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Some what shocked there has not been a top level post about the Annunciation School Shooting yet given the obvious culture war angles and parallels to the Covenant School shooting of a few years back (religious school, trans shooter - though FtM vs MtF).
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/annunciation-catholic-school-minneapolis-shooting-08-27-25
I had missed that the Covenant shooter was determined to have not acted out due to any real culture war stuff, but just due to your generic mass shooter mental illness + desire to be remembered cocktail.
I would guess that throwing in the Culture War angle makes it a lot more likely that the shooter's name and face get passed around, though in this case seems like he was just crazy more so than any particular niche of the political compass.
Presumably gun control will be in the news again a bit.
Going to keep my comments short since this is a well-trod culture war battlefield.
But its truly annoying to have to listen to the standard anti-gun positions trotted out once again without grappling with any of the other factors at play.
When only a couple months ago an attempted mass shooting at a church was stopped by at least TWO armed staff... and a guy with a truck.
Yes, it turns out that 'good guy with a gun' can be an effective counter to these threats.
So when the Dems once again trot out the gun control agenda I can only assume they're acting in bad faith because the only other explanation is having the memory of a goldfish.
Your example reminds me of this other example from a Church of Christ.
My Christian friends often wonder aloud with me what it'll take for us to again recognize an in-group cultural identity among ourselves (a conversation typically prompted by the construction of our brand new fuck-you enormously gargantuan Islamic cultural center), and my answer is always something that this is an example of: innocent Christians being persecuted.
And I wonder how many Christian children killed by trans gunmen will be enough. It's actually quite remarkable how much less sensitive than Jews Christians are to this kind of thing. Remember that Baptist hospital (now run by Episcopalians) that was bombed in the first few weeks of the war in Gaza? No?
Canada had an outbreak of church burnings over that Indian burials on schoolgrounds hoax, and not a word about it from any of my church staff. I'm not even sure if they were aware! NPR certainly kept quiet about it. Edit: NPR was not quiet about church burnings in 2006 and 2015, as long as you were a black church. I also briefly googled about the 2021 burnings and most forum discussion and coverage are contemporary, and they're taking the burial narrative at face value. Most sympathetic pieces are from very partisan sources.
Not closely related to what you just said, but it's something I think about more and more.
All of them.
Christianity doesn't really seem like the right toolkit for encouraging in-group bias and even defensive militancy. History may seem to contradict me here, but I'd posit that it's actually non-christian traditions that historically lent the means of protection to Christianity, that institutions of physical defence had to work in spite of Christianity, not thanks to it. And over the centuries, it looks to me like Christianity has worn down those alternate memeplexes until they became defunct, and is now, in the West, left without the memes to ensure its own survival and that of its adherents.
I think that Christianity has had a good run, but owed much of it to other forces that allied with it and carried it through the centuries. It survived those, and in their place has grown some post-christian replacement non-religion that picked and chose a few elements of Christianity to run with while rejecting the name of the faith and any coherence that came with it. But I think they picked and chose poorly - they took up the most flawed pieces, and left behind most of the good bits.
Christianity and western leftism both seem doomed in the long run. But so is everything, I suppose.
Good luck.
Modern Christianity probably not. Most modern Christians are basically ecumenical believers— they believe that Christianity is true enough for them, but they don’t see Christianity as the one true faith, nor see themselves as christian before other group identities they happen to hold. That’s true today of Westernized Christianity, but there are times and places in history where this wasn’t the case. Orthdox, Traditional Catholics, and fundamentalist Christians are more likely to think this way, and more likely to see themselves as Christian before things like nationality.
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I speculate it might be down to the size of the two groups. There must be at least an order of magnitude more Catholics in the US than Jews. It's entirely possible that every Jew in America is no more than three degrees of separation away from the couple gunned down outside the embassy, whereas in this case there are probably many American Catholics who are six degrees of separation removed from the children shot in the church.
History might well have a role as well. Jews have their entire history of being persecuted specifically for being Jews, and this obviously creates the solidarity, not just because you care about other Jews, but because history shows them that their survival depends on being aware of persecution of Jews because it will eventually come for them too.
