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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12203 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?

There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.

The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.

No wonder Bezos laid these people off.

At the moment, this is the seventh most viewed story on the Guardian.

They call her by her preferred pronouns, but also mention that she was trans:

“I can say that Jesse was born as a biological male who, approximately six years ago, began to transition to female and identified as female, both socially and publicly,” he said.

Naturally they do not spin it as 'trans shooter' but mainly focus on mental health issues, which I find fair enough.

So if you are implying that the woke MSM is burying the story I think you are mistaken.

First paragraph:

Canadian police have identified the suspect who carried out a school massacre in remote British Columbia as an 18-year old woman with a history of mental health problems.

The article is 1,291 words long, and it's not until the tenth paragraph, 375 words in that we get any indication that the perpetrator was anything other than a "woman" in the traditional (i.e. adult female) sense of the term ("McDonald said police “identified the suspect as they chose to be identified” in public and in social media"). How many people are going to read down that far?

Also surely not a coincidence that they didn't include a photo of the perpetrator (despite doing so for the Brown University shooting and this UK shooting in September 2024), as no one could possibly mistake him for an adult female.

They may not be burying the story, but they're certainly running interference.

Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?

The Telegraph, a right-wing paper, quoted the Canadian Police to say that the shooter was 'a female in a dress' before updating the headline to describe him as a 'gunperson in a dress', also a quote from the Canadian Police.

I'd have loved to be in the room when then Canadian law enforcement were deciding how to present the killing. Its as if someone genuinely thought they could keep the killer's sex a secret, or perhaps 'female in a dress' was a deliberate piece of malicious compliance.

EDIT: The police have now released the name of the perpetrator, it's this guy.

In the UK we had a rather horrible school stabbing spree. Nothing about the assailant has been released except the very reluctant admission that he was “apprehended in a mosque”.

The American press is pretty famous for not covering Canada at the best of times... then add in the fact that it's winter and Tumbler Ridge is hard to get to.

In general my sense is the US sees Canada as much more of a foreign country than Canada sees the US. So it's not really seen as relevant to the domestic political battles.

Republican president and Congress, foreign, Olympics taking up story time, not useful to Trump vs. Canada, and the shooter is not the favorite type. Could be a lots of these factors that influence coverage. I am most certain it has nothing to do with a newfound ethical backbone among journalists. Had the kid spray painted a swastika we'd hear about it. Another idea is there are no political interests positioned to feed a big gun control news cycle in the US, or a Canadian shooting may not be capable of setting that off. There's still time for stories of backlash and pouncing Republicans/Conservatives.

Seems like a fairly big story, anyway. CBC is willing to report this individual "started transitioning" four years ago in one of its last bullet points. I see /r/Canada issued an obligatory reminder to not spread hate or misinformation. It is important to be careful.

9 dead, 27 injured in a town of 2400. That's 1.5% of the population hit... incredibly grim.

I see /r/Canada issued an obligatory reminder to not spread hate or misinformation. It is important to be careful.

They were deleting any comments about the shooter's identity until it was 'confirmed by the authorities'.

Which sounds fine, until you realise that the authorities were explicitly and deliberately lying. The shooter was not a female in a dress, he was a male in a dress.

As a data point, in Australia this was top story on ABC news 7am radio broadcast, second story on the 8am broadcast. During the second broadbast they listed off the genders of all of the victims (which I found a bit weird) but pointedly avoided saying anything about the gender or identity of the shooter. Perhaps they were giving a Straussian hint.

I see the online article now names the shooter, refers to them as a woman and no hint of a trans identity.

Perhaps they were giving a Straussian hint.

Extremely unlikely, IMHO.

That was what I saw at first. It appeared as breaking news on the ABC website. I was a little surprised for it to be Canada rather than America, as is far more common, and then a later update identified the shooter as a 'woman'. I admit I wondered if it was a trans woman if only because it's so unusual for women to be involved in mass shootings. Is there any confirmation on that either way?

