Mental Illness, Ideology, and the Price Paid by Children

The silence inside Annunciation Catholic Church was broken only by gunfire. Two children lay dead, seventeen more were wounded, and a sanctuary that had just moments earlier been filled with the sound of hymns was transformed into a place of terror. The killer, a 23-year-old former student, came with three legally purchased firearms and left with nothing but a suicide note that read with haunting clarity: “I am not well. I am not right… I want to fulfill a final act that has been in the back of my head for years.”

That confession is the truest thing about this tragedy. This was not a sudden collapse into violence; it was the predictable outcome of a long deterioration that society chose not to see. A broken mind, left untreated, encouraged in its delusion, and allowed to fester until it burst into murder.

The shooter identified as transgender. That fact alone has become radioactive to mention, but it cannot be ignored. Here was a young man, already unmoored from reality, cheered on by activists for rejecting his own body, and applauded for “living his truth.” Yet what we call authenticity was, in fact, an untreated psychological disorder. This same disorder now ensnares young women as well, who are told their anguish will be resolved not by healing but by chemical castration and surgical mutilation. These are not brave identities. They are symptoms of distress, untreated and mislabeled as progress.

The shooter’s writings and videos revealed an obsession with killing children and contempt for faith. The fantasy life of violence was not hidden; it was broadcast. But in today’s climate, such signals are dismissed, because to confront the truth would mean admitting that some young men and women are not on a journey of self-expression but on a downward spiral toward destruction. And when destruction finally arrived, it took the form of bullets in a church filled with second-graders.

After every massacre, we hear the same refrains. Institutions drape themselves in statements of sorrow. Leaders emote about unity and resilience. The press rushes to frame the narrative carefully, stripping the event of any ideological discomfort. The violence itself becomes a moment to remind us to “reject hate,” as if hate were the cause rather than the symptom of a diseased mind. But the brutal truth is that a society that refuses to call sickness by its name, that redefines disorder as identity, is not compassionate. It is complicit.

Minnesota has a red-flag law, meant to give families and law enforcement the means to disarm dangerous individuals. But no law can function if no one dares to name what is dangerous. Teachers and parents sense when a child is drifting into instability. Counselors read the signs. Yet the cultural machinery now threatens anyone who speaks too plainly. To call gender delusion a sickness is to risk accusation, litigation, or professional ruin. And so everyone looks away. And then one day, the silence is broken by gunfire in a church.

The comparison is unavoidable. We compel treatment for tuberculosis. We quarantine the contagious. We place people on psychiatric holds when they threaten their own lives. But when a young man announces his estrangement from reality or when a young woman insists she is the opposite sex, we call it bravery, not sickness. We do not intervene. We do not treat. We affirm. And when that fractured mind collides with rage, resentment, or the allure of infamy, the result is predictable.

The answer is not only cultural honesty. It is also hard security. We post armed guards at banks to protect stacks of cash. We protect courthouses with metal detectors and guards. We shield politicians with details of men carrying rifles. Yet we hesitate to guard schools, where the future of our country gathers every day. The priorities are obscene. A civilized nation does not spend more effort protecting its currency than its children. To secure schools with armed personnel is not an admission of failure; it is the minimum standard of seriousness in a world where madness walks freely.

But protection cannot end at the church doors or school gates. It must begin earlier, when the signs of illness first appear. Forced psychiatric intervention must be on the table. That phrase alone unsettles people, as if compulsion is a cruelty. But what is crueler: to intervene when a young man declares war on reality, or to allow him to become the man who opens fire on a congregation of children? What is harsher: to compel treatment for a young woman unraveling in self-loathing, or to watch her sterilize herself in the name of ideology while her mind collapses into despair? Compassion without discipline is negligence. Society has confused tolerance for kindness. The price is being paid in funerals.

The Minneapolis tragedy is not simply about guns, though the weapons made it lethal. Nor is it simply about school security, though the absence of armed defense made it easier. It is about the refusal to confront the obvious: that many of these killers are broken souls who show us their sickness long before the first shot is fired. They say it online. They write it in journals. They declare it in how they view themselves. And instead of treatment, they are affirmed. Instead of intervention, they are applauded.

We are a nation capable of recognizing tuberculosis in a crowded ward and quarantining it. Yet when a mind displays its infection—through delusion, through violent fantasy—we look away. This cowardice is not sustainable. It will produce more dead children, more grieving parents, more sanctuaries turned into slaughterhouses.

The question before us is whether we are willing to place truth before ideology, children before comfort, and reality before delusion. That requires securing our schools as if they matter more than banks, and confronting mental illness before it festers into bloodshed. Anything less is the slow surrender of our most precious trust: the protection of our children.