Just a mere month before a shooter opened fire on a group of school aged children in a Minnesota church, the Trump administration cut Minnesota state funding for efforts to identify potential mass shooters. The grants were wiped out as part of an $18.5 million cut to a Homeland Security program, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. CP3 aimed to spot early warning signs of dangerous mass shooters like Minnesota shooter Robin Westman, but the Trump administration called it partisan and unsuccessful.
Westman himself was baffled he wasn’t identified by authorities as a potential threat, writing in his “manifesto” that it is too easy for people like him to carry out attacks. According to his journals, Westman had recently ended a long-term relationship, bought three firearms in one month, quit his job and was frequenting a local gun range.
“I have dropped a few warning signs to a few people,” Westman wrote. “Nothing crazy, but if I did something, they would say it was obvious in hindsight.”
The dismissed grants funded local programs in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety and Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office to assess and manage mass violence threats. Getting rid of preventative programs when our country is at the height of its gun crisis is a careless and ignorant decision that unfortunately resulted in the killing of two children and the wounding of 18 others, according to CNN. This is not an untimely coincidence, it is a direct cause and effect.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson claimed the grant program was nothing but a slush fund for left-wing ideologies and did nothing to combat threats, according to WKOW. Minnesota lawmakers disagree, claiming that stripping funds has left the state underequipped to prevent tragedies. The DHS under the Trump Administration is committed to political division and the demonization of the left, ignoring the fact that gun violence is not a Democratic issue but an American one.
Just recently a shooting at Utah Valley University killed conservative social media personality and debater Charlie Kirk — a man who stood firm behind Second Amendment rights. That same day, a school shooting at Everdeen high school in Denver hospitalized two students. Gun violence does not discriminate based on one’s political affiliation is — it spares no one. The only thing that could have saved Charlie Kirk, and the hundreds of children killed every year in mass shootings, isn’t more political divide — it’s a crack down on gun control.
The cancellation of the Minnesota grant limits the state law enforcement’s access to federal counterterrorism resources, according to a letter sent to the DHS by six Democratic lawmakers begging for the reinstatement of the grant to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
These programs have a long history of criticism claiming they are inefficient. Still, law enforcement agencies have shown high demand for funding through the program with a 2024 DHS report stating 178 organizations applied for what eventually added up to far more than the available funding. This report challenged the criticisms of the program’s uselessness, giving multiple examples of incidents where the program was indeed successful in identifying potential mass threats. These included online threats of mass violence, resulting in the individual being found and charged, a neo-Nazi being reported and referred to mental health services and a hospital sending a troubled student to a rehabilitation clinic.
The grant for Minnesota’s Department of Public Safety was specifically centered around the issue of school shootings, focusing on identifying potentially dangerous people. The roughly $100,000 grant allocated to the County Sheriff’s Office was designed to establish a team to engage actively with mental health professionals, school officials, social workers and probation officers — the exact kind of program that would have had a good chance at identifying and stopping Westman before the shooting.
After the shooting, first lady Melania Trump had the nerve to take to X with a call for more preemptive measures to stop potential shooters. The exact preemptive measures her husband just shut down under the guise of them being part of the woke agenda.
There have been 301 mass shootings so far in 2025, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There have been 146 K-12 school shootings in 2025 according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. The average American school year is only 180 days.
Gun violence and mass shootings are the biggest safety threat our country is facing. Children in K-12 schools don’t feel safe, college students don’t feel safe and now children going to church don’t feel safe either. I urge you to recognize gun violence is not a party issue, and I ask you: How many children have to die before guns are recognized as what they really are, a national threat?
