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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.
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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