What were the motives of the Minneapolis school shooter?
The school shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minnesota is another act of violence connected to TCC (true crime community), online hate groups, and idolization of prior mass shooters.
Robin Westman attended the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis as a child. His mother worked there as a secretary for five years before she retired in 2021, and they still lived less than a mile from Annunciation Catholic Church. While many people believe that school shootings are committed by psychotic strangers who can be kept out by gates and guards, the sad truth is most shooters are members of the school community.
And like most other school shootings, Minneapolis police said the perpetrator had no prior criminal history, and all three guns used in the shooting had been purchased legally. This follows the same pattern as prior schools shootings:
Current or former students with a personal connection to the school
Depressed, suicidal, and plan to die during the shooting
Firearms are legally purchased (either by the parents of younger teens or the shooter is old enough to legally buy them)
Handwrote journals, drew pictures, and posted violent writings, images, and glorified other mass shooters for years before the attack
Influenced by Columbine and prior mass shootings (both in the US and abroad)
Formal reports of crisis and suicide risk years before the attack
School shootings are violent public suicides and just like the majority of prior attacks (both school shootings and mass public shootings), it was over before police could intervene.
I’ve analyzed the manifestos of previous school shooters and they share the same themes (e.g., CVPA, Nashville). Unlike terrorists who use violence to advance the ideology of a defined group with specific political goals, these teens and young adults who commit mass shootings are full of hate towards everyone. Most of all, they hate themselves (e.g., depressed, actively suicidal, self-harm) and they are extremely angry about the real or perceived grievances that are connected to, or represented by, the school.
Westman’s high school art teacher described him as an “odd, different kid who was goofy, but at the same time, someone who needed help. She says she noticed signs of self-harm and reported it but doesn't know what happened after.”
These attacks are not isolated or independent acts because they draw heavily on the motives and actions of prior school shooters, mass shooters, terrorists, and serial killers. For example, the Minnesota shooter’s weapons included references to the 2024 school shooting at Abundant Life School in Madison, WI. The Madison school shooting was committed by a 15-year-old girl who was connected to men plotting mass public shootings online.
Rather than advancing an defined ideology (like a terrorist group), the motive of most school shootings is performative as the violence is staged as part of a subculture rather than in pursuit of political goals. After the shooting, the way the perpetrator is described and culturally positioned is also a social ritual with deep historical roots in western literature (see: Ep. 39: Talking about "unspeakable" violence (like Columbine) with Rev. Dr. Ingebretsen).
From my interview with the Daily Mail in the UK:
David Riedman, creator of the K–12 School Shooting Database, told the Daily Mail that Westman's use of coded symbols, inscriptions on weapons and disturbing references leading up to the attack align with the online lore surrounding past school shooters and violent extremist communities.
'There are very clear references in the photos and videos from the shooting,' said Riedman, a long-time authority on school shooters.
'It's almost like this is the postmodern representation of a template of violence – if you're going to commit mass violence, you need to draw on all of these other pieces that exist in the lore around it.'
The 2x4 used to block the door to the church as the names of neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in the 2011 Norwegian terror attacks, and New Zealand Christchurch mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant, the left 51 people dead and 89 wounded. The semi-auto rifle has name written on it including Robert Bowers, who carried out the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Riedman also pointed to an ominous global dimension. Westman wrote in Cyrillic script, echoing a trend seen in Eastern Europe. 'There's a huge Columbine subculture in Russia and in Eastern Europe,' Riedman said referring to the 1999 school shooting in Colorado that killed 14.
'There have been a number of Columbine-mimic attacks there. Just recently, a Georgian neo-Nazi was arrested who was connected to the Antioch High School shooter. These connections exist online, and they cross borders.'
A video posted on twitter/x (a hotbed for extremists and violent content since the community trust and safety team was eliminated) shows Robin stabbing a diagram of the Annunciation church with a knife.
Another photo shows names of the shooters at Sandy Hook, Jokela, and Kerch Polytechnic College written on a rifle magazine. In other examples, the shooter wrote “Where is your God” and “Where is your God now?” on a magazine and the stock of an AR-style rifle which are both references to a question that the Columbine shooters in 1999 are rumored to have asked one of their victims before killing her (read more: Columbine influenced dozens of school shooters over the last 25 years).
The shooter also wrote random violent words and phrases like “psycho killer,” “suck on this,” “there is no message,” “release the list” (likely a reference to the Epstein list), “skibidi”, and "НЕНАВИСТЬ” (Russian for “hatred”).
The writing on the weapons also included a wide array of random hateful references targeting Christians, Jews, Black people, LGBTQ+ individuals, Muslims, and Hispanics including “kick a spic,” “Burn Israel,” and “6 million wasn’t enough,” an antisemitic phrase lamenting that only six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Unlike a terrorist who believes in a specific ideology and goal that the group is trying to achieve, this writing seems like random hate and anger directed at everyone without a clear purpose or defined ideology.
In one video, the shooter also showed off a smoke bomb that had “Extra Thicc! [sic] Jew Gas” written on it in silver marker. A former classmate said Westman would be verbally abusive to other students in their middle school classes and performed Nazi salutes when teachers had their backs turned. The strongest throughline in school shootings from the 1960s through today is an obsession and identification with nazis, white nationalism, and hate-based groups.
Stopping the next attack
Parents need to realize that apps like twitter/x, Signal, Telegram, Wickr, Wire, Element, Threema, Matrix, and Discord are ‘safe havens’ for glorifying and plotting mass violence because they provide an unmoderated service with open chatrooms, closed groups, and encrypted private messages for anonymous users.
Discord Platform: What schools and parents need to know to prevent a school shooting
There has been a ‘no notoriety’ movement which encourages the media not to share the names and images of school shooters. While it seems like a good idea not to glorify and ideologize mass murderers, not naming or showing photos just hides their identity from casual observers like parents.
Kids can find out anything they want to know about school shootings and mass shootings on thousands of internet forums with pictures, videos, discussion boards, and even fan art idolizing the attackers.
Instead of pretending like school shooters don’t exist, parents need to be able to immediately recognize their faces, names, nicknames, and symbols associated with mass violence. For a parent to spot red flags, they need to know who and what to look for.
Just like some many other school shootings, the attack is the final link in chain of failures. If a parent, teacher, friend, neighbor, or anyone in the community can notice a person in crisis before they reach the point of committing mass violence, making just one right decision can break the chain and prevent a school shooting from happening.
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.