It’s not enough to pray anymore. That’s what we keep hearing, and it’s what Jen Psaki said on her show after the tragic shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. A trans-identifying individual walked into a place of worship and safety and shattered lives. And while the media tries to frame this as another gun issue, another mental health crisis, another moment for policy debate, the more profound truth is being ignored. We’re watching a society unravel because it’s been taught to outsource its soul to the government.

This wasn’t just a shooting. It was a symptom. A symptom of a culture that’s been told it doesn’t need to believe in anything higher than itself. It doesn’t need family, doesn’t need faith, and doesn’t need personal responsibility. Just laws. Just feelings. Just government. And when Psaki says prayer isn’t enough, what she’s really saying is: don’t trust God, trust us. Trust the system. Trust the people who’ve been failing to protect our kids for decades.

But we’ve seen what happens when people put their faith in government over God, over family, over community. We’ve seen the rise in violence, in confusion, in identity crises. We’ve seen kids who don’t know who they are, who’ve been told they can be anything, do anything, change anything—even their biology—and then collapse under the weight of that illusion. And when they do, when they lash out, when they hurt others, we’re told it’s society’s fault. It’s guns. It’s a mental illness. It’s everything but the ideology that created the conditions.

The shooter in Minneapolis wasn’t just mentally ill. He was a product of a political culture that celebrates victimhood and confusion. He was someone who had been told that feelings are truth, that identity is fluid, that morality is subjective. And when you build a society on those foundations, you get chaos. You get violence. You get kids who don’t just feel lost—they act on it.

And then the media steps in. They sanitize it. They politicize it. They use it. Every tragedy becomes a tool to exert more control, enact more laws, and expand government. But the people pushing these policies aren’t the ones raising strong families. They aren’t the ones teaching kids discipline, faith, and resilience. They’re the ones telling them they’re victims who need help, that they need the state to be their parent.

You don’t see this kind of violence coming from strong family units. You don’t see it in communities that teach self-respect and personal responsibility. You see it where people have been trained to outsource their identity to politics. Where they’ve been told that the government will make them feel safe, feel wealthy, feel whole. But it can’t. It never could.

And that’s why the Second Amendment matters. That’s why guns matter—not just as tools of defense, but as symbols of self-reliance. When you take away people’s ability to protect themselves, you’re not just making them vulnerable physically—you’re making them dependent emotionally. You’re telling them they need someone else to keep them safe. And that message is dangerous.

Because the people who want to run society through centralized control are often the least equipped to do so, they’re not grounded. They’re not stable. They’re not empowered. They’re often the very people who’ve been broken by the system they now want to expand. And when you give administrative power to people who are emotionally unstable, ideologically confused, and disconnected from reality, you get dangerous outcomes.

We’ve seen it in cities run by big government. High crime. High victimization. Low accountability. And every time something terrible happens, the answer is always the same: more laws, more control, more government. But that’s not the solution. The solution is empowerment. It’s strong families. It’s faith. It’s a community. It’s teaching kids that they are responsible for their own lives, their own choices, their own futures.

And yes, it’s guns. Because guns represent the ability to say, “I will protect myself. I will protect my family. I will not wait for someone else to do it.” That’s not violence. That’s virtue. That’s a strength. That’s what built this country.

The shooter in Minneapolis didn’t have that strength. Robert Westman had confusion. He had an ideology. He had a system that told him he was a victim and then gave him no tools to rise above it. And when you combine that with mental illness, with identity instability, with political manipulation, you get tragedy.

And then you get people like Psaki telling us that prayer isn’t enough. We need laws. That we need government. But what we really need is truth. We need to stop pretending that feelings are facts. That identity is whatever you want it to be. That morality is optional. We need to stop raising kids in a culture of confusion and start growing them in a culture of clarity.

Because every time we ignore these truths, we create more victims. More shooters. More tragedies. And every time we politicize those tragedies, we move further away from the real solutions. We don’t need more laws. We need more courage. More conviction. More community. More faith.

And yes, we need prayer. But we also need action. Not the kind of action that expands government power, but the kind that builds personal power. That teaches kids to be strong, moral, and responsible. That teaches them that they don’t need the government to be their parent. They need to be their own person.

That’s the only way we stop this cycle. That’s the only way we protect our kids. That’s the only way we build a society that doesn’t just survive—but thrives.

And what is anybody to make of Decarlos Brown Jr., who stabbed in the neck a very young and beautiful Ukrainian refugee, just minding her own business?  What kind of evil provokes a person to stab someone to death without any provocation?  Would gun control have stopped that terrible crime on a Charlotte, North Carolina, train?  The killer had 14 prior cases; he was sentenced to six years in North Carolina prison for robbery with a dangerous weapon, breaking, and larceny.  He had a history of mental illness and homelessness.  So what would have kept him from killing young Iryna Zarutska, who came to America to escape the ravages of her war-torn country?  Only to be ruthlessly stabbed in the neck three times and to die just because she sat down in front of a killer riding a train, in a city that should be somewhat safe, by perception compared to places like New York or Los Angeles.  These killers are creations by Democrats and their platform of putting feelings above empowerment, leaving in their wake dangerous personalities in society that cannot manage themselves.  Democrats have been soft on crime, assertive on victimization, letting their supporters believe that degraded personalities can thrive in society, that a big daddy government will carry them forward.  But when that doesn’t happen, these personalities turn to violence.  And they believed that because they believed in the politics of Democrats who were soft on crime, soft on punishment.  And most importantly, soft on self-empowerment.  There is no amount of laws in the world that can correct these kinds of personalities, and no gun law would have saved poor Iryna Zarutska.  And gun control would assume that we could trust Democrats to run a healthy society, which we know from vast amounts of evidence, not to be the case.

Rich Hoffman

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