Hardly anyone has said, however, what would work, and has been proven to reduce gun violence in every other advanced nation. To license new gun buyers and require both criminal and mental health background checks, and a permit each time they want to purchase either a semiautomatic weapon or handgun. A handful of states like New Jersey have required all these measures for decades every time to buy a handgun, and no court has ruled these regulations violate the Second Amendment.
Back in 1959, the organization that became Gallup reported 75% of Americans would not oppose requiring a permit to buy a gun. Today, however, few Americans including even gun reform advocates talk about gun permits. The reason is that Americans on both sides of our ongoing debate over guns have been gaslit and don’t know it.
There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), whose leadership has since been ousted over their embezzlements, and the gun industry, represented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have both wielded tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns. But their donations explain only part of their influence. What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less their money than the ideology that they’ve been spreading for years.
“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” US President Donald Trump told reporters during his first term after a weekend of deadly shootings in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso and on a bar-lined street in Dayton. He said it after a phone conversation with the NRA’s now-disgraced leader Wayne LaPierre. The phrase is based on the idea that gun control is just a step or two away from gun confiscation and then tyranny.
This view is taken like gospel truth among the ranks and leadership of today’s Republican Party, even though it’s a myth. Gun control has never led to gun confiscation. Communist nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba declared firearms illegal under the threat of imprisonment to compel people to turn them in. Nazi Germany seized few usable firearms from Jews, as one NRA-funded author, Stephen P. Halbrook, admitted, but only in the back pages of his book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, published by a small California think tank. Democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have used buyback campaigns to voluntarily compel people to turn in semiautomatic weapons.
Democratic Party leaders and gun reform advocates are partly to blame. Despite their good intentions, they both chose to play it safe, while sidestepping the disinformation long peddled by the gun lobby. Reformers built the strongest movement for “gun sense” that this nation had ever seen after the Parkland high school shooting, which incorporated surviving students and parents from prior school shootings in Newtown and Columbine. But what its advocates failed to realize is that the movement for gun rights was even stronger.
Money on its own rarely moves people for very long. But what people may believe tends to resonate more, whether even one word of it is true. There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
Donald Trump has flip-flopped over guns throughout his life, the last time in 2019 over better background checks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. One doesn’t have to look back very far to find posters in online gun forums doubting his loyalty. But he seems to have proven himself to most pro-gun people today.
President Trump along with allies and followers continue to claim that he is the only one keeping tyranny in America at bay. Even as his followers, including paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and the National Front and the expanding ranks of federal immigration enforcement agents, gradually impose an armed presence loyal to the president across the land.
This is the kind of outcome that many gun rights activists have long said they feared. Considering how their alleged evidence has always been nothing more than a fairy tale may help explain why President Trump and his armed allies and troops are the ones imposing what looks like an emerging tyranny today, while our daily violence from guns goes on.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Frank Smyth is the author of the book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).
Full Bio >
“Not again,” countless Americans have said for decades after another mass shooting like the one on Wednesday, August 27 at a mass in church at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Some experts say we should focus more on the “red flags” that potential shooters may give off so authorities could have a better chance of stopping them. Others say we need to fortify schools and deploy more armed guards to deter them.
Hardly anyone has said, however, what would work, and has been proven to reduce gun violence in every other advanced nation. To license new gun buyers and require both criminal and mental health background checks, and a permit each time they want to purchase either a semiautomatic weapon or handgun. A handful of states like New Jersey have required all these measures for decades every time to buy a handgun, and no court has ruled these regulations violate the Second Amendment.
Back in 1959, the organization that became Gallup reported 75% of Americans would not oppose requiring a permit to buy a gun. Today, however, few Americans including even gun reform advocates talk about gun permits. The reason is that Americans on both sides of our ongoing debate over guns have been gaslit and don’t know it.