Yes, they're trans.

The media has 2 choices- double down on "we need to ban guns to protect women from male mass shooters" and throw trans women under the bus, or double down on TWAW and throw "it's all men's fault" out.

I think they're still figuring out which one it's going to be, but TWAW's in the lead right now.

Third option: the fact that this person was driven to commit such a horrific crime is testament to how widespread transphobic bigotry is, even in an ostensible progressive utopia like Canada.

I'm sure the TRAs themselves are pushing this one on the backchannel. Trans cannot fail, they can only be failed.

Sure, "the victims deserved it" is always an option.

Unfortunately for the TRAs, this wasn't a Christian school.

I'm sure the TRAs themselves are pushing this one on the backchannel.

"The mass shooter was female" is the best concession they're going to get. Because the truth- that this was violence the entire progressive political stack (by its own rules) is directly and solely responsible for- is an inconvenient one.

If anything the TRAs should be signal-boosting the couple of politicians who will inevitably shoot their mouth off too quickly in blaming trans people for this. They're completely dependent on progressive success for survival.

"The mass shooter was female" is the best concession they're going to get. Because the truth- that this was violence the entire progressive political stack (by its own rules) is directly and solely responsible for- is an inconvenient one.

So far, I did not see any evidence that this was politically motivated. Presumably your hedging of 'by its own rules' means something like 'if a member of the outgroup does something bad, we can blame the outgroup for it', and I am sure you have some story of some Trump supporter having a psychotic episode and shooting up a shopping mall getting spun as MAGA violence.

If there is some indication of political motive, like the shooter planning to kill some TERF teachers, then blaming the SJ movement is still a bit silly but fair.

Otherwise, bad faith behavior does not become acceptable just because the other side does it occasionally, I am sure a SJ supporter would find many spins from MAGA which I would condemn them for emulating.

I find this issue somewhat ironic in that, IMO, Trans overrepresentation in this field is more about 'The sort of mildly-spectrumatic social misfits that would historically have been overrepresented as school shooters are now being nudged hard into transitioning' moreso than expressly 'it's the transness that does it'.

On the other hand, grabbing that particular demographic and ramming a bunch of random hormones down them plus giving them a persecution complex is probably not the absolute ideal way of handling the delicate subject of adolescent mental health.

The sort of mildly-spectrumatic social misfits that would historically have been overrepresented as school shooters are now being nudged hard into transitioning

It's funny to think that, if Columbine had happened today, the names that would have lived on in infamy would have been Erica Harris and – well, I suppose Dylan can be a girl's name too.

I peeped at the big canadian subs and predictably, any discussion regarding the killer's identity is being actively moderated. And the removed threads did acknowledge the bit of nuance you reference. Of course, now that it's confirmed they belong to an inconvenient demographic, I doubt we'd see much institutional bipartisan appetite for any exhaustive scrutiny. Because now the victims aren't just dead kids, but we gotta protect the kids transitioning. This individual reportedly surpassed Elliot Rodger in terms of casualties, yet it seems unlikely that we will witness a comparable level of sustained analysis of their background, motivations, or formative influences.

The recent shooting in Sydney, Australia had the same thing. Any attempt to bring up 'maybe there is some causatory factor here' getting immediate 'HOW DARE YOU NOT FOCUS ON THE VICTIMS AND IT'S THE GUNS' reactions, whilst you know if it were hypothetical Chudzilla there'd be absolutely no hesitation in making it a 'right wingers are gonna kill us all' story.

Even in Australia the lasting political impact seems to be negligible in terms of laws passed or anything that might actually hit Islamic radicalization. Instead massive upsurge in polling for the populist right party, death of the established middle-right party and gun control efforts.

Yes, I tend to think it's a combination of 1) shooters being almost entirely male, and thus more likely to be trans women than cis women or trans men, and 2) both shooters and trans people having strong positive correlations with mental illness.

