This morning, a gunman opened fire into a Catholic church in Minneapolis. Two children are dead. How did we get here? And then:

Jessica Winter
A staff writer covering family and education.

The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published the blueprint for the second Trump Administration with Project 2025, has an article on its website titled “The Essential Second Amendment.” It begins, “The right to keep and bear arms is premised on self-defense. A well-armed citizenry secures a free state by protecting the nation and its individuals from three distinct threats: tyranny, foreign invasion, and domestic dangers such as crime and civil unrest.”

Yet it is impossible to identify any premise of self-defense in the carnage that took place on Wednesday at Annunciation Catholic Church, in Minneapolis. This morning, while students were celebrating the first Mass of the school year, a shooter killed two children, ages eight and ten, and injured seventeen other people, fourteen of whom were children. It is impossible to claim guns as our guard against “domestic dangers” when firearms killed more children than any other cause—more than cancer, more than car crashes—for three years in a row. It is impossible to assert that guns keep us safe from “distinct threats” when we know that more kids are killed by guns in states that have the most permissive gun laws.

The Heritage Foundation tells us that a “well-armed citizenry acts as a major check on the ability of would-be tyrants, enabling the people to forcibly resist oppression.” And yet we can guess what might happen if residents of Washington, D.C., watching federal troops descend on their city, threatened to take up arms against their oppressors. The right wing’s vision of the Second Amendment is premised on a fantasy of what Heritage calls “a truly free society.” That fantasy is evidently more valuable than life itself.

If parents in Minneapolis are inconsolable tonight, if parents across the country are afraid that their children’s school might be the next one—and there will be a next one, and a next one after that—that means our nation is working according to our current leaders’ wishes. They wrote it down. It’s how we know we’re truly free.

For more: revisit Malcolm Gladwell on how school shootings spread, and Matthew Hutson on whether threat assessment could prevent this kind of violence.

Patrick Drahi, the fifty-five-year-old French Israeli telecommunications billionaire, shocked the art world when he bought the storied auction house—he is merely the two-hundred-and-fifty-second-biggest art collector in the world, after all. And then his takeover incurred debt, layoffs, and culture shock. Sam Knight reports »

Today’s Crossword Puzzle: Tidbits for aardvarks—four letters.

P.S. We’re midway through the Burning Man festival, and those attendees still raging have powered through more-than-fifty-mile-per-hour winds, dust storms, damage to their shelters, rain, and injuries—all in the name of community and creative expression.

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.