Following the deadly Annunciation Church shooting in August during a Catholic mass filled with students in south Minneapolis, protestors and politicians across the city, state and the U.S. once more called for strengthening gun control laws.
In Minnesota, Governor Tim Walz (DFL), who is still weighing whether he'll run for a third term in 2026, said he planned to reach out to legislators on the right and begin working on a special session to address those laws.
But Walz has yet to call a special session. State Rep. and GOP Floor Leader Harry Niska told WCCO-TV that Walz knows he needs support from other Republicans in order to get anything done. Walz and Niska have discussed it but there's resistance to the things the governor is proposing.
"Republicans that I've been talking to, that I've heard from, are focused on things that are politically feasible and things that are going to work," Niska says. "And what we've seen from in terms of, you know, a ban on so-called assault weapons, is it was tried on a federal level. It didn't work. It didn't move the needle in terms of reducing gun violence at all."
Supporters of an assault weapons ban disagree with that assessment, and say statistics show mass shootings decreased after the federal measure went into effect in 1994. That federal ban expired, as scheduled, in 2004 and efforts to reinstate it have failed in Washington.
The shooter who killed two schoolchildren and injured 21 other people visited a suburban gun shop the weekend before the attack, but the owner of the store said this past Thursday that his staff saw no warning signs in their interactions.
Gun store owner Kory Krause told The Associated Press that Robin Westman spent around 40 minutes at Frontiersman Sports in St. Louis Park on Aug. 23 and appeared completely at ease. A surveillance video showed Westman examined several guns before ultimately buying a revolver.
Westman had already passed the required background checks and had a valid permit to purchase the gun, Krause said.
But Niska does say that they need to find out why the shooter, 23-year old Robin Westman, didn't trigger the state's red flag laws when he purchased weapons.
"This is a person who had some pretty bad ideas, had some pretty bad plans," Niska explained this past weekend. "How do we get people to take that more seriously and make sure that that gets prevented in the future? That shouldn't be a controversial thing that we should look into that."
Debate about if an assault weapons ban could prevent more shootings
What appears to be the biggest sticking point is Walz talking about an assault weapons ban. Niska says there isn't enough support among himself and fellow Republicans to approve such gun control measures.
There is also resistance from the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, who remains committed to the stance that banning assault weapons will not end gun violence.
"This individual had what they would call an assault weapon, but they also had three other firearms as well," says Gun Owners Caucus Chair Rob Doar. "So if we're talking about actually preventing a shooting or an attack like this, that wouldn't have prevented this thing."
The revolver wasn't one of the guns Westman used in the shootings. Investigators recovered a semiautomatic assault-style rifle, a shotgun and a different handgun at the scene, and said Westman was legally entitled to buy them. Krause said none came from his store.
Doar says members of the Gun Owners Caucus are interested in finding solutions to increase gun safety. He says a ban would not address the mental health issues the he says is a root cause of attacks like the Annunciation school shooting.
They also want to make sure there is a consensus to any solution brought up before lawmakers.
"We're interested in finding politically viable solutions, but beyond that, the fact that there may not even be the votes to get this through," says Doar. "But even if we could get a ban through, we're still not addressing the actual root causes of the attack, and that's where we're interested in finding some common ground."
Doar also claimed the federal assault weapons ban that was in effect from 1994 to 2004 did not reduce mass shootings.
Krause stressed that nothing in Westman's conduct raised any concerns among his staffers, who he said are trained to watch for warning signs.
“This person said all the right things, they checked all the right boxes, asked all the questions, they were friendly, talkative, making jokes, laughing, knowledgeable about guns, handled a lot of guns that were not the type of guns you would think are of the interest of somebody looking to do a mass shooting,” Krause told the AP.
Krause said his employees have extensive experience in picking out bad actors, straw purchasers, people who are homicidal, suicidal, mentally unstable or under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He said nothing stood out with Westman.
“We're still going over it,” Krause said. “We’re still scratching our heads thinking, ‘What did we miss? What could we have done?’ But it always ends with the answer of ‘nothing.’ There was just nothing there. And that’s what makes this situation so unique.”
The debate about whether the federal assault weapons ban is complicated, with several studies coming to different conclusions. The National Institutes of Health says the data does point to a reduction in public mass shootings specifically. They noted that a ban on large-capacity magazines was associated with fewer public mass shooting events, fatalities, and nonfatal gun injuries.
"Gun control legislation is an important public health tool in the prevention of public mass shootings," said the NIH study.
House Republicans on Thursday released a list of proposals that lack any restrictions on access to firearms. It calls for increased funding for school security and for school resources officers, including for private schools. The proposals would also prohibit districts from banning school resource officers, as Minneapolis and some other districts have done.
The House GOP also called for more mental health treatment beds and mandatory minimum prison sentences for repeat criminals who use guns and for straw purchasers of firearms that are used in violent crimes.
Students Demand Action, an arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, is organizing school walkouts across the country for Friday to demand that state and federal lawmakers ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Cities and former educators weigh-in on more gun safety laws
Both Minneapolis and St. Paul have begun to explore their own citywide ordinances to restrict weapons but that would violate current state laws. St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter says it's a proactive move.
"Moving early on an ordinance will make it such that if a state preemption lifts at midnight, our city ordinance will take effect at 12:01," Mayor Carter explains.
Carter says a city ordinance would ban public possession of assault weapons, binary triggers, and guns in recreation centers and libraries, and would require every gun to have a serial number.
"We've asked our state legislature if they can't pass a ban, if they can't pass those laws, to at least lift the preemption so that we can," says Carter.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and several other metro-area mayors recently joined together to call for further restrictions on weapons across the state as well.
Two state lawmakers, a Democrat and a Republican with experience inside schools were on with Blois Olson on WCCO's Sunday Take, highlighting the experiences and opinions any gun legislation would need to overcome.
State Senator Steve Cwodzinski was a social studies teacher for 30 years, and he says there were too many times he had to tell a room full of kids about school shootings.
"The looks on their faces of disbelief and I wished I had a hidden camera to capture those 32 or 34 faces looking at the grown-up in the room going, 'can't you people keep us safe?' And to have to do that time and time again as a teacher was getting increasingly hard," Cwodzinski explained.
Also appearing was GOP Representative Jeff Witte, who is a former school resource officer.
"You never know what people are going through in their lives behind closed doors," says Witte. "And they might act out, they might say things, but it's important for our community leaders and people just to recognize that and understand that."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.