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.