Minnesota’s School Security Failure And Path To Radicalization Probed

The deadly shooting at a Minnesota Catholic school should prompt school security review and an investigation into how the transgender-identifying attacker was radicalized, experts say.

The attack, which left two students dead and more than a dozen injured after Robin Westman, a transgender-identifying 23-year-old, targeted students at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis while they were attending a back-to-school Mass at the church of the same name. Westman had previously posted disturbing and incoherent content on social media, including images of weapons with “Kill Donald Trump” and “Nuke India” written on them.

The Minnesota government is also facing criticism over its failure to provide security funding for religious schools, despite pleas from the Catholic Bishops Association in the state, who wanted to harden security after a spate of school shootings across the country in recent years.

Minnesota allocated “millions” to fund public school security, but refused to provide similar resources to private schools. Amy Swearer, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said school security could have made all the difference in the attack.

“When we look at what happened here, one of the things that we know actually stops these, these mass shooters, is one, what is the quickness of the response, the swiftness of the armed response, but also the ability to detect these threats in advance and to deal with them and to have secure facilities,” Swearer told the Just the News, No Noise TV show.

“And that funding, again, unfortunately, was not secured for these schools, and we can only look back now and ask, what difference might that have made?” Swearer asked.