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How many has there been? We had 3 in covenant and 2 today.
Sure five lives is more than should die, but that's less than a life a year, that's like 1/600th the amount of people who die falling off ladders a year. And basically no one dies falling off a ladder. Apparently there's already been 60 deaths of kids shooting themselves unintentionally with a gun, so that's about 1/120th accidental gun suicides of children, and basically no child dies of accidental gun suicide.
If we include the important detail the two times it has happened, they had shot up their own school (so they could be shooting up their own spaces because that's what shooters do, rather than specific religious targeting), a case for persecution comes off weak.
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A crazy trans person shooting up a Church is not being persecuted. From what I can tell, the Christian right and the LGBT* may be politically opposed to each other, but almost all of their members would be horrified when they learned that someone had shot up their opponent group.
Likewise, the fact that lots of mass shootings happen in schools is not proof that there is a coherent ideology which prizes the killing of US students.
Contrast this with Jews. There is a coherent group which will cheer whenever someone shoots up a synagogue. While I am sure that they likewise get their base rate of crazies without any antisemitic ideology (plus the odd youth who was formerly a member and blames the institution for whatever is wrong with their life), I would guess that nine out of ten murderous attacks against synagogues have an antisemitic background. That does not mean that these attackers are sane, but simply that on a per-victim-capita basis, a random unhinged person will encounter a lot more claims that the Jews are what is wrong with the world than that it is the Methodists.
Even more relevant, this was their former school! It is the default of mass shooters to target their current and former workplaces/schools (often over highly personal grievance) so assuming it was a targeted attack on religion instead of just default mass shooter behavior could use some stronger evidence.
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It's not clear to me that there is such a coherent group. At the very least, I have not seen them act before. There are certainly occasional anti-semites, but they don't seem to be unified in any way. Which I don't think is too dissimilar from Christians, to be honest - there are individual bigots who will cheer when someone hurts a church, but not a unified group. So it seems to me that both groups are equally persecuted - I would say neither group is truly persecuted right now, but if one argues that individuals being hostile towards Jews counts then I would say it should count for Christians as well.
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Are they really "Christian children" just because they're going to a christian school? I doubt many of them were given a choice in which school they were sent to.
It seems like the disproportionate number of shooters at these schools should also raise some questions. To me it seems obvious that subjecting kids to religious values is a bad idea.
Do you have even the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that a disproportionate number of school shootings take place at private religious schools by students who attended private religious schools?
No, I'm working under the assumption that these two shootings by trans alumni of christian schools are significant. If that's not true, I'm not sure what the whole point of this thread is. I'm just pointing out that it fits perfectly with my worldview. I believe that transgenderism is probably biologically innate, so a person with transgenderism who is raised in an oppressive fundamentalist religious environment could end up harboring resentment toward the people who forced those values on them.
As for transgenderism being biologically innate, the shooter admitted that he was tired of being trans, but felt that if he cut his hair short and detransitioned, he'd lose face in front of the (presumably numerous) people who'd earlier advised him that coming out as trans was probably a bad idea. This whole pointless massacre came about because of a misguided sunk-cost fallacy, an arrogant nutcase who was too proud to publicly admit he'd made an error as an adolescent (also known as "the period of your life when making mistakes is most understandable and forgivable").
I suppose next you'll tell me that the shooter's transgenderism really was biologically innate, but years of exposure to toxic Catholic propaganda left him confused and suffering from internalised transphobia. It's so easy to claim that trans is something fixed and unchangeable as long as you dismiss all the counter-examples that suggest it might not be.
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I will politely point out that "the people who forced those values on them" emphatically does not include "small children mercilessly gunned down who weren't even born at the time the shooters attended the schools in question".
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Stop trolling.
Trolling? Are you implying that I don't sincerely believe this? I believe that raising kids under Christianity is harmful, just as raising them in radical Islam is harmful. In my liberal bubble this is not a controversial belief, at all.
As I understand it you are allowed to post this argument but you haven't put the requisite amount of effort into it.
That would be blatantly biased if true. People are allowed to post zero effort anti-trans posts where they assume consensus. I've never heard anyone here make an actual argument against transgenderism.
