
David’s view
On Wednesday morning, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stopped by the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting for a report from the field. His city was building more affordable housing, attracting and connecting diverse groups of people. Harmony would follow.
“We need to find common humanity across races, ethnicities, and religions,” Frey said. “We can show, collectively, that Democrat-run cities can work.”
Moments later, five and a half miles from the conference, a 23-year-old fired 116 rounds into Annunciation Catholic Church, then died by suicide. Frey raced to the scene. The shooter’s identity had been reported; he was born male, successfully petitioned to change his legal sex to female, and later recorded videos suggesting a detransition in progress.
“Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community or any other community out there has lost their sense of common humanity,” Frey said.
The people Frey was addressing didn’t heed him. “It’s time to have a national conversation about common sense restrictions on transgenders,” wrote Matt Walsh, whose 2022 film What Is A Woman? boosted the gender-critical movement. Mary Margaret Olohan, a fellow Daily Wire employee and author of a book about detransitioners, asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt if the president might heed “calls for the FBI to institute a new class of domestic terrorism that involves trans ideology.”
The filibuster of gun control legislation in 2013, and the ascension of a Supreme Court majority that would strike down most legislation like that, ended the discourse that used to follow mass shootings. Democrats assume that no reform they want will pass, Republicans criticize them for saying “thoughts and prayers” are useless, the news cycle moves on.
The Minneapolis discourse was something else, a function of conservative arguments that the government really can stop crime if it is willing to punish some behaviors and physically remove some people. Removing illegal immigrants ends any chance that they will commit crime against citizens. Anyone who did not support maximum border enforcement, said the vice president, was aiding “drug cartels who run rampant over our country and sex traffickers to be able to continue to traffic little kids into our country.”
Here, the argument is that Democrats, far from protecting “common humanity,” are endangering people by not treating transgender identity as a pathology, which they frame as an error that started with the psychiatric field and should be corrected. Two mass shootings in three years, whose culprits had incoherent ideologies and violent impulses unrelated to their gender identity, are the basis for this.
“We’ve placated them for too long,” said Anthony LaBruna, the executive director of the American Principles Project, in an interview after the killings. “We should have been cracking down on this a long time ago, and getting these people the mental help that they really needed.”
The White House hasn’t fully endorsed this. But it’s been moving in that direction. Democrats can’t see a legal path to the gun control they favor. Republicans see far more opportunities to change the makeup of the country, at fundamental levels.
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Room for Disagreement
A Pew Research Center survey taken in February found that while Americans have come to favor limiting gender-related medical care, and barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports, “56% of adults express support for policies aimed at protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces.”

Notable
- For The New York Times, Julie Bosman spoke to Minneapolitans, who have faced a spate of high-profile shootings, in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s violence: “‘You know, it’s a weird feeling when you’re not super surprised that it happened because it happens so much.’”
- In Reason, Liz Wolfe writes that, for many Americans, prayer is “not just a nice thing you’re obligated to say” following a tragedy: “For devoutly Catholic parents grieving children, prayer might be the only thing that can provide comfort right now.”