Naomi Girson | opinions editor

Two weeks ago, Robin Westman wrote “FIND ME I AM BEGGING FOR HELP, I AM SCREAMING FOR HELP,” in their journal, according to CNN.

Last Wednesday they opened fire at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis killing two children and injuring 18 others in the chapel, before committing suicide, according to AP News.

The comment in the journal came after a family member remarked on “dark energy” coming from Westman — one of many entries depicting the lack of support they received for so long, raising eyebrows, but not turning heads enough to see anything really going on.

We cannot continue to pretend like these shooters do not live among us. But that’s the only place they can live.

They are not anonymous, and sometimes they aren’t even that secretive, Westman sure wasn’t. There were signs for years, of a mental health crisis, of a possible danger to themselves and onto others.

Conversations about school shootings, signs of an unstable person who should not have been capable of legally purchasing firearms.

It is not a random chance who crafts plans like Westman, who keeps stream-of-consciousness journals in Cyrillic code, detailing how they will execute their attack.

There doesn’t have to be some huge motive behind these actions, as Westman put on the side of their handgun so chillingly, “there is no message.”

Westman had a long trail of evidence, tracing back years before the shooting was planned.

For example, in a journal entry CNN correlated to around seventh grade, Westman was suspended for a week after asking a girl in class “if there was a school shooting, would you hide?”

But nothing ever came of the infraction.

An art teacher Westman had in high school said they noticed possibly self-inflicted arm wounds, and though they reported it to the guidance counselor, they didn’t know what came of it, according to The New York Times.

The teacher called it “either a cry for attention or self-hatred or both,” and said it was “something that slipped through the cracks.”

That always seems to be the case. There are no cracks in the foundation, there’s a giant gaping hole, and it’s only getting bigger with the removal of funds for programs set in place to find problems like this before they turn into massacres.

Last month, the Trump administration cut funding to what it called a partisan and unsuccessful Homeland Security operation in Minnesota actively working to better identify potential mass shooters and stop violent acts before they happen, according to CNN.

Westman was not even that secretive leading up to the killing. They wanted to be caught, they wanted someone to put a stop to the plan, but no one was there to notice.

“I have been showing signs for a while, I need to be stopped! I don’t want to abandon my plan, but I really want to be stopped for the sake of my family,” Westman wrote in a journal shortly before the fatal day, according to CNN.

Had the resources not been cut by the administration, Westman’s calls may have been heard.

Or at least made it harder for them to obtain the weapons that they did.

But instead, after years of plotting, Westman was able to purchase firearms legally, making it easier to carry out the attack. The simple purchase clearly even surprised Westman in the moment, writing “should be harder for people like me to carry out these attacks.”

Guns are the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 17, according to Johns Hopkins University, and yet we are reversing policies trying to find the problems from the start, not after the end.

“Most people who commit a mass shooting are in a crisis leading up to it and are likely to leak their plans to others, presenting opportunities for intervention,” according to the National Institute of Justice.

The Minneapolis church shooting last week is no exception. 

Westman is not a stand-alone case, but merely one example of the many.

The longer we continue to allow the federal administration to roll-back the programs we had in place, the worse the school shooting problems will get, for everyone involved.

Naomi Girson can be reached at girsonn@duq.edu