You can debate the reasons for trans correlation with mental illness, say that it's all because of bigotry against gender-non-conforming people if you like, but the observation itself seems to remain true. Shooters tend to be biologically male people with some sort of mental disorder, and trans women are biologically male people who frequently have some sort of (other than being trans) mental disorder.

It isn't an epidemic or anything. But if trans women are slightly more likely, statistically, to be shooters than other demographics, it wouldn't surprise me.

This seems very plausible. On the other hand, society is generally chill about most mass shooters carrying the Y chromosome, I am sure that the take 'you can prevent violence by aborting your male fetus' exists somewhere but I have not stumbled upon it.

This seems entirely fair, most men do not engage in horrific violence, after all.

However, then it seems also fair to apply similar standards to trans women -- sure, they may be over-represented compared to cis men in shootings, but the violent ones still form a tiny minority.

Strong chance that this demographic is also on SSRIs, so that hypothesis still has legs too, IMO.

There's actually a very easy choice of "embrace individual responsibility" and stop blaming people for the actions of other just because they're in a tangentially related group. Most people of basically any demographic you can think of are law abiding citizens, even the black population with the highest rate still only has a third with a felony conviction of any kind, yet alone violent felonies.

Individual responsibility cuts both ways. Criminals should not be defended and forgiven because "oh but they're just poor" or "but society left them behind!", and innocents should not be blamed for the acts of criminals. Whether they be responsible gun owners who haven't inappropriately used their firearms or a trans person who hasn't committed violence.

With freedom goes responsibility, a responsibility that can only be met by the individual himself.

That would be a solution I could get behind, if the last fifteen years hadn't featured a nonstop deluge of handwringing about the dangers of young white men becoming radicalised by far-right/incel content, and how this poses such a grave threat to our society that we need to suspend freedom of expression and browbeat young white men into submission with artfully produced agitprop about how loathsome and contemptible they are (which no less than the prime minister of the UK erroneously referred to as a "documentary" on two separate occasions).

If it's legitimate to speculate on the societal factors that led to Elliot Rodger, Nikolas Cruz etc. to commit their horrific crimes, it's legitimate to speculate on why this guy did so. If young white men are susceptible to radicalisation by social media echo chambers, I see no reason why young white trans-identified men couldn't be also. Being trans should not be a get out of jail free card.

LOL, this is like on Star Trek when they presented Nomad with an irresolvable paradox, except instead of making him get a higher-pitched voice and explode, it made him quote Ronald Reagan.

Not much Reagan has ever been wrong about. Well, maybe Iran Contra but that's really only because he subverted Congressional will. He was right that the US should be supporting anti communist forces, he just should have accepted it wasn't viable at the time. Maybe acknowledged the aids crisis a little faster too but really, what would even the best president on that have been able to do? I can't see much different, they're politicians not doctors and medical researchers.

They don’t have to give any reasoning for banning guns other than “prevent shootings.” Also they can just ignore this shooting if it isn’t politically advantageous. I don’t think the left is losing sleep over this

It's Canada. They already have more gun control than they ever thought they were going to.

There aren't enough guns left to ban for that (they already blew their loads on this 4 and 2 and 1 year ago), and the lack of coverage about what the guns the shooter used (along with how fatal the attack was given the near-immediate response time) suggests they weren't special in any way- likely a bog-standard hunting rifle or shotgun.

It's going to get ignored for that reason. The gun-banning side will take an L, since most of the narrative is "u need to ban guns to protect wimminz", and this guy being [allowed to be] a woman damages that narrative- it's best for them it disappear.

Isn't Canada in the midst of a gun buyback? Seems like a buyback should override any concern over details like what kind of weapon was used. But, the Canadian public may be more discerning than Americans on gun control. Here the type of weapon used is a tertiary consideration, at best. It's a gift to advocates if a shooter uses a scary gun, but none have let a shooting go to waste because it doesn't line up with the bill that's already in the chamber.

