You may be thinking about this backwards. It’s not: you see double consonants in romaji, you use っ in Japanese. Rather it’s more like you see っ (pause for the mora/beat, as others have memtioned), you use double consonants in romaji to represent that. In other words, you derive romaji from Japanese, not Japanese from romaji.
The Japanese term is “み • ん • な” (“mi • n • na”), no pause.
Side note: みっな (“mi • (pause) • na”) seems like it would be really awkward to say (sounds robotic).
皆様, don’t forget みな.
Because it’s みんな *min na*, not みっな *min(pause)na*.
Yes, the pronunciation is virtually identical in practice, but so are “hear” and “here”, yet they’re different words.
If we look at the histories of both ん and っ, and of sokuon, we have to look at historical kana usage.
First, remember that the modern Japanese syllabaries are very recent. Reforms started in the late 19th century and were implemented only in 1946. Prior to c. 1900, kana was roughly divided into katakana, a relatively stable and standardized system created by Buddhist monks that used parts (片 kata) of kanji to purely represent sound.
Why the long story? Well, around this time, it was asked how to represent the modern nasal sound, which doesn’t follow the V / CV rule that all Japanese syllables have. Most people wrote む or ぬ and considered the nasal sound to just have a weak vowel, like the す in です and ます. In 1900, the government made one exception to this hentaigana rule, and used the cursive form of 武 (む) to represent mu, and the cursive form of 无 (ん)—a hentaigana of mu—to represent the nasal consonant.
I had to do a little bit more reading on the sokuon letter っ. As another poster mentioned, historical kana spelling generally does not have this letter. 學校 was がくかう (gakukau), for example. (Again, く from the native perspective simply lost its full vowel sound and geminated with the following か from the k column.)
The gemination phenomenon arguably happens most with “stops” (sounds your mouth makes by stopping airflow) like t, k, and p. If you pronounce “hot pocket” and listen to yourself, chances are you won’t really hear the t in “hot”. It may come out as “hoppocket” or “ho’pocket” (like a glottal stop).
っ is *not* consonant doubling, the transcription uses double consonants for gemination. The ん in みんな is one of the rare cases of an *actual* double consonant.
Because it’s not used to double letters. っ is used as a glottal stop. When you say みんな it’s one steady flow. If it was spelled みっな you’d have to say it as mi…na.
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