There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
The National Rifle Association (NRA), whose leadership has since been ousted over their embezzlements, and the gun industry, represented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have both wielded tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns. But their donations explain only part of their influence. What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less their money than the ideology that they’ve been spreading for years.
“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” US President Donald Trump told reporters during his first term after a weekend of deadly shootings in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso and on a bar-lined street in Dayton. He said it after a phone conversation with the NRA’s now-disgraced leader Wayne LaPierre. The phrase is based on the idea that gun control is just a step or two away from gun confiscation and then tyranny.
This view is taken like gospel truth among the ranks and leadership of today’s Republican Party, even though it’s a myth. Gun control has never led to gun confiscation. Communist nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba declared firearms illegal under the threat of imprisonment to compel people to turn them in. Nazi Germany seized few usable firearms from Jews, as one NRA-funded author, Stephen P. Halbrook, admitted, but only in the back pages of his book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, published by a small California think tank. Democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have used buyback campaigns to voluntarily compel people to turn in semiautomatic weapons.
Democratic Party leaders and gun reform advocates are partly to blame. Despite their good intentions, they both chose to play it safe, while sidestepping the disinformation long peddled by the gun lobby. Reformers built the strongest movement for “gun sense” that this nation had ever seen after the Parkland high school shooting, which incorporated surviving students and parents from prior school shootings in Newtown and Columbine. But what its advocates failed to realize is that the movement for gun rights was even stronger.
Money on its own rarely moves people for very long. But what people may believe tends to resonate more, whether even one word of it is true. There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.
Donald Trump has flip-flopped over guns throughout his life, the last time in 2019 over better background checks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. One doesn’t have to look back very far to find posters in online gun forums doubting his loyalty. But he seems to have proven himself to most pro-gun people today.
President Trump along with allies and followers continue to claim that he is the only one keeping tyranny in America at bay. Even as his followers, including paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and the National Front and the expanding ranks of federal immigration enforcement agents, gradually impose an armed presence loyal to the president across the land.
This is the kind of outcome that many gun rights activists have long said they feared. Considering how their alleged evidence has always been nothing more than a fairy tale may help explain why President Trump and his armed allies and troops are the ones imposing what looks like an emerging tyranny today, while our daily violence from guns goes on.
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Frank Smyth is the author of the book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).
Full Bio >
One radical step will horrify most but it can end our national nightmare
Mourner Tim Barr prays outside the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis. REUTERS/Tim Evans
Thom Hartmann
August 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.
There are lessons we must learn from both, as I’ll lay out in a moment.
Immediately following the Minneapolis shooting, another pathetic Republican congressman claimed that the slaughter wasn’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.”
A community is grieving, school kids across America are terrified, and after 339 mass shootings since the start of this year you’d think average Americans would finally understand that the horrors of this gun violence have been intentionally inflicted on us by Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court in exchange for cash from the NRA and Russia.
This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.
Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.
Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on Aug. 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any meaningful consequence.)
His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.
Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said two years ago, honoring the release of the movie Till:
“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.”
That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.
We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?
The odds are pretty close to zero. Most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children.
But we need to learn. Because pictures really work when it comes to changing public opinion.
In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s anti-abortion movement began the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils.
Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, still often carry or allude to these graphic images.
Those in the movement will tell you that the decision in the 1990s to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“
Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helped finally turned the tide on the Vietnam War.
Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.
There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.
And yet, pictures convey reality in a way that words cannot. One of these days, the parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision Mamie Till did in 1955.
America’s era of mass shootings kicked off on Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman murdered his mother and then climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas and begin shooting.
The vast majority of our mass killings, however, began during the Reagan/Bush administrations following the 1984 San Ysidro, California McDonald’s massacre, the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office shooting of 1986, and the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991.
Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the gun lobby, his repeal of modest restrictions like the Brady Bill waiting period, and his rhetoric casting firearms as symbols of “freedom” helped unleash a flood of guns into American society, fueling the explosion of both gun ownership and gun violence that has scarred the nation ever since.