Isn't Canada in the midst of a gun buyback?

Kind of. Half the country is in the midst of something that could charitably be called a buyback.

The Federal Government has zero credibility on the issue, and they haven't taken any of the obvious opportunities to improve. If you properly file for the buy"back", then they won't guarantee any money, nevermind guaranteeing a fair price. They capped the payouts at about $250M, planning for 136k guns (vs. industry estimates of 500k+).

I also heard (and subsequently debunked) that they were giving themselves two months to do the paperwork, not that they were giving gun owners two months to apply. That tells you something about the current state of affairs.

Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Yukon are all obstructing it to various amounts because Trudeau was disastrous to national unity, both with specific policies (like this) and with his general attitude.

none have let a shooting go to waste because it doesn't line up with the bill that's already in the chamber

Sure, but none of the perpetrators have been expressly, blatantly, inescapably representative of every Establishment failure.

This is part of why they want to call him a woman, but it forces the anti-gun side in particular to give up being able to use the superweapon of blaming men; conversely, allowing them to call him a man costs them credibility with the TRAs.

If the government can't protect against attacks like this, and the reason it can't protect against attacks like this is that it let an ugly/unpopular Progressive token minority off the hook while acting to punish everyone else (and in a way that directly led to their children being killed), at a time where the government can't even keep the fucking nation together?

Then yeah, I'd be trying to lay low too. The most rabid anti-gunners in Canada might be tempted to go full Twitter meltdown, but if they do their time as a political force in Canada will be over.

they listed off the genders of all of the victims (which I found a bit weird)

If you found that weird you're not being cynical enough.

The demand for straightwhiteman crimes against young women far exceeds supply.

The demand for woman or transwoman crimes against young women, not so much. Of those, calling them a woman is perhaps the less damaging option.

Perhaps they were giving a Straussian hint.

The Canadian media already fell into that trap- "woman in a dress" = obviously trans.

To be fair, the El Paso airspace restrictions are kind of a big deal, and I'd expect them to suck the air out of the room.

There were some seriously hilarious headlines based on police quotes about a "Gunperson in a dress"

🎶 Gen Z gunperson and a mini 🎶

It’s like Coulter’s Law—but where the more ambiguously the suspect is described using clothing, the more likely it is the suspect is a fashionable racial or alphabet minority.

That might be the new journalist meta, where euphemisms like “urban youth” or even more recent innovations like “lunchtime rowdies” are already old hat.

Another recent example can be found with the FBI offering a $5,000 reward, involving an incident in Georgia where “an unknown male wearing dark clothing” threw acid upon a white woman and burning her severely. For some reason, absent is a photo of the suspect or further description of what he might look like.

This ABC article echoes that it was a “man in dark clothing,” but Problematically provides a photo of the alleged perpetrator.

'memba when 4chan was referring to young black men as "joggers"? Seems like a lifetime ago.

Nobody cares about shootings, including school shootings, anymore and they haven't for a long while. South Park was making fun of this all the way back in 2018.

This has actually gotten significantly more coverage than the average school shooting gets, there was this one school where a shooting happened two years in a row and basically no one has heard about either!

The Rhodes-Ewing shooting occurred one year before another gunman allegedly opened fire inside the same school, injuring four students and a teacher. That incident, which took place this past April, led to 17-year-old Tracy Denard Haynes Jr. being charged with five counts of aggravated assault in connection with the mass shooting.

It might not seem like this recent one is getting much attention, but it's actually an outlier just because you've heard about it to begin with!

Sailer's Law...

Sentenced to 5 whole years!

Does it really need to be spelled out why the "average school shooting" is not covered? Because the "average school shooting" are gang bangers doing everyday gang banger shit, and not what people actually think about when "school shooting" is invoked.

AFAIK school shootings aren't covered because it was found that coverage inspires copycats, like suicides.

Does it really need to be spelled out why the "average school shooting" is not covered? Because the "average school shooting" are gang bangers doing everyday gang banger shit, and not what people actually think about when "school shooting" is invoked.

