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Notes -
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.
That both of the recent transgender terrorists targeted their own childhood school could mean something. Does their mental illness spring from a form of arrested development occurring at the puberty age? Could it have to do with a failure on behalf of those around them to reinforcement and affirm the biological changes that happened at this age? Could transgenderism — for the ones not seeking sexual gratification — be caused by the mind being “stuck” in the age where one learns about their body, due to some obscure early life trauma or a lack of social affirmation, and their mind tries to rekindle the feelings of that age through the artificial rediscovery of their body via “coming out” and hormones? This is something to dwell on, because there does seem to be a sub-expression of transgenderism which is obsessed with nostalgic things but which is not sexualized, and this is a distinct from the other subexpression which craves its own sexual humiliation (eg that Canadian teacher with the enormous boobs who sent her one sextape to her HR lady; the Matrix-dominatrix brothers…)
School shooters are narcissistic megalomaniacs who crave, more than anything, personal infamy. They notice that there are few crimes in our society seen as more heinous than murdering children (made particularly evident by the ghoulish amount of attention the most recent school shooting received). They conclude that murdering a bunch of children is the easiest way to achieve personal infamy. They look to places where large numbers of children congregate, and unsurprisingly find that schools meet this description. The nearest school is probably the one they are currently attending, or the one they attended (if they are a recent graduate or still live in the town they grew up). I'm not sure anything more needs to be explained beyond that.
On the TV Tropes page for the movie JFK, it's noted that one reason a lot of people didn't accept the conclusions of the Warren Commission was because they simply couldn't fathom the idea of a frustrated, unemployable, socially awkward loser murdering someone for no better reason than wanting to be famous for something, even something heinous. "Modern audiences, however, more than a generation after the Columbine massacre when such self-aggrandizing slayings have become almost mundane, might be more accepting that Oswald could indeed have acted alone." (Incidentally, there's something uniquely chilling about that phrase "self-aggrandizing slayings".) If Lee Harvey Oswald was around today, he would've been a school shooter: if all you're after is fame for yourself, it's much easier to gun down a bunch of minimally protected developing youths than a politician with a Secret Service detail. It also says something about how heinous a crime murdering children is that, for doing so, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are almost as famous as the man who committed
the onlyone of the two successful assassinations of a POTUS in the twentieth century. Innumerable books analysing their psychology? Check, check. An Oscar-winning movie about their exploits? Check (bonus points for going out of its way to attempt to whitewash and exculpate Oswald), check (and there are several other movies about both which didn't win Oscars). A video game about them? Check, check.Czolgosz seethes in lack-of-infamy...
Could've sworn McKinley was a few years earlier, mea culpa.
Eh, the 20th century didn't start until 1914 anyways...
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