We’ve become familiar with the names of the places, and sometimes the dates, but the horror and pain of the torn and exploded bodies has escaped us.
It’s time for America to confront the reality of gun violence. And all my years working in the senior levels of the advertising industry tell me that a graphic portrayal of the consequences of their products is the greatest fear of America’s weapons manufacturers and the NRA.
We did it with tobacco and drunk driving back in the day, showing pictures of people missing half their jaw or mangled and bloody car wreckage, and it worked.
And now there’s a student-led movement asking states to put a check-box on driver’s licenses with the line:
“In the event that I die from gun violence please publicize the photo of my death. #MyLastShot.”
This isn’t, however, something that should just be tossed off, or thrown up on a webpage.
Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism — print, television, web-based publications — should get together and decide what photos to release with parental permission, how to release them, and under what circumstances it could be done to provide maximum impact and minimum trauma.
But Americans must understand what’s really going on.
A decade ago, President Barack Obama put then-VP Joe Biden in charge of his gun task force, and Biden saw the pictures from school shootings back then.
Here’s how The New York Times quoted Biden:
“‘Jill and I are devastated. The feeling — I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling,’ he said, at times struggling to find the right words.”
Obama himself, after seeing the photos, broke into tears on national television.
And we appear to be tiptoeing up to the edge of doing exactly this. The Washington Post featured an article about what happens when people are shot by assault weapons and included this commentary:
“A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that ‘disintegrated’ a toddler’s skull.
“This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
“The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.”
But we need to go the next step and show the actual pictures for this truth about the horror of gun violence to become widely known. Doing this will take leadership.
And, of course, there must be a Mamie Bradley: a parent, spouse or other relation willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.
In 1996 there was a horrific slaughter in Tasmania, Australia, by a shooter using an AR15-style weapon, culminating a series of mass shootings that had plagued that nation for over a decade.
While the mainstream Australian media generally didn’t publish the photos, they were widely circulated.
As a result the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.
And that was with John Howard as Prime Minister — a conservative who was as hard-right as Reagan!
In the first years after the laws took place, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have only been two mass killings in the 29 years since then.
The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment.
America needs ours.
August 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.
There are lessons we must learn from both, as I’ll lay out in a moment.
Immediately following the Minneapolis shooting, another pathetic Republican congressman claimed that the slaughter wasn’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.”
A community is grieving, school kids across America are terrified, and after 339 mass shootings since the start of this year you’d think average Americans would finally understand that the horrors of this gun violence have been intentionally inflicted on us by Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court in exchange for cash from the NRA and Russia.
This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.
Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.
Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on Aug. 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any meaningful consequence.)
His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.
Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said two years ago, honoring the release of the movie Till:
“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.”
That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.
We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?
The odds are pretty close to zero. Most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children.
But we need to learn. Because pictures really work when it comes to changing public opinion.
In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s anti-abortion movement began the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils.
Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, still often carry or allude to these graphic images.
Those in the movement will tell you that the decision in the 1990s to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“
Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helped finally turned the tide on the Vietnam War.
Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.
There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.
And yet, pictures convey reality in a way that words cannot. One of these days, the parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision Mamie Till did in 1955.
America’s era of mass shootings kicked off on Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman murdered his mother and then climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas and begin shooting.
The vast majority of our mass killings, however, began during the Reagan/Bush administrations following the 1984 San Ysidro, California McDonald’s massacre, the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office shooting of 1986, and the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991.
Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the gun lobby, his repeal of modest restrictions like the Brady Bill waiting period, and his rhetoric casting firearms as symbols of “freedom” helped unleash a flood of guns into American society, fueling the explosion of both gun ownership and gun violence that has scarred the nation ever since.
We’ve become familiar with the names of the places, and sometimes the dates, but the horror and pain of the torn and exploded bodies has escaped us.
