146 And Counting: A Mother’s Warning After Minneapolis

Oppression, untreated mental illness, and a society complicit in silence have created a pressure cooker. When it explodes, our children pay the price.

Author: Desirea Nicole Calvillo | August 28, 2025

On August 27, 2025, tragedy struck Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis.

A 23-year-old former parishioner named Robin Westman, who had transitioned from male to female, opened fire during morning Mass. Armed with multiple weapons, she killed two children, just 8 and 10 years old, and injured seventeen others before taking her own life.

The news cycle immediately fractured into predictable camps: liberals pointing to gun control, conservatives seizing on the shooter’s gender identity to further their anti-trans agenda. But I need us all to pause. Two children were murdered in their school. Seventeen people, most of them kids, were injured. Families are shattered forever.

And yet somehow, this is the sad reality of our society today. Children dying in classrooms isn’t shocking anymore; it just is. Today’s shooting in Minneapolis is the 146th school shooting in the U.S. this year, for K–12 schools alone. One hundred and forty-six classrooms turned into war zones before the year is even over.

It’s become so common that in just the last week, several universities across the country were hit with swatting calls, fake reports of active shooters that send students and professors running for their lives as police storm classrooms as if an active shooter is some kind of joke. Swatting started as a toxic stunt in online gaming, and now it’s bleeding into schools, layering trauma on top of trauma.

We’ve normalized the unthinkable. And the numbers prove it. Firearms are now the leading cause of death for American children and teens, surpassing car accidents. U.S. kids are 36 times more likely to be killed with a gun than their peers in other wealthy nations. This is insanity, and it’s uniquely American.

“My friend was shot while trying to protect me.”

When I read that eyewitness account from a child in Minneapolis, one line pierced straight through me. That immediately made me think of my own 9-year-old daughter. She absolutely is the type who would try to protect her friends. Just the thought makes me teary-eyed, picturing her slumped over a friend after being shot in the back because she used herself as a human shield. Or the image of her frozen with fear, standing helpless, wishing I was there to protect her.

I’ve raised her to stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. We don’t sit by when others are bullied, because inaction is complicity. So yes, I can picture her throwing herself in front of a bullet to protect her friends. Or maybe she’d freeze in fear, just standing there, helpless, wishing I was there to protect her. Both images crush me.

My daughter isn’t supposed to have final moments before I do. No child is.
And yet, understanding how we got here means looking at the shooter, too.

A Troubling Window into a Tormented Mind

This wasn’t a shooting born purely of ideology; it came from a deeply disturbed place. The perpetrator, 23-year-old Robin Westman, left behind a chilling manifesto and videos. They revealed a torrent of hate toward Christians, toward Jews, toward political leaders. Weapons were scrawled with slogans like “Kill Donald Trump” and “6 million wasn’t enough.”

The writings glorified past mass shooters, referenced Sandy Hook perpetrator Adam Lanza, and toyed with the idea of a symbolic “final act.” But Westman also admitted the attack wasn’t about politics. It was about being sick, tainted, broken. In a final letter, they apologized to loved ones, writing: “I’m not well. I’m a sad person, haunted by these thoughts… I just want to escape from this world.”

It’s a terrifying contradiction: someone who was themselves marginalized lashing out with hate. And yet, if we ignore this contradiction, we miss the truth. Hate doesn’t only come from the powerful. Sometimes, it erupts from the wounded, too.

The Forgotten Factor: Mental Health

In those final words, Westman didn’t sound like a revolutionary. They sounded like millions of Americans struggling without help.

America shut down its state asylums in the 1970s without building a real alternative. Homelessness boomed. Since then, mental health care has been an afterthought. Today, seeing a psychiatrist can cost $200–$300 an hour, plus hundreds more for medication. Even with private insurance, it can take six months to book an appointment. Six months is a lifetime for someone in crisis.

We’ve created a society where people in pain fall through the cracks, their despair untreated, until sometimes it breaks outward in catastrophic ways. Most people with depression or psychosis never harm anyone. But when access to care is impossible, when stigma adds shame to suffering, we guarantee that some will reach a breaking point.

