ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA — Following a series of increasingly violent Somali gang shootings across Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz announced Wednesday the launch of a groundbreaking new equity initiative designed to ensure that gun violence is distributed more equitably among the state’s racial groups, particularly the state’s White population.
Calling the program an important step toward creating a “more inclusive Minnesota,” Walz said the state could no longer tolerate a gun-violence system in which black demographics were disproportionately represented among victims while others remained almost entirely unaffected.
“When we look at the data coming out of our suburban neighborhoods, the demographic imbalance is heartbreaking,” Tim Walz said at a press conference surrounded by several members of the Somali community. “For too long, White suburbanites in Edina and Minnetonka have been systematically excluded from the lived experience of diving behind a minivan during a 100-round firefight. That’s not the inclusive Minnesota we’re trying to build.”
According to state reports, nearly 100 percent of shell casings recovered in recent Twin Cities skirmishes were aimed exclusively at other Somali youth, leaving White, Asian, and Hispanic residents historically marginalized from participating in local drive-by encounters.
At press time, Minnesota officials were celebrating the first successful week of the initiative after discovering that the state’s gun violence statistics had become significantly more racially diverse, despite no measurable reduction in the number of people being shot.