It’s time for America to confront the reality of gun violence. And all my years working in the senior levels of the advertising industry tell me that a graphic portrayal of the consequences of their products is the greatest fear of America’s weapons manufacturers and the NRA.
We did it with tobacco and drunk driving back in the day, showing pictures of people missing half their jaw or mangled and bloody car wreckage, and it worked.
And now there’s a student-led movement asking states to put a check-box on driver’s licenses with the line:
“In the event that I die from gun violence please publicize the photo of my death. #MyLastShot.”
This isn’t, however, something that should just be tossed off, or thrown up on a webpage.
Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism — print, television, web-based publications — should get together and decide what photos to release with parental permission, how to release them, and under what circumstances it could be done to provide maximum impact and minimum trauma.
But Americans must understand what’s really going on.
A decade ago, President Barack Obama put then-VP Joe Biden in charge of his gun task force, and Biden saw the pictures from school shootings back then.
Here’s how The New York Times quoted Biden:
“‘Jill and I are devastated. The feeling — I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling,’ he said, at times struggling to find the right words.”
Obama himself, after seeing the photos, broke into tears on national television.
And we appear to be tiptoeing up to the edge of doing exactly this. The Washington Post featured an article about what happens when people are shot by assault weapons and included this commentary:
“A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that ‘disintegrated’ a toddler’s skull.
“This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.
“The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.”
But we need to go the next step and show the actual pictures for this truth about the horror of gun violence to become widely known. Doing this will take leadership.
And, of course, there must be a Mamie Bradley: a parent, spouse or other relation willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.
In 1996 there was a horrific slaughter in Tasmania, Australia, by a shooter using an AR15-style weapon, culminating a series of mass shootings that had plagued that nation for over a decade.
While the mainstream Australian media generally didn’t publish the photos, they were widely circulated.
As a result the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.
And that was with John Howard as Prime Minister — a conservative who was as hard-right as Reagan!
In the first years after the laws took place, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have only been two mass killings in the 29 years since then.
The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment.
America needs ours.
Minneapolis Mass Shooting Exposes Trump-GOP Lies on Crime and Gun Violence, Critics Say
"Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids," said one healthcare advocate.
Parents await news during an active shooter situation at the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis on August 27, 2025.
Stephen Prager
Aug 27, 2025
Congress has not passed a significant piece of gun legislation since 2022, when it passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
That law, which was supported by just 15 Republicans, introduced some modest reforms—including extended background checks for firearm purchasers under 21, funding for state red flag laws, and the closure of gun purchasing loopholes.
However, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) only agreed to negotiate the bill if Democrats abandoned more ambitious reforms, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks.
Since its passage, even this watered-down piece of legislation has been fought aggressively by Republican lawmakers backed by the gun industry's lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, who have attempted to have it repealed.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to present an action plan to reverse any law that the Department of Justice determines has "impinged on the Second Amendment rights of our citizens."
Through executive orders, Trump has rolled back efforts under the Biden administration to regulate ghost guns and enhance background checks.
The administration has also choked off more than $800 million in grants to local gun violence prevention groups and pushed for "concealed carry reciprocity" legislation, which would require all states to honor concealed carry permits issued by other states.
Instead of stricter gun control measures, Trump has personally advocated for schools to arm teachers and focus on improving mental healthcare—even as he's rolled back rules ensuring Americans have access to that care.
Far Right Exploits Children’s Deaths in Minneapolis to Target Trans People
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has decried those using the tragedy “as an opportunity to villainize our trans community.”
By Zane McNeill ,
HHS Website Removes Advisory Declaring Gun Violence a Public Health Crisis
The HHS web page that once featured the former surgeon general’s advisory on gun violence now reads “Page Not Found.” By Chris Walker , Truthout March 18, 2025
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey condemned the transphobic backlash, saying that anyone “using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.” He added on X that “thoughts and prayers” are not enough to confront the systemic causes of mass shootings.
