Yesterday, Minneapolis was shattered by another school shooting. At Annunciation Catholic grade school, during morning Mass, a young man who believed he was a woman opened fire, killing two children (ages 8 and 10) and injuring 17 others, including 14 children and three elderly parishioners. All the injured are expected to survive, but the scars will last a lifetime.
Two years ago, Nashville faced the same horror at the Covenant School, where a woman who believed she was a man killed six, including three children.
These are not random events. They reveal a deeper pattern.
The Triad of Protection
Human survival depends on a simple triad:
- Men protect women.
- Women protect children.
- Children are the sacred center.
This isn’t ideology. It’s biology. It’s how our species endured. The strong defended the nurturers; the nurturers shielded the young; the young carried life forward. Break that circle, and children are left exposed.
What Happens When It Breaks
The triad fails in predictable ways:
- Abdication: fathers absent, men refusing to provide or defend.
- Usurpation: women turning away from nurture, neglecting or outsourcing children.
- Inversion: blurred roles, women taking on the roles of men, men the roles of women, until they even start claiming to be the opposite gender.
- Betrayal: the strong preying on the weak.
- Dissolution: families fractured, every layer fending for itself.
Transgenderism is not the first break — it is the fallout of families and children already in crisis. Mothers forget their roles, children never learn theirs, and the result is a generation unmoored. What began as a social contagion hardened into a disorder, and for complicated reasons was elevated into a celebrated condition. Its sufferers were anointed as holy victims, and families that embraced them were praised as enlightened. In a world bereft of religion and deep meaning, transgenderism offered a counterfeit faith. It became a new sacrament.
But that new faith carries a built-in enemy. Christianity, by affirming natural boundaries and the created order, challenges the very root of transgender identity. So when broken individuals turn violent, it is not only against children, but against the faith they perceive as threatening their existence. And the children inside those schools are not only vulnerable enough to be victims — they represent what the shooters longed for and never achieved: healthy young lives in stable families, rooted in meaning. That made them targets twice over.
Why the Violence Escalates
An identity built on rejecting natural boundaries is always unstable. It cannot survive contradiction, because reality itself becomes the enemy. At first, the demand is for silence and compliance — change your words, change your laws, change your schools. But when reality keeps intruding, compliance escalates into coercion, and coercion into violence.
That is why we now see slogans like “Trans rights or else” paired with guns and bloodied imagery, often alongside Antifa symbols, as Andy Ngo has documented. The rhetoric is no longer about acceptance but intimidation. What began as confusion has become confusion weaponized, and it increasingly points itself at children and the communities that still protect them. Violence becomes the final guarantee for an identity that cannot stand on its own — and the most fragile pay the price.
Twice in two years, sanctuaries of innocence became killing grounds. Not because of “senseless violence,” but because a culture that celebrates confusion produces individuals who weaponize it. When the triad collapses, the fury of that collapse falls hardest on children.
The Way Back
We must rebuild the triad of protection.
- Men must again embrace their duty to defend.
- Women must again guard and nurture the young.
- Families and faith communities must stand firm, knowing they will be targeted.
We must recover truth instead of indulging fantasies and delusions. Feeding illusions only deepens the collapse — and when reality finally intrudes, the backlash grows ever more dangerous.
Children are the center. Always have been. And until we protect them, nothing else we argue about will matter.
When children are the targets, nothing else matters.
In two years, two school sanctuaries have been shattered by shooters who embodied a culture of confusion and collapse. These tragedies aren’t “random.” They’re part of a deeper pattern — a breaking of the natural order that leaves the weakest unprotected.
That’s what this column lays out: the collapse of the triad of protection — men defending, women nurturing, children at the center — and why its unraveling fuels both cultural chaos and deadly violence.
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