Is there an opposite to non-central fallacy, where the fallacy is taking a non-central event as central in order to inflate the impression of frequency of the non-central event?

I don't know that there's a special term for the bread and butter of mainstream news coverage: reporting every single "man bites dog" until it's nearly forgotten that "dog bites man" exists.

School shootings in general are very rare but just looking up some real quick there seems to be a few "traditional" mass shootings style school shootings that weren't big news.

Evergreen high school

Antioch High School (this one is interesting because he was a black kid but radicalized by white supremacist and neonazi groups online)

Florida State University

Lincoln University (maybe doesn't count depending on how technical we want to get, happened at a homecoming event on campus)

There's also stuff like this where a guy was shooting right outside of a high school. Like should we not count it if they don't take a foot inside but they're literally next to it? Idk

Yeah even with how rare these mass school shootings tend to be, you probably haven't heard about a good chunk of them anyway.

Cristo Rey high school is a special school for at risk youths(that is literally what a 'Cristo Rey Jesuit high school' is. It's a program that swings back and forth between woke nonsense and doing real but limited good through the usual mentorship route), and them reverting to the normal extracurriculars of at risk youths every so often is to be expected. It's not really a 'school shooting' in the sense of 'mentally ill guy with lots of red flags randomly killing people'.

These are not "traditional mass shootings style school shootings" and Cristo Rey High School is more gang bangers being gang bangers.

Location Deaths Injuries Details
Evergreen High School 1 2 Shooter (suicide); two students critically wounded but survived.
Antioch High School 2 1 Includes the shooter (suicide) and one 16-year-old female victim.
Florida State University 1 3 Shooter killed by police; three victims wounded (one paralyzed).
Lincoln University 1 6 One fatality during Homecoming; multiple gunshot and stampede injuries.

These are not "traditional mass shootings style school shootings"

How are they not? These don't seem to be "gang member just shoots another gang member" shootings, they include multiple victims and motivations outside of gang affailation. Evergreen, Antioch and FSU seem to have been motivated by neonazism (Ikner of FSU even used a Hitler profile picture and called his gaming account Schutzstaffel), not gang violence.

Lincoln University shooting is barely covered in the news, it was basically just dropped right away. Which really is just another piece of evidence towards society not really caring about mass shootings that we don't even have followup on a 7 person attack.

Primarily because there is a maximum of one fatality other than the shooter in any of them.

I don't draw that major of a distinction in a mass shooting between the successful murders and the attempted murders. If the difference is simply in something like the school's distance to the hospital or the shooters aim, it seems irrelevant.

There is hardly anything about this in the American media today.

Maybe the media finally got instructions do not give front page space to mass shootings and do not make shooters into heroes. (as is the case for celebrity suicides).

as is the case for celebrity suicides

I feel like that long standing journalistic practice is being more and more flagrantly ignored these days. To give one recent example, multiple outlets in different nations had zero qualms about specifying that James Ransone (Ziggy from The Wire) died by his own hand. Going a few years back, Chester Bennington from Linkin Park, Chris Cornell from Soundgarden. I really don't think there was any pretense of discretion.

It's unfalsifiable, but the obvious course isn't hiding the suicide, it's reporting it but avoiding romanticizing it directly or giving it more coverage than you'd give a tragic accident. Robin Williams is the classic example of the wrong approach on both counts; it was all over the press with loving tributes endorsing his decision to kill himself.

Yes, likewise with Bennington and Ransone, with journalists falling over themselves to highlight how both men had been victims of child abuse. I'm sure they meant well (attempting to highlight how abusing a child can traumatise them for literally decades hence), but the clear subtext was that their suicides were logical decisions in light of their experiences.

It's all over Irish media, first story I saw this morning. I have to say, when I read "school shooting" I thought USA, it's very surprising to be Canada.