Despite such “thoughts and prayers,” the Mass Shooting Tracker currently reports 339 mass shootings this year, leaving 388 people dead and nearly 1,500 wounded. Everytown for Gun Safety has recorded 91 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2025 alone.
Yet rather than confronting this crisis or advancing meaningful gun control — even though the shooter obtained the firearms legally — advocates say that the far right has instead chosen to weaponize the tragedy. “I’m absolutely disgusted by how the right-wing media and the Trump regime have tried to make this story about transgender people rather than the victims. They should be ashamed,” Chapman told Truthout.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has dramatically escalated efforts to roll back transgender rights. He directed the Food and Drug Administration to convene a panel to determine if hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases a propensity for violence among trans people, and his administration has pushed bogus research on the efficacy of gender-affirming care for trans kids. He has also taken steps to pathologize trans people in what many trans people see as an effort to regulate and institutionalize transgender people.
“The Trump regime is desperate for a story to legitimize their attacks on the transgender community and this is simply a convenient way to demonize a community based on the actions of a singular person,” Chapman said.
Even in the rare instances when a mass shooter is transgender, the statistical reality remains: The overwhelming majority of such incidents are carried out by cisgender men. Meanwhile, transgender people are four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime — not the perpetrators.
“I’m terrified for my kids, I’m terrified for my community, and I’m terrified at the thought of what the Trump regime could do to me and my community in response to this tragedy,” Chapman told Truthout.
"Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids," said one healthcare advocate.
Parents await news during an active shooter situation at the Annunciation Church in Minneapolis on August 27, 2025.
(Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Star Tribune via Getty Images)
Stephen Prager
Aug 27, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Another horrific mass shooting that left multiple children dead and injured has once again ignited a wave of fury at Republican lawmakers who refuse to take action to stop gun violence.
Two children—ages 8 and 10—were killed when a shooter fired through the windows of a church at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. Another 17 people, including 14 more children, were also injured in the attack before the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Minneapolis police say the shooter carried out the attack, which is now being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, using three weapons: a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, not even eight months into 2025, there have already been 286 mass shootings—defined as cases in which four or more people are shot or killed—in the United States just this year, averaging more than one per day.
Gun violence is the number-one killer of children in the US, causing more deaths each year than car accidents, poisonings, and cancer. The victims of the shooting in Minneapolis join the more than 800 children killed and more than 2,200 injured by firearms this year.
Like dozens of mass shootings before it, Wednesday's deadly attack has stoked calls in Minnesota and around the country from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for stricter gun laws, which have been repeatedly shot down by Republicans in Congress.
"We need better laws on the books nationally," said Minnesota's Democratic senator, Amy Klobuchar. "When you have so much access to guns right now and so many guns out there on the streets, you're going to continue to see these kinds of mass shootings."
"Don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. "These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church."
"They should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence, and their parents should have the same kind of assurance," Frey said. "These are the sort of basic assurances that every family should have every step of the day, regardless of where they are in our country."
Another horrific mass shooting that left multiple children dead and injured has once again ignited a wave of fury at Republican lawmakers who refuse to take action to stop gun violence.
Two children—ages 8 and 10—were killed when a shooter fired through the windows of a church at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning. Another 17 people, including 14 more children, were also injured in the attack before the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Minneapolis police say the shooter carried out the attack, which is now being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism, using three weapons: a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, not even eight months into 2025, there have already been 286 mass shootings—defined as cases in which four or more people are shot or killed—in the United States just this year, averaging more than one per day.
Gun violence is the number-one killer of children in the US, causing more deaths each year than car accidents, poisonings, and cancer. The victims of the shooting in Minneapolis join the more than 800 children killed and more than 2,200 injured by firearms this year.
Like dozens of mass shootings before it, Wednesday's deadly attack has stoked calls in Minnesota and around the country from Democratic lawmakers and gun control advocates for stricter gun laws, which have been repeatedly shot down by Republicans in Congress.
