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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?
Over the past two decades and change, a great deal of energy and public resources have been invested into trying to prevent young people (especially young male people) from being sucked into internet echo chambers and radicalised into violence by the content they find therein. Government bodies such as the UK's Prevent were set up for this explicit purpose. These efforts have mostly been focused on the potential for violent radicalisation by three distinct ideologies/communities: radical Islam, far-right white nationalism/neo-Nazism, and incel/blackpill*. The latter, in particular, is considered such a pressing societal issue that the prime minister of the UK wants every secondary school student to watch a miniseries (which, tellingly, he erroneously referred to as a "documentary") about a white teenager who gets radicalised by incel communities and stabs a female classmate to death - in spite of the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a single case of a UK citizen or resident murdering someone because of the incel worldview.
Spend enough time looking at trans activism and you can't fail to notice how much of the messaging carries a distinctly aggressive bent which revels in the glorification of violence. Trans activists routinely call on their supporters to assault, punch* or decapitate TERFs ("TERF" here meaning not "trans-exclusionary radical feminist" but "anyone who doesn't unquestioningly validate trans people's claimed identities", a category which doubtless included most of the worshippers in that church). There's a literal "holiday" called the "Trans Day of Vengeance". There are subreddits which encourage trans people to take up arms against their oppressors. (I mean seriously, look at this shit.) The impression I get is that, among the alphabet people, the trans community is really something of an outlier in this regard: if there's a parallel movement of gay men urging each other to take up arms to fight back against their homophobic oppressors, I'm not aware of it.
A few years ago, progressives had a term for this: stochastic terrorism. The idea is, if you flood information pathways with enough messaging which covertly encourages people to commit violence ("dog whistles" optional), sooner or later a dangerously unhinged person will encounter it, take it to heart, and attack the people you want to see attacked. But because it's impossible to predict where and when such a person will strike, you have enough plausible deniability to escape accusations of incitement to violence. Well, just so.
I don't know for a fact that this specific shooter (or the one in Nashville) was radicalised by exposure to extremist trans rhetoric, but it seems a reasonable assumption given the extremely online bent of many of his declarations (seriously, would "I'm the Woker Baby/Why So Queerious" even mean anything to someone who doesn't spend at least four hours of every day staring at a screen?). Every trans mass shooter to date has explicitly couched their crimes in political identitarian terms.
Suffice it to say that I believe the question of whether participation in radical trans communities is a risk factor for violent radicalisation is one which warrants serious consideration and ought not to be just dismissed out of hand. I'm not even being funny, but one of the core tenets of gender ideology ("anyone who doesn't see you the way you wish to be seen is oppressing you") seems practically tailor-made to promote the narcissism and megalomania common to all school shooters (likewise a secondary tenet, "any lesbian who doesn't want to fuck you is a hateful bigot"). There's the even more obvious point that female people taking testosterone causes increased aggression which might make FtMs more prone to violence.
*Also worth mentioning that, if participating in incel communities is a red flag for violent radicalisation, many trans people fit the bill by default. At this point I find the existence of an incel-to-trans pipeline flat out impossible to deny (something a handful of posters on /r/MTF are self-aware enough to recognise). Spend some time in that sub, take a shot every time you see a post which boils down to "why won't cis lesbians fuck me even though I identify as a woman?" and you'll have alcohol poisoning before the day is out (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). Incel and MtF online spaces are alike in that they largely consist of male people who are attracted to female people complaining about being sexually frustrated. See also the rivers of digital ink spilled about the so-called "cotton ceiling".
**This one was actually said by a man who's spent more than half of his life in prison for assorted violent crimes, including false imprisonment, torture and attempted murder. Suffice it to say that, when he encouraged people to assault others, I do not believe he was speaking figuratively or engaging in harmless hyperbole.
Something I find interesting is the relative lack of interest in, or ability to, self-police among progressive groups. Of course this happens on the right as well but such groups tend to be much smaller and further from respectable politics (like groypers). I wonder if it's got to do with deeper psychological factors such as respect for authority hierarchy.
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