Minnesota Parents Are Grieving. Republicans Are Busy Blaming Trans Kids.

Another school shooting leaves families shattered while the GOP offers scapegoats instead of solutions.

I sat down this week planning to write about why I became a gun owner.

It was going to be uncomfortable but honest: about a death threat I received that named my son, about months of training and long conversations with my wife, about finally buying a firearm even though I’ve spent my career fighting for stronger gun control and most of my adult life never thinking I’d have any reason to own one.

I wanted to write about the tension of being both an outspoken Democratic strategist and a gun owner. About how I wanted to be transparent with my readers, and how leaning into discomfort is sometimes the only way I know how to grow.

And then, before I even hit “publish,” the news broke. A Catholic school in Minnesota. Three dead. Seventeen injured. Kids as young as eight and ten. Parents still waiting for word if their children made it out alive.

I went live with Don Lemon as the news came in, and I’ll be honest: I fucking lost it. I couldn’t stop thinking about my six-year-old son, who just last year came home from school after his first “active shooter drill.” One of the worst days of my life as a parent was trying to explain to him why he had to practice hiding from someone with a gun. How do you answer that question when the truth is: we don’t keep kids safe in this country? That active shooter drills don’t guarantee anything.

And here’s the kicker—my six-year-old son asked me better questions than most of the people in power. We tell children to hide in closets instead of keeping guns out of dangerous hands. We traumatize them instead of protecting them. And when the inevitable happens—as it did yesterday in Minnesota—we call it a tragedy, but not a crisis.

It is a crisis. It’s evil. And the part that wrecks me is: it’s avoidable.

We know what to do. It’s as simple as first-grade math. Keep guns out of dangerous hands. Pass laws that already have overwhelming support—even from responsible gun owners like myself. Invest in community policing and school safety. Treat mental health as part of the solution, not a throwaway talking point. Stop pretending this is normal. Stop pretending this is “American.”

And while families grieve, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem are out here doing what they always do: pointing fingers at anyone but the people actually responsible. Their new favorite scapegoat? Trans people.

They are so desperate for an enemy that they’re inventing one—screaming that the trans community is “grooming” kids into violent criminals. Out of more than 5,000 mass shootings in the last decade, four involved someone who was trans. Four. That’s their evidence. It’s pathetic. It’s grotesque.

And it proves what we already know: the conservative movement doesn’t give a damn about keeping kids alive. They don’t care about solutions to any problem. They don’t care about safety. They care about feeding their bloodlust, stoking fear, and attacking already vulnerable kids. They’re not going to lift a finger to make sure my son—or your kid—is safe in their classroom. They’re just going to keep scapegoating trans children (and ignoring the obvious signs that this person was radicalized by far-right media) like the soulless, creepy weirdos they are.

And here’s one final thing that infuriates me: the empty “thoughts and prayers” debate. I’m a practicing Catholic. Prayer is part of my life. I believe it matters. But as has been said many times, faith without works is nothing. And there are a lot of people out there who claim to be Christian, who claim to pray, who claim to care—but when push comes to shove, when it’s time to protect kids, to care for their community, to do the right thing, they don’t. If the only thing you have in a crisis is “thoughts and prayers” without any action, then you are not living up to your Christian values. Period.

This isn’t about me. It’s about parents yesterday who didn’t know if they’ll ever see their kids again. Families who will carry this grief for the rest of their lives while this country continues to shrug.

And unless we make this a voting issue—unless we defeat these Republicans and replace them with a Democratic Party that has the stomach to do what it takes to solve this crisis—kids will keep dying.