Oppression without support becomes a powder keg. And untreated mental illness is the match.

And when stigma and despair mix with hate, the consequences spread beyond individuals, poisoning entire communities.

A Generation Shaped by School Shootings

My first memory of a school shooting was Columbine in 1999. Two teenage boys, fueled by anger, rejection, and bullying, walked into their high school and murdered 13 people before killing themselves. Columbine shattered the illusion that schools were safe, but it was just the beginning.

Since then, the list has grown so long it reads like an obituary for a nation: Virginia Tech, Parkland, Uvalde, Sandy Hook.

At Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, 20 first graders and six staff members were murdered in minutes. The shooter was a young man with profound mental health struggles, social isolation, and an obsession with previous shootings.

At Isla Vista in 2014, six people were killed in what the shooter described as “retribution” for being rejected by women. Misogyny, loneliness, and rage fueled the attack.

At Uvalde in 2022, 19 children and two teachers were massacred while police hesitated outside the classroom doors. The shooter was 18, isolated, angry, and immersed in toxic online communities.

And now Minneapolis, where despair, mental illness, and hatred sharpened by feelings of religious oppression lit the fire.

The epidemic of school shootings didn’t begin with ideology. It began with rejection, bullying, and untreated pain. Over time, it evolved, layering misogyny, extremism, grievance politics, and oppression onto the same broken foundation.

What ties all of these together isn’t just access to guns. It’s untreated despair. It’s silence. It’s society’s refusal to act until the headlines scream again.

When Silence Becomes Complicity

Here’s the thought that won’t leave me: when minority groups are targeted, stripped of rights, and told they are less than human, society’s silence becomes complicit. And complicity builds a pressure cooker.

Oppression doesn’t just silence, it radicalizes. History shows this pattern clearly: when groups are attacked over and over, eventually some people break. Most never resort to violence, but some do, and their breaking point can devastate entire communities.

Just as I’ve taught my daughter that doing nothing when someone is bullied makes you part of the problem, the same is true for entire societies. When oppression is normalized and ignored, we all become complicit in the consequences.

Fear is the root of hate. It always has been. Fear of loss, fear of difference, fear of equality. Oppression weaponizes that fear, and when a society ignores it long enough, it metastasizes into hate and eventually violence.

What Oppression Looks Like

I think of Eric Garner in New York. He wasn’t armed. He wasn’t violent. He was a father of six, selling loose cigarettes to scrape together money. Police swarmed him, threw him in a chokehold, and pinned him to the ground. He gasped eleven times: “I can’t breathe.” Eleven times, ignored. His life ended not because of violence, but because survival looked suspicious on Black skin.

I think of Sandra Bland in Texas. She was 28 years old, just starting a new job. A traffic stop for a lane change turned into an officer screaming, yanking her from her car, and slamming her to the ground. She was arrested, bruised, and three days later, she was dead in her jail cell. Officials called it suicide. Her family never believed it. Sandra’s story showed how easily a routine encounter could turn fatal for a Black woman.

I think of my father’s stories from Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950s and ’60s. A white woman only had to say a Black man looked at her funny, and by the next day, that man could be hanging from a tree.

That same script echoes today in what we now call “Karen” moments. Just weeks ago, at Mount Tabor Dog Park in Portland, Oregon, a woman went viral after harassing a man walking his two golden retrievers. She screamed at him for buying purebred dogs, followed him through the park, hurled insults, threatened to call ICE, and even accused him of being a Trump supporter. Then she flipped the script, shouting that he was harassing her. He stayed calm, recorded the whole thing, and later said he never thought he’d get his own “Karen” video. That’s the danger. Her words alone could have been enough to put his life at risk.

Think of Emmett Till in 1955. He was just 14 years old, visiting family in Mississippi. A white woman said he whistled at her. That lie was enough to have him abducted, tortured, and lynched. His body was mutilated, but his mother refused to hide it. Mamie Till-Mobley demanded an open casket, saying: “I want the world to see what they did to my baby.” And decades later, the woman admitted she had lied.

