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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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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.

There's a focus on his identity among some online discourse but realistically until groups exceed the Chinese robber fallacy by a meaningful degree, it's not a particularly interesting discussion.

Estimates of trans/nonbinary identification differ quite a bit but it seems to be around 2-5% among youth (a few estimates going even higher), many of them being nonbinary identified which in my experience at least tends to mean pretty much nothing, a lot of them are basically indistinguishable from regular men and women except for taking on a special label and maybe doing a gender neutral name change or something.

Determining the identification of mass shooters likewise is hard but a lot of the estimates I find tend to be <1%, even if we assume those estimates are downplaying it by 5x then we're still at proportional amounts as expected of Chinese robbers. Yeah, unless there's evidence produced showing trans shooters are more common than current estimates find, it doesn't seem to be notable.

Also even if it did, we still expect the difference to be meaningful before anything is done. Like if .25% of the general population did mass shootings and .27% of the trans population did, it's hard to see any policy response or social treatment justified towards the trans population that isn't basically just as justified towards the general. If someone was like "wow .2699% was my exact cutoff between no action and full action" it'd be pretty suspicious. Some of the highest claims I'm seeing for total trans mass shooters is like six people, so even if we go the lowest estimate of .5% of the population, that is 6/1,650,000 or .000363636% leaving us with 99.999636364% of trans people having not done a mass shooting. Yeah is 99.999% of people being innocent really something that people would have preregistered as the crackdown threshold?

there's an interesting parallel between the logic you are going with here (which I don't even disagree with) and the same arguments I see on gun control (ie extremely low percentage of guns ever used in crime)

It's an interesting example of framing too!

Like we could say that 100% of mass shootings are done by someone holding a gun and it sounds scary and intense. That's also a completely factual point because they couldn't do the mass shooting without a gun.

But like .00001% or whatever it is of people who have held guns are mass shooters. Mass shooters are just extremely uncommon in general. It's scary in part because it's so violent and done by someone else on purpose, but they're just not a thing that meaningfully happens.

But I would hazard a guess even amongst the group of "people with violent tendencies" most of them probably have not done a mass shooting because they're just that rare and most violent tendencies people are just slamming their car horn at road rage imagining beating the other driver up or whatever.

Like we could say that 100% of mass shootings are done by someone holding a gun and it sounds scary and intense. That's also a completely factual point because they couldn't do the mass shooting without a gun.

I was thinking, too, that this figure was indeed tautological… and then I thought about it a bit more, and maybe not. I mean, it's plausible someone someone could shoot and kill four or more people in a single incident with a crossbow…