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By Nathaniel Minor

Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune

The image above is the one I will remember from yesterday.

Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other local leaders led the city and state in a collective mourning of yesterday's horrific shooting at Annunciation Church on the city's South Side. Many of them called for fellow policymakers to go beyond offering thoughts and prayers and pass stricter gun laws, too. 

“Keep us in your thoughts and prayers, but also keep us in the thoughts for action,” Walz said during a news conference.

“Every level of government must act to ensure that these preventable tragedies never happen again,” read a statement from the Minneapolis City Council. 

“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school,” Frey said.

Frey's comments in particular set off conservatives in Minnesota and elsewhere. State Rep. Harry Niska, a Ramsey Republican and GOP floor leader, defended the power of prayer and said it should be at the start of some "really hard discussions ... about how we can rebuild our state." 

"But don't let anyone tell you that prayer is not an important part of it," Niska said on X. 

Any significant gun-control bills will need bipartisan support, both in the Minnesota Legislature and in Congress. 

Read More. 

The shooting ended a Minnesota summer that began with another one. The first part of the year saw a "promising decline" in gun violence, my colleague Tim Harlow reports. Then came the assassination of Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the attempted killing of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in early June. 

Walz, who has spoken publicly of the personal toll he felt after the June political shootings, found himself again in the role of the state’s chief consoler.

“What happened here today will not be gone,” Walz said. “Minnesotans will not step away.”

Late on Wednesday, the Hortman family released a statement that offered condolences to the victims' families and friends, and said that Mark and Melissa believed children should be able to live peacefully.

"We hope this tragedy spurs elected officials to take action towards common-sense measures on access to high-powered weapons so that no one else must suffer," the statement read.

Read more.

Both school and mass shootings are on the rise in the U.S. and in Minnesota. More than 70 mass shootings have happened in Minnesota since 2014, I reported with my colleague Jeff Hargarten. That's according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as having a minimum of four victims either injured or killed, not including the shooter.

Another data set counts more than 30 school shootings in Minnesota since 2000, though most of those did not result in any deaths. Both data sets show the number of incidents has spiked in recent years.

Read more.

The governor has no public events scheduled for today.

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An abrupt end to DNC meeting. Members of the Democratic National Committee voted to end the summer meeting at the Minneapolis Hilton earlier than planned on Wednesday following the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, my colleague Sydney Kashiwagi reports.

"I'm extremely, extremely sorry that our meeting ended on such a tragic note but as we leave here with heavy hearts, let's steel ourselves again in this work and why it's so important," an emotional DNC Chair and former Minnesota DFL Chair Ken Martin told hundreds of Democrats who came to Minneapolis for the party's meeting.

"Everything we do is to make sure things like this never happen again — especially to little children," Martin said.

"It's a horrific situation for the families and the children within that school community, and as somebody who's married to a schoolteacher, it sends shock waves throughout the education community in our state and our nation," Martin's successor, DFL Chair Richard Carlbom, said on the sidelines of the meeting. "I'm horrified by the violence itself and heartbroken by the loss of life."

What will Walz do? Carlbom told Kashiwagi he spoke with Walz this week about his political future as Walz weighs whether to seek a third term. Carlbom thinks Minnesota will know Walz's decision "in the next couple of weeks."

But for now, Carlbom said Walz is "going through his process" and does not know if the governor is running for a third term.

Going through the process. "I've known Gov. Walz and First Lady Walz for nearly 20 years, and they are very thoughtful, deliberative decisionmakers and they have a process by which they make decisions like this and that process obviously was delayed because of the assassination of Melissa Hortman," Carlbom told Kashiwagi.

"But they are working through their process and ultimately, I hope Gov. Walz runs for re-election. I think he has served the state extremely well."