Last Monday, Audrey Hale, 28, shot his way into Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, and fatally shot three staff members and three 9-year-old students. Hale, a former student at the private Presbyterian school, was armed with a semi-automatic pistol, an AR-style rifle, and a handgun.
Initial calls for sensible gun controls after this, the 130th mass shooting in 2023, were quickly drowned out when police let everybody know that Hale identified as transgender on social media. Aha! Something besides guns that Republicans could blame this one on! And they were already trying to ban transgender therapy! Oh, goody!
Several conservative political figures, including Sen. J.D. Vance, Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Donald Trump Jr., were among the personalities on social media who implicated the role of the shooter's transgender identity in the shooting. The motive for the shooting remains unknown, according to authorities.
Statistically, transgender Americans are much more likely to be the target of violence than its perpetrator. Yet right-wing propagandist Benny Johnson cited three other presumed transgender or non-binary mass murderers to argue that "the modern trans movement is radicalizing activists into terrorists."
To which someone with more authority to speak on the issue replied:
"4 shooters out of over 300 mass shooters since 2009 are transgender or non binary. That's just 1.3 percent of all shooters," Anthony Zenkus, a lecturer in social work at Columbia University, wrote on Twitter. "You just proved our point: 99 percent of mass shooters in the United States are cis gendered."
Tennessee politicians have called for publication of a manifesto that Hale left behind, but many in the LGBTQ+ community worry that while his manifesto might help police understand his motives, publishing it only serves to inflame right-wingers' passion for trans-bashing, while perversely glorifying the murderers' twisted thoughts and potentially inspiring some future killer.
We didn't need to read what the Las Vegas shooter thought about casinos, or how the Tree of Life shooter justified slaughtering worshipers in a synagogue, or why the Monterey Park shooter objected to Lunar New Year celebrations, or the ruminations of the guy who killed the journalists at the Capital Gazette regarding freedom of the press.
To list but one cisgender mass murderer for each of the transgender killers Benny Johnson named.
All we need to know about them is that their minds were filled with hate and rage. Of which, like military-grade weaponry, we seem to have no shortage of peddlers on social media and right-wing "news" channels.
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