People do this all the time, I don't know why you would say this with a straight face. There are lots of arguments, like that the belief that someone can be a gender other than the one associated with their birth(if this formulation of gender as separate to physical sex is even reasonable) is entirely unfalsifiable even to the person supposedly experiencing it. If there isn't one single argument against "transgenderism" it's because there are something like at minimum two and probably more like a dozen different entirely incompatible ideas of what the transgender phenomenon is under the trench coat of the trans movement. Is being trans synonymous with experiencing gender dysphoria(a thing itself with myriad definitions) or is it a purely social, you're trans if you like to wear the opposite gender's traditional garb?
If I didn't know you had in fact participated in past debates on this site on this subject I might think you had just somehow managed to not stumble upon those threads but no, you have and are either experiencing extreme amnesia or are lying.
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Gender roles are important because society can do many bad things, but 'not work' isn't one of them. At a fundamental level people have to know their job in broader society and gender roles are a major part of figuring that out.
At the end of the day, a functioning society is based on the idea that 'sorry, you(personally) have a job to do. It doesn't really matter if you want to do it, that just makes you a bad person if you don't rather than making it not your job. Get it done. No, you don't have an unlimited say in the matter. Your sex, your age, your class- these all say what you're supposed to be doing. Much more of a say than you have. Keep the wheel of civilization turning even if it crushes you underneath it.' We should be very careful about allowing defections. People should conform to the wisdom of their elders because their own ideas are normally bad ones.
Trans undermines this whole memeplex by making gender roles a weird sex thing, not a fundamental attribute.
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Was the comparison you made between Christianity and radical Islam deliberate? Is non-radical Islam less harmful in your view than Christianity?
No that wasn't deliberate. Christianity is obviously less bad than Islam. Christianity converts people through relentless propagandizing, guilt-tripping, cultural subversion, and indoctrination from a young age, whereas Islam still converts people with physical violence.
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Until approx. 5 years ago I would have agreed with you, and maybe 8 years ago I would have strongly agreed with you. But it has not escaped my notice that most "normal Christians" I see just seem to have their lives together so much more: they're happier, kinder, started families sooner (or at all), haven't had to rediscover from first principles a reason to get out of bed and do anything, ...
I say this as an atheist who has gone to more masses in the past couple of years than the rest of my life combined, but has not and probably doesn't expect to find faith.
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There is no value neutrality. If they aren't getting your values, they're getting someone elses. And since liberalism is a quokka factory producing naive and easily duped hothouse flowers, perhaps religious values aren't so bad after all.
There may not be complete value neutrality, but telling kids you've figured out exactly how the world works and that they have to obey a specific list of rules otherwise they'll burn in hell is very far from neutral. Closer to neutral would be having conversations with them and telling them what you personally believe, but not forcing your values on them.
Liberals do that too except 'burn in hell' is substituted for by social ostracism and killing their reputation right here, right now.
That's wokeness, not liberalism. Wokeness is highly illiberal.
Sure, if by liberalism we mean something that doesn't exist anymore and has been supplanted by wokeness in practice.
Classical liberalism is larval wokeness, or more precisely, wokeness came into being to profitably exploit liberalism. There's no reason to be extra careful about terms here, both are very bad news.
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"No enemies to the left" typical American liberals and progressives passively keep quiet while extremists and the woke wage culture war. Then fight like cornered animals when conservatives push back. Wokeness is indeed illiberal and modern self described "liberals" are its chief enablers.
Not of course principled classical liberals. But they are an endangered species with little in common with modern common "liberals".
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What if you actually believe that the options are Christianity or Hell?
That said, if aren’t to some degree enforcing your values, they won’t take them seriously. Why should a kid believe that you really think pornography is bad if you don’t have any enforcement of rules against pornography? They won’t.
And that's why religion is so dangerous, you can justify anything with that. If I sincerely believed that I might burn in hell for eternity if I didn't do something, that would be a very strong motivation. A much stronger motivation than any human should ever have. That's what makes people strap on bomb vests.
Well maybe they would be convinced if you had a rational argument for it. If people need external consequences to know that something is bad, maybe it's not actually a big deal.
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Stop taking the bait.
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