The very atmosphere
Heather Cox Richardson writes:
March 27, 2023 (Monday)
Seven people died today in a school shooting in Nashville. Three of them were nine-year-olds. Three were staffers. One was the shooter. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Joe Biden once again urged Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons, to which today’s Republican lawmakers will never agree because gun ownership has become a key element of social identity for their supporters, who resent the idea that the legal system could regulate their ownership of firearms.
In the wake of the shooting, Representative Andrew Ogles (R-TN), who represents Nashville thanks to redistricting by the Republican legislature that cut up a Democratic district, said he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting and offered “thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost.”
In 2021, Ogles, his wife, and two of his three children held guns as they posed for a Christmas card with a caption that read: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference—they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”
Then…………………………………………….why is there so very much gun violence in the US with its barely detectable gun laws and its profusion of guns? I await elucidation.
She, she, she…
Even the reports that mention Hale identifying as transgender and claiming he/him pronouns just brush over it. ‘Yeah, she identifies as he, people remember her as…’.
This is stuff that people get the police called on them for doing when it’s a guy identifying as female.
So many questions:
-Is the number of transgender people killed larger or smaller than the number of people killed by transgender people?
-Where is Chase Strangio on this? Surely Chase must be horrified by the misgendering of one of his (so to speak) brothers in arms.
-Is the complete lack of interest by the media in using Hale’s preferred pronouns an indication that really all that trans stuff is only important when it’s men?
Hm, well, this kind of goes to my point in the comment I just wrote about online “communities” centered on homicide and suicide. What a macabre coincidence.
I haven’t got this clear from the reports: is the murderer a he pretending to be a she, or a she pretending to be a he?
DING DING DING DIING! WE HAVE AWINNER!!
@Athel,
The murderer was a she pretending to be a he.
Now she’s a corpse.
I think it’s more that dog-bites-man isn’t news. Male mass shooters are almost routine in the US at this point. But a woman shooting up a school…that’s an exciting novelty!
The scattered coverage of this I have seen so far gives the impression that the “narrative consensus” for the mainstream media has yet to be reached. Online, I saw some attempts to make sure we knew this was a WHITE woman doing the shooting, but it seems the white devil line was not catching on because the white devil in this case was not a clear right winger.
Local paper had an Associated Press story about the shooting which never named her or mentioned anything about transgender. There was a paragraph about how mass shootings are generally done by men. Now, to me, that would have been where it would be noted that this woman may have wanted to be a man but no dice.
It seems the media is going with the “guns bad” narrative again. Nothing about how a gun is an inanimate object that requires a human choosing to use the gun in a criminal matter to be dangerous.
I guess that deeply held beliefs of a criminal only matter when the shooter can be described as a white nationalist Trump supporter. Then it is all about how the shooter’s identity and beliefs were toxic. A female shooter who may have been on a crusade to murder the “enemies” of her chosen identity class? Nah, mainstream media ain’t touching that with a twenty foot pole.