What we must not do
In the face of tragedy and lawlessness, our purpose is clear
I am positively sick inside. Acting quickly, Townhall.com downloaded two videos from the Youtube account maintained by Robin Westman, a 23-year-old who shot up a Catholic church in Minneapolis Wednesday morning while the students were celebrating Mass, before the account was removed. I watched the videos. I don’t recommend you do that—some things shouldn’t be casually seen (but here’s a link to Townhall’s X.com account if you want to find them).
Two children are dead and 17 were injured in the attack. The killer apparently committed suicide. Here’s what I have learned.
The killings were meticulously planned. Westman knew exactly where the kids were sitting. The videos showed a hand-drawn plot of the sanctuary of the church. The killer knew exactly what was going on during the time chosen for the shooting.
Robin Westman filed a legal name change from Robert Westman when he was 17, and apparently identified as a trans person.
Westman kept a detailed journal, hand written in Cyrillic script in phonetic English, making the document hard to read, though some X users fed it through Grok to obtain a more-or-less readable document. The journal is filled with disjointed thoughts, “a jumbled bunch of thoughts.” These are centered around pain, blood, and vengeance.
In a second video, Westman shared a multi-page apology to his family and friends, urging them to “forget him” and move on with life, though the handwritten pages recognize that might not be possible given what was being planned.
The second video also displayed several firearms, with Westman handling multiple magazines of various capacities, ammunition. The magazines all had writings on them, from “Where is your God?” to anti-semitic invectives, to threats against the president. It was a soup of awful memes, foul language, and expressions of violence.
From ChristianPost.com, it appears that Westman’s mother, Mary Grace Westman, was referred to in a now-deleted post from Church of the Annunciation (the scene of the shootings), as someone who had retired about four years ago. “The Aug. 16, 2021, post included the following caption: ‘On Sunday we honored Mary Grace Westman who is retiring from Annunciation. She has provided such wonderful hospitality, friendship and compassion to all who gathered for the last five years at Annunciation. You will be missed! Congratulations on your retirement!’”
In the apology note, Westman referred to his parents as people who raised him well. The video displaying that note begins with a meme of Walter White, as “Heisenberg” from the show “Breaking Bad,” which would have aired when Westman was just a young teen. There was also a reference to vaping and having lung cancer, though I found no evidence Westman was diagnosed with it.
For a young person to be so messed up as to spend hours and hours focusing on pain, death, and killing, and to plan their own suicide in such a way, is sickening to me. Obviously, this is not the first or the last time we will see it.
What we must not do is lose our humanity over it.
Yes, Westman was a transgender person. Other transgender people have shot up Christian schools. For transgenders, it’s a convenient target, and also for many a source of great pain, since they may have tried to turn to church to deal with their own identity issues, and were rebuffed or worse, taunted and rejected.
But other killers had their own inscrutable motives, like the 2017 mass killer at the Route 91 Harvest music festival. That was also meticulously planned. The point is that we can’t paint all transgender people with the “killer” brush because some have resorted to it.
It is perfectly normal to offer condolences for the victims—they are innocents who did nothing deserving of what happened. But making the victims into objects of honor is something we should take care not to go overboard with. That’s a difficult topic, as nothing we could offer in honor could bring back the two murdered children or give their parents peace.
But let me address the question written on one of Westman’s magazines: “Where is your God?”
In John chapter 11, Jesus learned that his friend Lazarus was sick. Instead of immediately going to Lazarus in Bethany, Jesus stayed where he was for two days, then went. He told his disciples that Lazarus was “asleep,” meaning dead, but they didn’t get it. So Jesus explained it plainly, and told his disciples that it was his intention to not arrive before Lazarus died, so that they would believe.
Upon arriving, Lazarus’ sisters Mary and Martha, were waiting for him. Mary accused Jesus of delaying, saying if he was there, Lazarus would not have died. Jesus saw Mary weeping, and in verse 35, the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.”
The Lord then performed his greatest recorded miracle, calling Lazarus forth from the dead, after he had been placed in a tomb three days.
Where is God? He is weeping with the parents. He is preparing miracles for those who believe. He is glorifying his Father as he waits at the Father’s right hand in heaven for the time when He is to return. What we have is our humanity, which means our freedom to choose whom we serve, and what we believe.
It is easy and understandable to blame God for not showing up beforehand to stop death. It is natural to ask why God didn’t stop Westman from carrying out an evil plan, or for any murderer to be allowed to kill innocent people. It is human to question the nature of our morality, and how we treat those among us who are in pain, confused, and crying out.
Many question how there can be a loving God if all this evil is allowed to happen. But I turn the question on its head. How can people not turn to the loving God, who raised Lazarus from the dead, wept with Mary and Martha, and offered himself to die for our sins, when we face evil in the world? They turn to so many things, to darkness, and pain, and vengeance, and public spectacles of violence, and to suicide. But God is there, always, unchanging, waiting with love, forgiveness, grace, and compassion.
God reserves his wrath for the day of judgment, which one day is coming. The wrath is not for those things Jesus died for. It’s for not believing.
Jesus died for our sins, but not for our unbelief. Where is our God? He is waiting for those who do not believe, to believe. We’ve seen the miracles of believers forgiving those who killed their loved ones. We’ve seen the miracles of grace. Some of us have seen miracles of healing. But the world is filled with lies, violence, and pain. Jesus told his disciples (and us) that we would also deal with lies, violence, and pain. But the miracle is that we are to be of good cheer, for Jesus has overcome the world.
Whether we believe or not, we must not lose our humanity. We must not trade blame for blame, pain for pain, and violence for violence. That’s the way of the world, but it is not what we humans were made to be. Even if we do not choose to believe in the Son of God, we need to choose to be human and to believe in love.
I don’t care about all the hot takes that are coming out about this latest tragedy. I do care that I get to hug my kids today. I do care that someone reading this might be moved to contact their estranged relatives, or someone might be moved by love and compassion to weep with someone in pain. That someone who might have the seeds of the kinds of actions Westman and others have taken would experience the miracle of grace, repent and change their ways.
It can happen. It is what we were made for.
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We should try to enact change that prevents the next attack. No one is banning guns, that is not possible. Minnesota has strident Red Flag laws, and a transgender person would normally see a multitude of doctors and healthcare professionals, for years. All are mandatory reporters. If a patient is a threat to themselves or others, healthcare professionals are required by law to contact police. Red Flag laws are worthless if no one is willing to make the call. We need to review why no one alerted authorities in this instance and others. There should be a database that aids healthcare workers, who should err on the side of public safety.
Moreover, HIPPA laws should end at death, for murderers. At the very least, police and healthcare professional should be looking at the medications shooters utilized, looking for a commonality, that might help prevent the next incident. Parents should know what medications might aggravate a troubled young person.
Finally, we have a near $7 trillion dollar federal budget. We spend money on everything from 3rd world adult cosmetic circumcisions to rural high speed internet that does connect a single home to the internet. The US has hundreds of thousands of retired law enforcement and military members. Retirees should have their own healthcare coverage. Let the federal government pay for two guards for the 180 days schools are in session, for every school public or private. Large schools will require more guards, but they will presumably have larger budgets, for more guards at their expense. Without benefits, the cost should be minimal, and more than worth the expense.