The Plague of Gun Violence in America

On August 27, 2025, during the first week of the school year, a horrific mass shooting occurred at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As students gathered for morning Mass, a shooter armed with a legally purchased rifle, shotgun, and pistol fired through stained-glass windows, killing two children, just eight and ten years old, and injuring seventeen others, including fourteen classmates and three elderly parishioners. Authorities are treating the attack as both a domestic terrorism act and a hate crime targeting Catholics (The Guardian).

The nation is shocked, but in truth, we have been here before. The cycle repeats, our numbness deepens, and it is our children who continue to pay with their lives.

Gun violence in America has become a defining plague of our era. In 2023 alone, nearly 46,728 people died from gun-related injuries, one of the highest totals ever recorded (Pew Research Center). More than half were suicides, but tens of thousands more were homicides, accidents, or law enforcement-related incidents (Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions).

Schools in particular have become recurring sites of horror. Since 2018, there have been 229 K-12 shootings resulting in injury or death, with eight already in 2025 (Education Week). While data shows a 22.5 percent decrease in the 2024–25 year compared to the one prior, shootings remain more than double what the nation saw before the pandemic (K-12 Dive). Every incident leaves behind devastated families, shattered communities, and young people carrying lifelong trauma. The economic toll is staggering as well, diverting billions of dollars from education into security and emergency measures (White House Council of Economic Advisers).

And yet, in the face of such devastation, the current Republican Party and administration have made their priorities unmistakably clear by banning books, pushing mass deportations, kidnapping and detaining migrants, waging political war against LGBTQ+ communities and people of color, and cutting support for the very programs that help struggling families survive. What is not on their agenda? Preventing gun violence. While they find endless political will to attack diversity initiatives or remove inclusive literature from classrooms, they refuse to summon even the most basic courage to keep children safe in those same classrooms.

There are solutions, and they are well within reach. Assault weapons, firearms engineered to kill quickly and in large numbers, must be banned from civilian use. Universal background checks, waiting periods, and tighter oversight of extremist affiliations or violent histories should be national standards. Gun ownership itself should require licensing, mandatory training, and safe-storage requirements, much as driving a car demands tests and regulations.

Community-based programs also work. Initiatives like Cure Violence helped prevent around 1,300 shootings in New York City between 2012 and 2023, proving that investment in violence interruption pays dividends not only in lives saved but also in cost-effectiveness (arXiv). Beyond law and policy, America must also address the roots of violence by strengthening mental health resources, expanding school counseling, and building inclusive spaces where children feel safe and seen.

But numbness has set in. Every shooting is followed by the same ritual: shock, grief, “thoughts and prayers,” then silence until the next tragedy. We have come to accept, on some level, that our children’s classrooms may be converted into war zones. This acceptance is itself a moral collapse. American children deserve schools where they can expect education, growth, and safety…not bullets and funerals.

The responsibility to break this cycle belongs to us as much as it does to our elected leaders. Every parent, student, and citizen must raise their voice. Call local, state, and federal representatives. Tell them you value children more than political gamesmanship or campaign donations from gun lobbies. Demand a ban on assault weapons, stronger laws for purchasing and ownership, and funding for violence prevention. Support organizations like Sandy Hook Promise, which provide effective school safety programs and fight to shift our culture away from complacency (Sandy Hook Promise).

If we cannot summon the will to protect our children, then we forfeit any claim to moral leadership as a nation. The choice is stark, cling to numbness or confront the reality that every delay costs lives. It is time to choose children over ideology, compassion over profit, action over paralysis. 

The blood of Minneapolis’s children, like the countless others before them, must not be just another headline. It must be the line we finally refuse to cross.