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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.
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.
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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