Gun control is taking center stage in Minnesota politics as Gov. Tim Walz prepares to call a special session on guns in response to the Annunciation Catholic Church shooting and the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers and their family members this summer.
Firearm deaths in Minnesota have increased in the past decade.
Nationally, the most recent national gun violence death data from Pew Research shows a decrease from approximately 48,000 deaths in 2022 to roughly 47,000 in 2023.
What firearms are used in fatalities?
According to Minnesota Department of Health data, 63% of firearm deaths from 2015 to 2022 in Minnesota have been from handguns, 16% from shotguns, and 12% from rifles. While handguns make up a majority of firearm deaths, Democrats are proposing a ban on semi-automatic “military-style assault weapons” and high-capacity magazines.
Hamline University’s Violence Prevention Project Research Center found that more than half of the most deadly mass shootings in U.S. history involved such weapons, and their use spiking from 19% in the 1990s to nearly 60% in the 2020s.
Patricia Jewett, an associate professor and health scientist with the University of Minnesota who focuses on firearm injury prevention, said weapons such as AR-15s can produce the greatest number of victims at an individual shooting incident.
Three variations of the AR-15 rifle.
(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
“With these weapons, these events turn into mass shootings,” she said. “Mass shootings make up a small percentage of all the firearm deaths, but specifically, when you only talk about mass shootings, as long as you focus on mass, assault weapons play a very, very important role in those shootings.”
In testimony to Minnesota senators on Monday in support such a ban, Dr. Tim Kummer, the first physician on the scene of Annunciation, spoke about the difference in injury that such weapons can create.
“I know some will say that most gun violence involves handguns, not high-powered rifles, and that might be true, but in an event like Annunciation, the rifle made everything worse,” he said. “It turned potentially minor wounds into life-threatening ones. It multiplied the number of children shot.”
Kummer said that at Annunciation, he cared for a 12-year-old girl who had what looked like a very small graze wound to the top of her head.
“Despite that bullet never entering her brain, the energy from the rifle was so powerful it caused severe bleeding in her brain, and she had to have part of her skull removed,” he said. “From a handgun, that wound would likely have only been a graze wound, but from a high-powered rifle, it became a life-threatening brain injury.”
What manner of death is most common in firearm fatalities?
Of the total firearm deaths in the state in 2024 alone, 72% were suicide — 60% of which occurred in Greater Minnesota, according to a July study from Protect Minnesota. Minnesota’s percentage of firearm deaths from suicide is 14% higher than the national rate, which stands at 58%, according to the Pew Research Center.
Lisa Geller, senior adviser with the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University, told Forum News Service in August that states with more rural areas tend to have higher firearm suicide rates due to socioeconomic factors, lack of access to mental health resources, and higher rates of gun ownership.
During a hearing at the Capitol on gun control proposals on Wednesday, Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park, proposed funding an awareness campaign on the state’s new “red flag law,” which allows courts to temporarily take away someone’s firearm if the person is deemed at risk of harming themselves or others.
“Most of the firearm deaths in Minnesota are actually suicide, not homicide, and most of those suicides are basically white, middle-aged, rural men. So the Red Flag Law specifically is saving more of those lives than any other lives,” Latz said Wednesday.
The Red Flag Law legalized the use of what’s formally called Extreme Risk Protection orders (ERPOs). Of the ERPOs filed in Minnesota in the first eight months of the red flag law, as reviewed by Hamline, 22% involved threats to others, while 30% involved threats to self.
What’s the data behind mass shootings, school shootings?
Including the Annunciation shooting, Minneapolis has had four mass shootings in the past two weeks, with a total of three people killed and 40 people injured. Since September 2012, there have been 89 mass shootings in Minnesota, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which classifies at least four injured or killed as a “mass” incident.
Since 2013, there have been at least 24 “incidents of gunfire” on school grounds in Minnesota, resulting in seven deaths and 35 injuries, according to Everytown Research data.
In 2003, a student at ROCORI High School in Cold Spring shot and killed two people. In 2005, a student at Red Lake High School shot and killed seven people.
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Following the Annunciation shooting, lawmakers close to ROCORI have reflected on the impact of the incident. Sen. Jeff Howe, R-Rockville, said on Monday that his son was in ROCORI when the shooting happened and that his son helped to lock down his classroom since he had a substitute teacher that day who didn’t know the lockdown drill.
“I was on active duty with the National Guard when that happened, almost 20 years ago, and … not knowing whether … one of those individuals shot was your child or not? Was nerve-wracking. Calling their cell phone, not getting an answer,” Howe said.
Speaker of the House, Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, said her kids were involved in ROCORI and that from her perspective as a parent, Annunciation will “change things.”
“It takes a generation and beyond to really be able to move forward,” Demuth said. “As far as it being a passing news story, it’s not going to be passing for those families of both the victims, those that are injured, and the kids that were just in there. I can tell you that it does not just end.”
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