In mid-June, a tragedy in Minnesota made particularly grim national headlines: Vance Boelter’s assassination of State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, as well as his shooting at State Senator John Hoffman, his wife, Yvette, and their daughter, Hope. It was a distinctly American tragedy, a mixture of politics, lead and individualized action made all the worse by its relative banality. It was the kind of tragedy that, all things considered, ought to stick in the nation’s consciousness for far longer than it has.
But gun violence, to put it simply, is not a rare thing in this country. Here we are, not even three months later, and it’s happened twice again — and each time in Minneapolis. First, on August 26, at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, a Roman Catholic school at 2924 4th Avenue South, where six people were injured and one was killed. Secondly, the following morning at Annunciation Catholic High School, at 509 54th Street West, two children, aged 8 and 10, were killed. 21 other people were injured and the shooter died by suicide not long after.
The Northeaster extends its deepest condolences to the families, communities and individuals impacted by these acts of violence.
Gun violence has wracked this country for long enough that medical journals have had time to undergo long-term studies the topic. It is possible to twist these stories into knots looking for clean motives, obvious ideologies or philosophical throughlines, but that obfuscates a far simpler point: none of these tragedies would have happened if the shooters involved didn’t have access to the firearms they used.
“Firearm Laws and Pediatric Mortality in the US,” a June 2025 study released by Mass General Brigham, a nonprofit healthcare company, put this idea plainly. The study found that the states with the most permissive firearm laws also suffered “thousands of excess firearms deaths among children” between 2011 and 2023.
A report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions highlighted that, in each year since 2020, guns have been the leading cause of deaths in children aged 1-17 — exceeding automobile accidents, cancer or other forms of violence. In 2022 alone, 2,526 children were killed by gun violence, averaging to roughly seven a day.
Each of these deaths is both a grim statistic and an individual life cut short; it is both another number added to the pile and a family irrevocably, and suddenly, hewn.
On its website, The Heritage Foundation, an influential think tank, claims that the Second Amendment “is premised on self-defense. A well-armed citizenry secures a free state by protecting the nation and its individuals from three distinct threats: tyranny, foreign invasion, and domestic dangers such as crime and civil unrest.”
So, to put those ideas to the test: is either political assassination or shooting up a school a form of protection from “tyranny,” “foreign invasion,” “crime,” or “civil unrest?” Is there any meaningful end-goal to be derived here beyond violence for its own sake? When guns are responsible for fracturing so many families, do they serve as a protection against domestic dangers, or do they pose a danger of their own? How many bodies would it take to shift that calculus?
In a press conference following the shooting at Annunciation, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey dismissed “thoughts and prayers” as deeply insufficient in this moment. He called for bans on high-capacity magazines and assault weapons, demanding policy changes so “there’s not another city, two months from now, that is saying the same damn thing.”
On this, Frey is correct. If nothing comes of these shootings, it will be both predictable and foolish. In 2019, after a gunman killed 60 people in Las Vegas, minor gun-control reforms were allowed to stand before they were rolled back by the U.S. Supreme Court five years later. Lawmakers did not pass any meaningful legislature in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida, where 49 people were killed. Inaction on gun violence — the current status quo in the States — has clearly failed in Minneapolis. If nothing changes, it will happen again.