The response to Minnesota shooting is a toxic mix of ideology and political pathology

Boarded church windows are visible behind a memorial at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis the evening of Aug. 28, 2025. A shooter opened fire Aug. 27 through the windows during an Annunciation Catholic School all-school Mass, killing two children and wounding 18 other victims. (OSV News photo/Maria Wiering)

The vicious transgender terrorist attack on Annunciation School in Minneapolis elicited the usual responses from the political left and right. From both sides, politicians and pundits have rushed to reduce the issue to a single causative factor, effectively blaming their political opponents for the shooting. This is not based upon consideration of actual solutions to gun violence in the United States, but on commitments to political ideology. In fact, the shooting has been used — especially, but not solely by the political left — to double down on the divisive political ideology that is a substantive contributing factor to the attack. This exposes the hypocrisy of both sides, of course. They are more interested in advancing an agenda than proposing comprehensive solutions.


More fundamentally, this shooting, like all the mass shootings before it, exposes the fatal flaw in the political theory upon which the U.S. is founded. It is yet another example of the failure of liberalism, which means that it is a failure across the American political spectrum, from far right (conservative liberals) to far left (progressive liberals). The radical individualism of American liberalism — embraced and advocated across the political spectrum — is the most fundamental cause of this kind of violence. All the particular causative factors descend from the basic problem of our common political theory. This suggests that positive solutions must be sought somewhere other than the liberalism that has produced the status quo. The answer to the pathologies of liberalism (of the right and left variations) is not more liberalism.

The question of gun control​

Continued below.