"We need better laws on the books nationally," said Minnesota's Democratic senator, Amy Klobuchar. "When you have so much access to guns right now and so many guns out there on the streets, you're going to continue to see these kinds of mass shootings."
"Don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now," said Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. "These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church."
"They should be able to go to school or church in peace without the fear or risk of violence, and their parents should have the same kind of assurance," Frey said. "These are the sort of basic assurances that every family should have every step of the day, regardless of where they are in our country."
Congress has not passed a significant piece of gun legislation since 2022, when it passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
That law, which was supported by just 15 Republicans, introduced some modest reforms—including extended background checks for firearm purchasers under 21, funding for state red flag laws, and the closure of gun purchasing loopholes.
However, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) only agreed to negotiate the bill if Democrats abandoned more ambitious reforms, such as bans on high-capacity magazines and universal background checks.
Since its passage, even this watered-down piece of legislation has been fought aggressively by Republican lawmakers backed by the gun industry's lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association, who have attempted to have it repealed.
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to present an action plan to reverse any law that the Department of Justice determines has "impinged on the Second Amendment rights of our citizens."
Through executive orders, Trump has rolled back efforts under the Biden administration to regulate ghost guns and enhance background checks.
The administration has also choked off more than $800 million in grants to local gun violence prevention groups and pushed for "concealed carry reciprocity" legislation, which would require all states to honor concealed carry permits issued by other states.
Instead of stricter gun control measures, Trump has personally advocated for schools to arm teachers and focus on improving mental healthcare—even as he's rolled back rules ensuring Americans have access to that care.
"Until we have more elected officials willing to place gun safety over allegiance to the gun lobby, more and more families will face unbearable suffering from random acts of violence," said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) on Wednesday. "Congress could—and should—pass stricter gun safety laws, but continues to cave to the gun lobby."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added: "The United States continues to be the only country where school shootings are a regular occurrence. We must stop this epidemic of gun violence and finally put the lives of our kids first."
Other advocates noted the contrast between Trump's response to the imaginary "crime wave" in Washington, DC, where he has initiated a militarized takeover, and his lack of interest in fighting America's endless wave of gun violence.
"Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in the US," said Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. "Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids."
Charles Idelson, a former communications director for National Nurses United, said: "If Trump wants to pretend he is 'fighting crimes,' stop protecting the pro-gun violence cabal."
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) added: "The United States continues to be the only country where school shootings are a regular occurrence. We must stop this epidemic of gun violence and finally put the lives of our kids first."
Other advocates noted the contrast between Trump's response to the imaginary "crime wave" in Washington, DC, where he has initiated a militarized takeover, and his lack of interest in fighting America's endless wave of gun violence.
"Guns are the leading cause of death for kids in the US," said Melanie D'Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health. "Trump will send the military into DC to pick up litter and arrest homeless people, but won't do a damn thing to end the gun violence epidemic killing our kids."
Charles Idelson, a former communications director for National Nurses United, said: "If Trump wants to pretend he is 'fighting crimes,' stop protecting the pro-gun violence cabal."
Update: This report, which originally referred to the shooter as a "gunman" has been corrected to accurately reflect new information about the gender identity of the shooter, who has been identified as Robin Westman, a transgender woman.
Far Right Exploits Children’s Deaths in Minneapolis to Target Trans People
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has decried those using the tragedy “as an opportunity to villainize our trans community.”
By Zane McNeill ,
August 28, 2025
People attend a vigil at Lynnhurst Park to mourn the dead and pray for the wounded after a gunman opened fire on students at Annunciation Catholic School on August 27, 2025 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Scott Olson / Getty Images
Trump supporters are exploiting the mass shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday — in which two children were killed and 17 people were injured — to escalate their broader attacks on transgender people.
“Two innocent children are dead and the far right are racing to use it as pretext to further eradicate trans people,” civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo said on Bluesky.