I think of gay married couples who live with the fear that their marriage could be undone in a courtroom. Imagine building a life together, raising children, buying a home, only to live with the knowledge it could all be erased because someone else’s beliefs carry more weight than your humanity. And this isn’t paranoia. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping away a constitutional right that had stood for nearly 50 years. If reproductive rights could vanish in an instant, then it’s not far-fetched to believe that marriage equality could be next. With a conservative majority on the Court and an administration openly hostile to LGBTQ+ protections, the fear is real. The precedent has been set: rights once considered “settled law” can be erased with the stroke of a gavel.

This is oppression. It’s the normalization of fear, cruelty, and dehumanization. And when fear fuels hate, the outcome is almost always violence.

History’s Warnings

Stonewall (1969): LGBTQ+ people lived under constant harassment. Gay bars were raided, patrons beaten, arrested, and humiliated. But in June 1969, when police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York, something broke. Drag queens, trans women, gay men, lesbians, and allies resisted. They fought back against years of abuse, sparking the modern gay rights movement.

Indigenous Boarding Schools: For more than a century, Native children were taken from their families, stripped of their language, names, and traditions. Their hair was cut, their culture erased. Many never returned home, dying of neglect, disease, and abuse. Survivors carry the scars to this day. The policy was clear: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”

Japanese Internment (WWII): After Pearl Harbor, fear painted every Japanese American as a potential enemy. Over 120,000 people, two-thirds U.S. citizens, were forced into camps. Families lost homes, businesses, and dignity overnight. Children grew up behind barbed wire, eating in mess halls, their childhoods stolen. And yet, many of their sons volunteered to fight for the U.S. Reparations came decades later, but the trauma never disappeared.

ICE Detention Centers (Today): At the southern border, history repeats itself. Children separated from parents, families detained indefinitely, deportations to countries people have never known. They sleep on concrete floors under foil blankets, crying in chain-link enclosures. Fear justifies cruelty, just as it did before.

Hate survives when people stay divided. But when people are forced to share space, music, food, and traditions, those walls can break. That’s what history teaches us, and what we keep forgetting.

When fear drives policy instead of compassion, walls are built higher and people are dehumanized faster.

When Overcorrection Becomes Its Own Kind of Violence

Fear doesn’t only drive oppression, it also drives backlash. When society finally responds to injustice, the solutions are often so polarized that they create new fractures instead of healing old ones.

Affirmative action was meant to correct centuries of systemic bias. But in practice, it sometimes feeds resentment, with white Americans feeling like they’re suddenly the ones at a disadvantage. Watching someone else get a scholarship, a promotion, or a job and believing it was “just because they’re a minority” fuels anger and division.

It’s like skidding on ice. Instead of gently regaining control, America jerks the wheel so hard we flip into the ditch.

This overcorrection is everywhere. Leaders dismantle DEI programs, dismiss tribal sovereignty as “race-based handouts,” demand that sports teams return to racial slurs as mascots, or insist that flag burning should carry a prison sentence.

But burning a flag has never been about inciting riots. It has always been the desperate, emotional cry of the oppressed. It’s the visual way of saying: this country does not have our interests at heart. Punishing that cry doesn’t heal anything. It just deepens the wound.

Polarized problems met with polarized solutions don’t bring peace. They breed more chaos, more hate, and more despair.

A Plea, and a Warning

I don’t write this to excuse violence. The children in Minneapolis deserved better. Nothing justifies what happened to them.

But if we refuse to face the roots, oppression, untreated mental health, and silence, nothing will change. Oppression doesn’t just wound the oppressed. It destabilizes entire societies.

Here’s the devastating reality: in 2024 alone, over 43,000 Americans were killed by guns. That’s more than the number of U.S. troops killed in the entire Vietnam War.

So here is both my plea and my warning:
My plea: that we teach understanding instead of fear, that we tear down the walls instead of stacking them higher.
My warning: if we don’t, the cycle will continue. More children will die in classrooms. More families will be broken. And the violence won’t stay neatly contained in “their” community. It will come for all of us.

Closing Note

If we don’t face the roots of violence, we will keep burying our children. We can’t bring back the children we’ve lost, but we can choose not to lose more.