Yeah, shooter probably trans, because who says "woman" (or "female", I've seen both versions reported) "in a dress"? Women are generally the ones in dresses, it's not some unusual thing. But we won't know for sure until further details are released. Shooter seems to have killed two family members first before going to shoot up the school and kill themselves/suicide by cop.

I think it was called out because it's pretty notable for a woman in Tumbler Ridge (55° N) to be wearing a dress in February -- local fashion I'd expect to run more towards lumberjack shirts even in the bug warm season.

The fact that the person was wearing a dress is in-and-of itself indicative of trans status IMO.

I’m just waiting for the inevitable Tumblr Ridge jokes to drop

Way ahead of you man

There is hardly anything about this in the American media today.

American media fails to publish story about news likely to be highly damaging to the preferred narrative of American media, news at 11.

Canadian media already fucked up and said too much about who the shooter was, so it's too late to deny it. The fact they haven't reported anything else suggests the other facts of the case are likely not in the regime's favor.

I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.

Canadians are a lot more passive-aggressive than that.

The "female in a dress" line was perfect. I can see that really catching on.

A (young and incompetent sounding) American reporter from ABC NY called into the press conference last night and was referring to the shooter as a "gun-person" -- the cop answering questions mirrored it for a while but seemed unenthused; politicians today are picking it up in their statements so maybe it will catch on!

A true win for peoplekind...

I eagerly await the day I see the headline "3 killed by male wearing pants".

American media fails to publish story about news likely to be highly damaging to the preferred narrative of American media

Given the ubiquity of linking That One Onion Article every time there is a mass shooting in America, I'm always darkly tempted to post it when there is one elsewhere (it's not that infrequent). Frankly, I feel bad even making the reference here: it's a shitty, inaccurate headline that makes people feel morally superior in their smugness and does nothing for the real people who have died, and their loved ones having to live through it.

I recognize I'm not doing much better in this regard right now, but clearly Canadian gun laws as they stand didn't stop this one (or the last one a few years ago, nor Australia's laws the Bondi massacre, and I could go on). I'd like to think good law could do better, but it's hard to design non-authoritarian systems that cope with the idiosyncratic and sometimes violently unpredictable failure modes of the human psyche. Sometimes there are signs (which would have lots of false positives to aggressively filter on), and sometimes people just break, it seems.

I was more surprised than anyone else to find that, per capita, Australia reports 80% of the deaths from mass shootings as does the US. And that's after multiple gun buyback schemes which supposedly prevented mass shootings altogether.

"The only country", indeed.

As an Australian (I cringed writing that phrase, but I suppose it's necessary), I am consistently annoyed both by local firearms discourse and by the way foreigners try to weaponise it. The 1996 buyback as far as I can tell made little difference - firearm deaths were a straight line trending downwards prior to Port Arthur, and continued their descent afterwards, with no visible change. There's just no particularly strong evidence that the policy change did anything.

I've come to interpret most tightening of laws after a tragedy as being symbolic. The buyback after Port Arthur probably didn't have much effect, but it was expressive. The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously." The reforms currently being proposed after Bondi are the same. Both additional firearm restrictions and additional speech restrictions have the same effect: they are very unlikely to actually reduce gun violence or anti-semitic feeling, but they signal, "We, the government, care about this, and are taking action."

The only people who lose out of these trade-offs are, well, the public. People whose rights to own what they want or speak what they want are shaved back another millimetre.

The 1996 buyback as far as I can tell made little difference - firearm deaths were a straight line trending downwards prior to Port Arthur, and continued their descent afterwards, with no visible change. There's just no particularly strong evidence that the policy change did anything.

In the article, I said that the buyback program must be judged a roaring success in the limited sense of reducing mass shooting deaths in Australia, even if it's only a qualified success relative to the equivalent metric in the US. But correlation obviously does not prove causation, and it's entirely possible the steep decline in mass shooting deaths after Port Arthur was just a particularly pronounced regression to the mean and the gun buyback program was coincidental. But even if the scheme did have an effect, its success relative to the US has been vastly overstated. The way progressives (namely John Oliver) talk about the scheme, you would think that mass shootings literally never happen in Australia anymore, as opposed to them occurring 20% less often per capita compared to the US.

