The tragic massacre at Annunciation Catholic School and its adjacent church in Minneapolis should serve as a sobering moment for us all, especially as we witness, yet again, a mass shooting by someone identifying as transgender. Robert “Robin” Westman, a 23-year-old man brainwashed into thinking he was a woman. He shot 116 rounds through stained-glass windows during a Mass. The horror claimed the lives of two innocent children, 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski, and wounded 17 others, including children as young as six and elderly parishioners in their 80s. Westman then turned a gun on himself, ending his own life at the scene.
The undeniable darkness of this attack goes far beyond the usual political platitudes about mental health and gun control. Westman methodically and chillingly calculated his acts: He scouted the church, locked doors from the outside to trap victims, and marked the pews and aisles with disturbing precision.
His journal, a stream-of-consciousness diary containing violent obsessions and hateful vitriol, including racial and antisemitic slurs scrawled on his weapons, reveals a profoundly disturbed mind fixated on cruelty, particularly the suffering of children. Acting United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota Joe Thompson laid it bare: Westman “wanted to watch children suffer.”
It’s a level of hate few people can understand.
The agonizing truth at the heart of this tragedy is Westman’s transgender identity and the mental health crisis bound up with it. He struggled for years with depression, as well as suicidal and homicidal thoughts, yet officials found no mental health interventions to stop his weapons purchases or his descent into violence. That is a glaring indictment of our society’s failure or refusal to confront the links between transgenderism, hate, and violence.
Related: This May Be the Worst Media Gaslighting About the Minneapolis Shooting Yet
It is past time to admit what so many deny: transgenderism is a mental disorder, not a lifestyle to affirm or celebrate. We can measure the consequences of pretending otherwise in shattered lives and grieving families.
Two years ago, I ran the numbers and found a disturbing trend. Even though transgender-identifying people make up just 0.6% of the U.S. population, according to Everytown For Gun Safety, they account for 1.3% of mass shooters. That means transgender individuals are more than twice as likely to commit these crimes as non-transgender people. And that’s before we even get into the question of whether the “gender identity” of every mass shooter in these databases is known or accurately reported. Mother Jones paints an even starker picture. Their numbers suggested that 2.83% of mass shooters are transgender, suggesting they are nearly five times as likely to be mass shooters.
That reality lines up with what we know about the deep mental health struggles within those suffering from gender dysphoria. The prevailing left-wing narrative is that transgender people aren’t violent at all, but the truth is much different. Whatever the case, we must acknowledge the facts, rather than sweeping them aside to protect a preferred narrative.
