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