Another school year, another mass shooting.

A shooter opened fire at a Catholic parish school in Minneapolis last month as children were attending Mass. The shooter fired through the church’s stained-glass windows, killing two children and injuring more than 17 before perishing from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Once again, the horror of school shootings — and mass murders in general — has reemerged at the forefront of American society: Columbine, Colo. (1999); Virginia Tech (2005); Sandy Hook, Conn. (2012); the Navy Yard in Washington (2013); Oregon (2015); the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (2016); Sutherland Springs in Texas (2017); Parkland, Fla. (2018); El Paso, Texas (2019); Uvalde and Buffalo (2022); Lewiston, Maine, and Monterey Park, Calif. (2023); and Jacksonville (2025).

Through them all, we find ourselves circling back, pondering the same questions and harboring the same emotions.

Mass shootings are hardly news. In August 1966, Charles Whitman murdered 17 people after locking himself down in the central clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, targeting random individuals from the 28th-floor observation deck. A decade later, a string of horrific school shootings commenced. In 1976, Charles Edward Allaway killed seven people at California State University, Fullerton. More than a decade later, in 1989, Patrick Purdy killed five children in Stockton, California. In 1991, graduate student Gang Lu killed three faculty members at the University of Iowa, while one year later Eric Houston killed three students and a teacher at Lindhurst High School in Olivehurst, Calif.

It’s therefore not accurate to state the trend of mass shootings began with the terrible events at Columbine High School in 1999.

Certain conservative activists have attempted to weaponize Westman’s gender identity to define transgender people as prone to violence or mental illness. Law enforcement officials provided no motive for the attack, but Westman’s sprawling social media history portrayed a colossal litany of hostility and grievance.

Numerous videos she posted indicated an obsession with guns, violence, and school shooters. She displayed her own cache of weapons, bullets, and what appeared to be explosive devices. She harbored white-nationalist views espousing vile attitudes toward Blacks, Latinos, and Jews – “the shooter appeared to hate all of us,” said Joe Thompson, acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota. President Donald Trump earned her ire as well. Videos revealed excerpts from her diary, with lengthy entries detailing self-hatred, violence toward children, and a desire to inflict self-harm.

Disingenuous agitation over Westman’s gender mirrored the reaction to the 2023 mass shooting at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, where a former student who identified as transgender killed three children and three adults.

Like many fellow mass shooters, Westman was part of a sordid online community of secret dark web groups, influenced by much of the blatantly callous, acidic rhetoric steadily emanating from the current fractured political environment. Much of it comes from the depths of the political and cultural right-wing echo chamber.

As has been the case with preceding tragedies, we hear the same routine, obligatory commentary from politicians across the political spectrum: “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” “We need to address the issue of mental health,” “We must harden our schools,” “We cannot trample on the Second Amendment,” and so on. In essence, the same gun violence cultivates the same response: denounce the killings and then offer our thoughts and prayers to the dead victims’ families, the brokenhearted, and the emotionally devastated.

With regard to donating resources to mental health, I concur with such an effort. But the vast majority of people who suffer from mental health issues are not murderers. Rational Americans are getting sick and tired of the constant and redundant commentary from gun manufacturers, right-wing politicians, and others who continue to look for scapegoats instead of confronting the issue head-on.

The motives behind such shootings do indeed matter, despite well-meaning yet misguided rhetoric from individuals saying they don’t or shouldn’t. Most rational people can distinguish the moral difference between an unfortunate tragedy that culminates in death and an act of malicious, intentional violence. Yes, family members whose loved ones were victims are grieving, but there is indeed a stark distinction in the cause of their loved ones’ demise.

The Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, but it does not give gun users, owners, sellers, or manufacturers the freedom to absolve themselves from their responsibility if doing everything possible to ensure we establish a society as free from gun violence as possible.

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Copyright 2025 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.