The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously."

Agreed, it's just the politician's fallacy.

I'm skeptical of drawing strong causal conclusions around mass shootings if only because the number of mass shootings is so low. If we just look at Wikipedia's list, in the 1990s there are seven after Port Arthur, and twelve before. Counting Port Arthur itself, that's twenty, for a total of two per year. I think that's too low to draw any sensible inferences. If we go past that, Wikipedia lists fourteen shootings in all of the 1980s, versus six in the 2000s, and ten in the 2010s.

14-20-6-10 is overall a decline, but one that I find perfectly plausible in terms of the overall decline deaths by firearms (both homicides and suicides) over the period. Overall I tend to agree with RAND's conclusion - the evidence that the NFA reduced firearm deaths is weak at best.

For what it's worth I don't think NFA-style reforms in the US would accomplish very much, and I'd tend to support Australia moderately loosening up our firearms laws. I don't feel very strongly about firearms and I'd be happy to trade it away as part of a compromise on some other issue, but I think we could safely do it, and in principle I'm in favour of people being able to own things that they want, unless there is some pressing reason why they shouldn't. I'm more exercised about speech, personally, where I do think our record is unimpressive, and I look at the American First Amendment with mild envy.

I've come to interpret most tightening of laws after a tragedy as being symbolic. The buyback after Port Arthur probably didn't have much effect, but it was expressive. The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously."

Nope. It's so that anytime they want, the government can with maximum ease send men to your house to tie you up, rape your wife, kids, and pets to death in front of you (if you have any), and drag you off to some blacksite to do medical experiments on you for the rest of your days. That's what "monopoly on force" means.

This looks very much like an inflammatory claim posted for maximum heat and zero information.

You may have some strong feelings about government monopoly on force, but if the Australian government is sending men to tie up citizens and rape their wives, kids and pets to death and then drag them off to blacksites to perform medical experiments on them for the rest of their days, or if that is the intention behind gun control laws, then you need to provide some evidence.

You now have a very mixed record of AAQCs and low-effort trolling, with the trolling being more recent. It is not amusing.

but clearly Canadian gun laws as they stand didn't stop this one

It's worse for the regime in this case because there's an active confiscation going on. The government has been campaigning for the better part of a decade on it. AUS murders did not happen under those conditions and the victims were perceived as having it coming- not quite the same thing.

Sometimes there are signs

If the most uncharitable rumors are true, institutionalization in some form have already occurred.

it's a shitty, inaccurate headline

It's made solely to justify reprisal attacks on the outgroup.

It’s hardly even on Fox. They love to report on trans shooters. I don’t buy it.

95% true -- it's a very small town where everybody literally knows everybody, and neighbours etc. have more-or-less confirmed the shooter's identity (both kinds!) on twitter.

There are fake (well real, but the wrong person) photos of a ridiculous young tranny from Ontario floating around; AFAICT that person has the same last name but is not the shooter; a yearbook photo of Jesse Strang for Tumblr Tumbler Ridge shows a much better effort but is still identifiably trans.

The trans thing was politically useful because it showcased the most extreme, least defensible positions on the progressive side (like that even biological sex was fake) during peak woke that had very low mainstream public approval. In a way, it was similar to eg factions on the academic far-left being sympathetic to extreme sexual deviancy in the late 1970s, which was also useful for the right at the time leading into the comparative backlash in the 1980s.

Today it feels like we’re no longer even close to that level. Yes, progressive wine moms and aunts are still very pro-trans, that’s true. But even the NYT is now no longer as zealous about the topic as it once was, and the whole right is in agreement. It feels like this chapter of the culture war is largely closed, albeit without a total victory on either side.

