On August 27th, a 23-year old psychopath shot up Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis -- the church his family attended, the church where his mother had worked as a secretary. 

Shooting into the church from the outside, shooting right through the stained glass windows, aiming directly at the congregation of mostly children, teachers, and parents on the first Mass of the first day of a new school year, Robert Westman murdered at least two innocent children, and injured many more. 

Once he had exhausted his desire for bloodshed, this demon finally turned one of his guns on himself, leaving behind an abundance of evidence for investigators to study – from scribblings in white paint on his weapons to an extensive diary and a number of YouTube videos. Too late, the world learned what a horror this confused soul had become. 

A few hours after the killings, it was revealed that Robert Westman had legally changed his name to Robin, apparently with the support of his parents, five years ago, on or before his 18th birthday, because he now “identified” as a girl.   

Despite having no criminal record before this event, the documentation reveals that he had had a violent demeanor much of his life; whether he acted on it or not, he wrote that his frequent statements of fondness for mass murder were already making the other schoolchildren shudder by the seventh grade. 

His writings, now public, show a deeply disturbed and evil mind, a boy who grew to be a hateful atheist, an anti-semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-American extremist, a fan of other mass shooters like Natalie Rupnow and Anders Breivik. 

Immediately after the shooting, leftist politicians – beginning with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who shockingly hijacked the police press conference with an offensive rant, quickly spreading across the punditry – began ordering their opponents to resist the temptation of transphobia.  

This incident – to the extent any school shooting can eclipse another, since they are all horrific -- should crystalize a number of issues in the public mind: 

Security has its limits 

In recent years, numerous schools and churches have employed indoor security measures, such as locking the doors, installing metal detectors, employing security officers, and arming other staff. Such measures are helpful for most attacks; they don’t help if the attacker shoots into the windows from outside.  

Now new methods must be considered, such as adding bulletproof glass to the windows of buildings, a crippling expense for non-profits already struggling financially. 

When defense against such attacks becomes more difficult, we must focus harder on the need to reduce the odds of the attacks happening at all.  

Red flags, therapy and confinement 

At this writing, it’s still early in the investigation, but indications are that there must have been red flags about this boy for at least a decade. Was he under psychiatric care of any kind?  Were his obsessions with murder and his litany of hatreds as obvious to others around him as they seem from his manifesto and other rants? 

If so, he is the perfect example of the foolishness of America’s decision to close so many mental institutions, and to end the practice of forced confinement, half a century ago. 

Yes, there were – occasionally – some people misdiagnosed, people condemned to the miserable life of a padded cell who didn’t belong there.  

But it was an overreaction to simply shut down the very concept of forced incarceration before madmen went on killing sprees.  As our nation grows in population, as we have more drug addicts and more sufferers of mental illness, the need for judicious application of forced confinement is clearer every day.   

Some mass killers give no warning signs; we could never protect society from 100% of them.  But some of them have given warning signs so blatant to have served as beacons; a rational program for the dangerously insane would save many innocent lives. 

The transgender issue 

There are many issues that the mainstream media avoid covering at all costs, not because they don’t have the ability, but because they don’t have the desire.  One of the most disturbing is a reticence to cover the confluence of mass shootings and the transgender population. 

Many perpetrators of recent mass shootings have fallen in the spectrum of what they call “the non-binary" -- men who think they’re women, women who think they’re men -- from those who have just changed their names to those who have had horrific operations.  The list is long: Uvalde, Denver, Aberdeen, Nashville, Colorado Springs, and many more -- now including Minneapolis among these tragedies. 

The Left, as always, is disingenuous; they define mass shootings the way they want, so that a much bigger pool is observed.   

If you count any crime in which more than three people are killed, then yes, the number of trans perpetrators is miniscule. But that list counts bank robberies, home invasions, gang shootouts, domestic murder-suicides, etc.  No normal person is thinking of these when using the term “mass shooting.” 

If you look only at this specific type of terror – the mass shooting at a church, synagogue, or school, where it’s not a turf war or a robbery gone wrong, but an intentional effort to kill lots of innocent people, particularly children – then the trans issue rises to the top, in this one specific, horrifying subset.  It therefore does deserve attention if we want to prevent such attacks. 

This isn’t to say that all people with gender dysphoria are likely mass murderers, any more than we would say that any other demographic is automatically likely to commit any other crime.  But we must recognize that it’s an indicator that society should be looking more closely at how we treat this group; there may be other related indicators. 

Is the person under a psychiatrist’s care, and does that care attempt to cure the delusion -- or does it embrace the delusion?  Is the person undergoing painful surgeries (they almost never warn the subject about the incredible, lifelong pain they are getting into), and is the person taking medicine, hormone therapy, depression meds, that may all coincide to create other problems, and perhaps encourage violence? 

Is the gender dysphoria prompted by things in their past, like physical abuse, sexual abuse, bullying, drug dependence, alcoholism, or other issues that might spur feelings of violence, and might warp the person’s sense of right and wrong? And again, is the person receiving care aimed at curing these issues, or at dismissing such concern? 

This isn’t to say that it’s the only indicator for mass murder.  There are Muslim terrorists all over Africa who burn down churches and shoot up schools because their imams tell them to. There are straight Gazans who have shot up malls and pizzerias because they’ve been raised to hate Jews.  There are lunatics who have committed mass murder because they thought it would impress some celebrity or honor a dead dictator. 

So no, we shouldn’t assume that all trans people are potential killers.   

But we do need to stop denying the fact that many are, so we must adjust the way our culture looks at the issue.  One mental illness may be an indicator of other mental illnesses; they don’t necessarily stand alone. 

The culture and the Democrat party 

The difference between the reactions of politicians may have been the most telling. 

 Republicans like President Trump and Vice President Vance offered condolences to the suffering families; Democrats like Mayor Jacob Frey and former Biden aide Jen Psaki issued warnings to not overreact against the trans community. 

As we read the psychopathic ramblings of this latest murderer, we see a picture that summarizes the modern Democrat party in far too many ways.  The hatred of religion in general, and Christianity and Judaism in particular, the hatred of work and capitalism, the sexual deviancy, the hatred of our culture, the rebellion against the traditional family and the traditional community in which the boy was raised. 

Today’s Democrats champion all these things. They don’t specifically call for murder, of course, not usually, not so blatantly, but today’s Democrat politicians attack the Catholic church, the traditional values it espouses, and the traditional morality that has always been at the heart of Christianity.  They agree with Robert Westman on the issues, they just don’t endorse his approach. 

No wonder the Democrat talking heads are more comfortable calling out the mourners, for praying, than they are calling out the gunman for his crimes. 

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation manager, trade compliance trainer, and speaker. Read his book on the surprisingly numerous varieties of vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris years (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his most recent collection of public policy essays, Current Events and the Issues of Our Age, all available in eBook or paperback, exclusively on Amazon.