After Nashville School Shooting, Republicans Are Ready To Regulate Trans People

It's the guns. It's always the guns.

There was another gun massacre in America Monday. A 28-year-old entered a private Christian school in Nashville and fatally shot three students and three adults before being shot and killed by the police. This was the deadliest school shooting in almost a year, a morbid statistic that recalls the sign in a poorly run factory indicating the number of days since a major accident.

The Covenant School is a private Christian school founded in 2001 in association with Covenant Presbyterian Church. Covenant teaches preschool through sixth grade. On most days, 209 students and 40 to 50 staff members are in attendance.

“The beauty of a PreSchool-6th school is in its simplicity and innocence,” the school's website boasts. “Students are free to be children – they can feel fully and safely known by our faculty and become leaders under their guidance.”

 But no one is free from gun violence in America.

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The victims of this latest rampage were Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney, all nine years old, as well as head of school Katherine Koonce, 60, substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61, and school custodian Mike Hill, 61.

The shooter was armed with at least two assault-style rifles and a handgun for their child-killing spree. According to Nashville police, the shooter had made maps of the school, including surveillance and points of entry, and entered the school by shooting through a door. The doors to the schools were all locked, but the guns prevailed.

Reports originally suggested the shooter was in a woman in their late teens, but the police later confirmed the shooter was Audrey Hale, a former student at the school who identified as transgender. (A LinkedIn profile for the shooter listed he/him pronouns.) This news summoned forth Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from the bowels of hell to vomit her transphobic bigotry on Twitter: “How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking? Everyone can stop blaming guns now.”

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Guns share a significant amount of blame for the massacre, considering they were how the shooter killed children and senior citizens. The victims weren’t doused with testosterone or pelted with Zoloft bottles. We don’t actually know if the shooter was medicated or suffered from mental illness. However, Marjorie Taylor Greene is pure evil, so this is what you can expect. She’s incapable of basic human decency during a crisis let alone responsible tweeting.

She wasn’t alone, though. Sen. JD Vance’s remarks were arguably even worse.

We're still learning about the horrific shooting in Nashville. But if early reports are accurate that a trans shooter targeted a Christian school, there needs to be a lot of soul searching on the extreme left. Giving in to these ideas isn't compassion, it's dangerous.

Trans people aren’t an “idea.” They are human beings who Vance seeks to pathologize. Conservative writer Erick Erickson tweeted, “Transgenderism is a mental issue. We should stop pretending it is normal.” We don’t need to pretend that the millions of trans people who didn’t kill anyone Monday are “normal.”

It’s the same old story. White cis men don’t live in the shadow of Hannibal Lecter but Buffalo Bill still haunts trans people, as trans actor Jen Richards once noted. Chris Rock had a routine about how, whenever a serial killer is caught, Black people pray it's not one of us. A crazy white boy is not a statement on an entire demographic. They have the privilege of individuality. Greene, Vance, and Erickson will eagerly smear a marginalized group of people because of one murderer’s actions.

It’s also unfortunate timing with Tucker Carlson’s latest trans panic, when he suggested that trans people were arming themselves for their own queer version of Rhodesia-palooza.

PREVIOUSLY: Tucker Just Saying Trans People Going To GET ALL THE GUNS AND MURDER YOU 

Right-wing bigots like Carlson are probably freaked out over the prospect that maybe actively oppressing a group, even calling for their extermination, could result in violent backlash. It’s how they would respond, so they assume everyone else has the same paranoid hair trigger. But most trans people just want to live in peace. They don’t want to kill anyone.

A source close to the shooter's family told the Daily Beast that he was autistic, but high-functioning. The shooter was also described as "quiet."

A search of [the shooter's] home turned up “maps drawn of the school, in detail, so, surveillance, entry points, et cetera,” [Nashville Police Chief John] Drake said, as well as a “manifesto” and “some writings that pertain to this date, the actual incident... of how this was all going to take place.” Inside a Honda Fit that Hale drove and parked at the school campus Friday morning, cops found “additional material written by Hale,” police said in a tweet .

Although school shootings are unfortunately regularly scheduled in America, a woman mass shooter is a rare occurrence. According to the Violence Project, ninety-eight percent of mass shooters are men. Of course, 100 percent of mass shooters have guns, and that’s the more relevant problem. However, if it’s true that the shooter was assigned female at birth, transphobes will insist that if the shooter was taking testosterone as part of gender-affirming care, it fried their brain and turned them violent. Of course, these same bigots also insist that testosterone blockers don't make a trans woman less of a "biological man" when it comes to women's sports. Republicans don't need logic or evidence to pass their hateful legislation.

Audrey Hale was one person who murdered six people. Before those victims are even buried, Vance, Greene, and others are knowingly stoking hatred for the trans community at large. They are vile people and they don't seem to care who else gets hurt.

[ The Daily Beast ]

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