Why We Can't Stop Our Children from Dying of Gun Violence

The recent shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis—where two children, ages 8 and 10, were killed and nineteen people injured as they sat in the pews during their first week of school—represents not just another tragedy but another iteration of a compulsive cycle that has trapped American society. We are collectively caught in what Freud would recognize as a “repetition compulsion” writ large, unconsciously reenacting the same trauma while believing we are trying to solve it.

When Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “Don't just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now; these kids were literally praying,” he touched upon something deeper than political critique. Yet even as he rejected empty platitudes, he was simultaneously performing his own scripted role in the very ritualistic pattern he critiqued. Every participant in this national drama—regardless of their political position or moral righteousness—is unconsciously colluding in a collective defense system that protects all of us from unbearable truths.

Our national response has become what psychoanalysts call a “basic assumption group”—a collective formation in which everyone plays predetermined roles that serve unconscious defensive functions rather than problem-solving goals. The TV anchors delivering breaking news with practiced solemnity; the experts offering familiar analysis; the politicians taking predictable positions; the religious leaders providing comfort; the polarized activists demanding action; the parents, depending on the fates of their children, expressing outrage, relief, or unfathomable grief; the educators implementing new protocols—all participate in an elaborate unconscious choreography.

This is not about moral equivalence. Individual positions may be factually accurate or morally defensible. But the rightness of any particular position matters less than understanding how all positions function within an unconscious system that “works” fo