They've discovered it loses votes so they're keeping it under their hat until they're back in power, at which point trans-everything is back on the agenda.

But even the NYT is now no longer as zealous about the topic as it once was, and the whole right is in agreement.

I don't know. APnews has a main story that studiously uses she and her. That strikes me as still zealous on the issue given it's a mass shooter.

Lukewarm support for trans rights looks like "studiously use preferred pronouns but avoid materially contentious questions like kids, prisons, sports and bathrooms", not like "use preferred pronouns for nice people but not for murderers". I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.

I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.

I don't really do it based on morality, but I've generally been a lot more hesitant to swap pronouns (among the legitimate three; I utterly refuse to use singular-they or neopronouns) if someone's obviously acting erratic and crazy (given the likelihood that said person is not, in fact, stably trans).

While not an intellectually consistent approach, many people are not intellectually consistent. The worldview that 'we should be nice to trans people, but changing your sex isn't really real, so we should humour it for the goodies but not the baddies' doesn't seem terribly uncommon among moderate progressives.

Indeed, the core argument of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ is that using preferred pronouns is something you should to do to "make a little effort to be nice to people," in the same way that you might tell a little white lie to spare your friend's feelings (or, in the example that Scott uses, humor someone who jokingly declares himself Emperor of the United States).

A journalist reporting on a mass murderer probably doesn't owe them the same level of social nicety.

I can imagine a kind of internal logic that overlaps heavily with "men bad, women good" ideas. Anyone can change their identity and pronouns at will, but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male.

As an intuition pump, would people be more likely to "misgender" a MtF or a FtM mass shooter?

Anyone can change their identity and pronouns at will, but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male.

"Choosing to do something heinous" and "changing their identity and pronouns at will" tend to go hand in hand, so this isn't acceptable to TRAs. Their entire thing is that the community has no right to tell you who you are, no matter what.

but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male/"men bad, women good"

Older Boomer women currently wish this was the case so they could go on blaming men [and guns] for mass murder. Having a pet of theirs rack up the highest kill count to date west of the Canadian Shield is incongruous with the "gendercide" narrative.

I think the pronouns will stick in this case; the demand for violence from straightwhitemen might exceed supply, but the reaction to that is an increase in the demand for violence perpetrated by non-straightwhitemen (because the demand for violence comes from the highly passive-aggressive "see, we were right about them, now it's time to make them pay" that characterizes most Western nations, in particular English-settled ones).

There are definitely a lot of people who use the preferred pronouns of trans people they like and not mass murderers, it's just not a position with intellectual support on either side of the aisle.

People who pass well and are integrated into my community I use chosen pronouns. Bad actors I will truegender all day. The vast majority of unaffiliated trans people I just avoid using any pronouns in front of, and call them their real gender in private.

It feels like this chapter of the culture war is largely closed, albeit without a total victory on either side.

The medical scandal part of it is yet to play out fully. Like I mentioned in another post, the first detransitioner just won a lawsuit, the FTC is going after WPATH, AAP, and the Endocrine Society. In the UK, they commissioned a massive clinical trial of puberty blockers to get around a ban that was imposed in the wake of the Cass Review. If it goes well for them, we might end up with some sort of "alright, let's call it a draw" resolution, if not it might be the nail in the coffin.

Media overage is usually propelled by some combination of proximity, audience relevance, and narrative traction. Geography definitely matters, but also US newsrooms are abuzz right now with domestic political drama and Epstein. They prioritise what their core audience clicks on. If a story is distant, developing, and not generating engagement, it gets less oxygen. There’s also caution around the first 24 hours, especially when details about the shooter's identity or motive are unclear, because misreporting early permanently damages your credibility.

It is currently the top story in Google News when I look at it in browser incognito mode to prevent it from showing stories tailored for me (to the extent that is possible despite browser fingerprinting).

It is currently the top story in the New York Times' World section.

It is also currently the top story in the Washington Post's World section.

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