In a quiet Minneapolis church, children bowed their heads in prayer. By the time they lifted them, two were dead and seventeen wounded. Annunciation Catholic Church joins America’s grim roll call of mass shootings—a list so long it numbs more than it shocks. This was the 286th in 2025 alone.
In therapy, we know the human impulse to make sense of trauma. After every shooting, the nation does the same: combing the killer’s history, parsing social media, speculating about paranoia, trauma, or hatred. We hope that if we name the wound we can stop the next one.
It’s an illusion.
There is no psychological formula precise enough to identify a future shooter. Human behavior is too messy, too contradictory. Some acts are pure eruption. Families burying children today will not find solace in talk of the shooter’s depression or grievances.
What we can analyze is ourselves. While motives remain unknowable, our paralysis is plain. We allow inertia to stand in for policy, ritual outrage to replace reform. Each massacre deepens our collective numbness. We watch, offer thoughts and prayers, mourn briefly, then turn away—because avoidance feels easier than facing the unbearable. Avoidance never heals–whether in the consulting room or the country at large.
Most Americans—polls show nearly six in ten—want stronger gun laws. Yet access keeps expanding. The painful truth is that every state will one day have its own Annunciation, its own funerals. In treatment, progress begins only when we stop circling and face the obvious. America keeps circling. The question is not why one man pulled the trigger but why we, collectively, keep putting the gun in his hand.