Early reports suggest the shooter may have identified as transgender, and the far right has seized on this to advance their ongoing campaign to demonize and criminalize trans people.
Within hours of the shooting, MAGA influencers began circulating the shooter’s reported gender identity as evidence of a so-called pattern. Far right commentators like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh called transgender people “dangerously delusional,” “mentally sick,” and “crazy.” U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted that the shooter “claimed to be transgender,” a claim that Elon Musk then amplified on X, writing: “There is a clear pattern here.”
This pattern, however, is one the far right have been trying to manufacture for the past few years as a routine scapegoating tactic in the wake of mass violence. “The fact of the matter is a shooter is more likely to be a non-transgender white male rather than a transgender person,” LGBTQ legislative researcher Allison Chapman told Truthout. “The right-wing media machine has been quick to blame a trans person in almost all recent shootings and this time it just happened to be plausible.”
Related Story
Trump supporters are exploiting the mass shooting in Minneapolis on Wednesday — in which two children were killed and 17 people were injured — to escalate their broader attacks on transgender people.
“Two innocent children are dead and the far right are racing to use it as pretext to further eradicate trans people,” civil rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo said on Bluesky.
Early reports suggest the shooter may have identified as transgender, and the far right has seized on this to advance their ongoing campaign to demonize and criminalize trans people.
Within hours of the shooting, MAGA influencers began circulating the shooter’s reported gender identity as evidence of a so-called pattern. Far right commentators like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh called transgender people “dangerously delusional,” “mentally sick,” and “crazy.” U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted that the shooter “claimed to be transgender,” a claim that Elon Musk then amplified on X, writing: “There is a clear pattern here.”
This pattern, however, is one the far right have been trying to manufacture for the past few years as a routine scapegoating tactic in the wake of mass violence. “The fact of the matter is a shooter is more likely to be a non-transgender white male rather than a transgender person,” LGBTQ legislative researcher Allison Chapman told Truthout. “The right-wing media machine has been quick to blame a trans person in almost all recent shootings and this time it just happened to be plausible.”
Related Story
HHS Website Removes Advisory Declaring Gun Violence a Public Health Crisis
The HHS web page that once featured the former surgeon general’s advisory on gun violence now reads “Page Not Found.” By Chris Walker , Truthout March 18, 2025
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey condemned the transphobic backlash, saying that anyone “using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community, or any other community out there, has lost their sense of common humanity.” He added on X that “thoughts and prayers” are not enough to confront the systemic causes of mass shootings.
Despite such “thoughts and prayers,” the Mass Shooting Tracker currently reports 339 mass shootings this year, leaving 388 people dead and nearly 1,500 wounded. Everytown for Gun Safety has recorded 91 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in 2025 alone.
Yet rather than confronting this crisis or advancing meaningful gun control — even though the shooter obtained the firearms legally — advocates say that the far right has instead chosen to weaponize the tragedy. “I’m absolutely disgusted by how the right-wing media and the Trump regime have tried to make this story about transgender people rather than the victims. They should be ashamed,” Chapman told Truthout.
Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has dramatically escalated efforts to roll back transgender rights. He directed the Food and Drug Administration to convene a panel to determine if hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases a propensity for violence among trans people, and his administration has pushed bogus research on the efficacy of gender-affirming care for trans kids. He has also taken steps to pathologize trans people in what many trans people see as an effort to regulate and institutionalize transgender people.
“The Trump regime is desperate for a story to legitimize their attacks on the transgender community and this is simply a convenient way to demonize a community based on the actions of a singular person,” Chapman said.
Even in the rare instances when a mass shooter is transgender, the statistical reality remains: The overwhelming majority of such incidents are carried out by cisgender men. Meanwhile, transgender people are four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime — not the perpetrators.
“I’m terrified for my kids, I’m terrified for my community, and I’m terrified at the thought of what the Trump regime could do to me and my community in response to this tragedy,” Chapman told Truthout.
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