Minneapolis news station KARE has revealed that Robin Westman’s obsession with school shootings stretches all the way back to middle school. In his journals, Westman himself admitted to being fascinated with mass killings as far back as the 7th grade. That is not a short-lived passing thought. That is nearly a decade of carrying around the idea of slaughtering innocent people.

Even more disturbing is that classmates remembered the warning signs and said they were reported to adults. Westman’s verbal abuse and Hitler salutes in class didn’t happen in a vacuum. Someone told the grown-ups. Yet, like so many other times before in so many other cases, nothing appears to have been done. One has to wonder if his mother, who the last I heard was still being sought by police, dismissed it all as ‘just a phase.’ If that was the case, then the results of her neglect are written in blood at Annunciation.

Westman wrote about creating school shooting scenarios with video games and acting them out with airsoft guns. This was the extent of his training. He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a cop. He wasn’t even a hunter. He was a coward who spent years pretending with plastic toys and first-person shooters before finally getting his hands on the real thing.

And yet that was enough. Because in this country, it’s pathetically easy to buy a gun without ever having touched one before. No training, no certification, no demonstration of even the most basic knowledge of firearm safety. Westman could go from acting out fantasies in his bedroom to mowing down children in a church basement simply because the system doesn’t care who buys the weapon.

While Kash Patel’s FBI has been quick to push a hate crime against Catholics narrative, Westman’s own journals tell a different story. He had scouted other locations, including a brewery and a café, before settling on Annunciation for one reason only. He thought he could achieve a higher body count by targeting children and families. His motivation was not religious; it was rooted in bloodlust.

The journals show us just how long Westman lived with these violent fantasies, but they also show us how little it takes for someone with no real experience, no real skill, and no real discipline to turn those fantasies into reality. That’s the most damning part of all.

(Source)

• KARE 11 Investigates | ‘There was definitely red flags’ Classmate of Annunciation shooter points to warning signs