Minnesota health care leaders gathered Thursday at the state Capitol to demand that Gov. Tim Walz call a special session to pass gun violence legislation more than a month after the Annunciation Catholic Church and School shooting in Minneapolis.
Joined by doctors who cared for Annunciation victims, they called for four gun control measures: a ban on assault-style weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazines, safe storage laws, and the removal of the local preemption law that prohibits cities from enacting local gun control.
“This is no longer a friendly request from their local doctors,” said Dr. Lisa Mattson, president of the Minnesota Medical Association. “This is a demand from the tens of thousands of physicians across the state who know firearm violence for what it is: a public health crisis.”
The doctors in attendance at Thursday’s news conference said they are in conversation with lawmakers, but did not share details about what lawmakers are telling them as to why a special session has yet to be called.
Janna Gewirtz O’Brien, president-elect of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said she’s hearing “a whole lot of empathy and not a lot of action.”
“I think sometimes politics gets in the way of good sense,” she said.
Walz said Thursday at an unrelated news conference that he’s “still working it,” but didn’t confirm whether he would call a special session. Negotiations for the parameters of a special session blew up publicly Tuesday, and DFL leaders said that negotiations are at a “clear impasse” with Republican leaders.
DFL leadership released one of their offers to the public, which includes several Republican proposals regarding school safety and mental health. Although Republicans did not release their counteroffer publicly, Walz said Thursday it’s “totally missing” any mention of gun control.
“If we’re going to come back in in a special session and address what the public clearly wants, we need to discuss the whole spectrum of issues,” he said. “For us to come back in and give Republicans everything they want, without anything we want, they are acting just like Republicans in D.C. right now.”
Dr. Trish Valusek, a pediatric trauma surgeon at Children’s Minnesota, recalled receiving a trauma alert the morning of the Annunciation shooting.
Valusek said she has cared for children with gunshot wounds before, but that it’s rare for school-age children to be “shot in the head at 8:30 in the morning” on a school day, so she had a gut feeling she would be dealing with a mass casualty.
“Having five bloody shocked children arrive at Children’s all at once, all of whom were the same age as my children, one of whom had the same name as one of my children, is very difficult,” she said.
Valusek said there’s a saying in pediatrics that kids “aren’t just little adults,” that they have a different physiology, and that doctors can’t treat them the same as adults.
“The saying certainly holds true for gunshot wounds,” she said. “It should be obvious — kids are small, and this can make the injury they incur more severe … I really hope I don’t need to give a more graphic description of what a bullet does to a child’s tiny body to get the point across that it is bad.”
Dr. Tim Kummer, the first physician on the scene, said he still remembers the blood on school uniforms, the looks in the children’s eyes and the screams of parents.
Kummer testified on Sept. 15 before Minnesota senators about the difference between a handgun injury and a rifle injury in a 12-year-old girl he treated. He said Thursday that assault weapons “multiplied” the number of children shot at Annunciation, and turned minor wounds into life-threatening ones.
“For those who say gun violence is a complicated issue, it isn’t,” said Kummer, who coordinates emergency medical services at Hennepin Healthcare. “This is a public health issue, and we know how to address public health issues. We follow the evidence.”
“And the evidence to this public health issue is clear: limit access to certain weapons, weapons that, by design, cause more victims, not less, with more severe injuries, not minor, creating more trauma for everyone who responds and cares for them,” he added.
Annunciation was celebrating the first Mass of the new school year on Aug. 27 when a shooter opened fire through a church window, killing two students and wounding 21 people, 18 of them children. The 23-year-old assailant, a former Annunciation student, died by suicide. No precise motive has been publicly identified by investigators.
Related Articles
St. Paul woman ties ribbons on TC Marathon route for Annunciation victims
DFL, GOP deadlocked in talks for special session on gun violence
Girl shot in the head in Minneapolis church attack is making ‘miraculous’ progress, family says
Annunciation parents testify as Minnesota senators look at gun control proposals
‘She taught us to live fully’: Remembering Harper Moyski
Leave a Reply