National
Review Online
Thursday,
March 30, 2023
On Monday,
a 28-year-old shooter broke into Covenant school in Nashville, Tenn., and
murdered three adults and three nine-year-old children. Within 14 minutes, police
had arrived and shot the assailant dead. As ever, it wasn’t long before the
slow trickle of information was engulfed in an avalanche of talking points.
This time, they concerned not only gun control but transgenderism.
At least
for some journalists and commentators, it is impossible to imagine that the
perpetrator was simply a disturbed and hateful person — no, social-justice
morality tales have to be read into her hideous crime.
The
charade began when local police first reported the shooter’s sex as female but
initially omitted that she identified as a trans male. Accordingly, some
initial media reports made the natural biological point. The New York
Times, for instance, first reported: “Female assailants in mass shootings
in the U.S. — like the one that occurred on Monday in Nashville — are extremely
rare.”
When
John Drake, Nashville’s police chief, later added that the killer identified as
transgender, the press backtracked. The Times issued a
clarification about “the confusion” around the assailant’s trans identity,
blaming Nashville officials for using “‘she’ and ‘her’ to refer to the suspect,
who, according to a social media post and a LinkedIn profile, appeared to
identify as a man in recent months.” USA Today offered a
similar statement, stating that it was “officials [who] had initially
misidentified the gender of the shooter.”
Of
course, nothing changes the fact that she was a woman.
Pursuing
the transgender angle, journalists and pundits tried connecting the atrocity
with Tennessee’s supposedly anti-transgender legislation, or the reported
disapproval of the shooter’s parents of her transgender status, or the mere
geographic proximity of conservative journalists. Benjamin Ryan, an NBC
freelancer, wrote in a tweet that “NBC has ID’d the Nashville shooter as
[name], who identifies as transgender and had no previous criminal record.
Nashville is home to the Daily Wire, a hub of anti-trans activity by
@MattWalshBlog, @BenShapiro and @MichaelJKnowles.”
Was he
saying the shooting was an act of vengeance? That the slaughter is really
the Daily Wire’s fault? The Trans Resistance Network, a fringe
group with a few thousand followers, made the connection directly. It warned
that “hate has consequences,” and stated that the shooter acted as she did only
because she felt she “had no other way to be seen.”
All of
this would be a little like blaming immigration policy or the National
Immigration Law Center for a white nationalist carrying out a mass shooting.
When
some on the right speculated that the shooter may have been motivated by an
anti-Christian animus, the press warned of the dangers of that line of inquiry.
According to ABC News, it only further harms the so-called trans community.
“Anti-transgender sentiment follows Nashville shooting,” the outlet reported.
From NBC News: “Fear pervades Tennessee’s trans community amid focus on
Nashville shooter’s gender identity: ‘We were already fearing for our lives.
Now, it’s even worse.’”
We know
from Drake, the Nashville police chief, that the murder was premeditated. The
killer had “drawn maps” and left behind a manifesto, which the police have yet
to make public. Drake also indicated that, as a former pupil of Covenant, the
murderess may have had “some resentment for having to go to that school.”
While
there is still more to be learned, everything so far suggests that the
perpetrator has, in some respects, the typical profile of a mass murderer, even
if the particular dimensions of her mental illness were distinctive. People
close to her worried that she posed a threat but did too little to address it.
The two
sides of the national political debate aren’t going to find common ground on
much, but we at least should be able to agree that the true victims of the
Covenant shooting aren’t transgender people.
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