Re: Crack down on guns for the Nashville school shooting, not trans people

[Gender Confused Wails]

On 06 Feb 2022, "2.AA6528" <2.AA...@gmail.com> posted some
news:stq4p3$12ese$1...@news.freedyn.de:

> Of course the other mentally ill faggots will defend this murdering
> piece of shit.

In Nashville on Monday, a devastating school shooting appears to have
been perpetrated by a 28-year-old transgender man named Audrey Hale.
According to media reports, Hale was autistic, though high functioning,
and only recently came out as trans. Many conservative figureheads,
however, like the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh and Rep. Marjorie Taylor
Greene, R-N.C., have already jumped on the bandwagon of blaming the
shooting on Hale’s gender identity, sparking panic among many in the
trans community over potential conservative reprisals.

“How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness
was the transgender school shooter taking? Everyone can stop blaming
guns now,” tweeted Greene, shortly after police revealed the suspected
shooter’s identity in a news conference.

There’s no actual evidence at this point that Hale was taking
testosterone. Instead, it appears from initial police reports that the
suspect’s motive came largely from grudges held from his attendance at
the private Christian school. Facts, of course, will make little
difference to the Republicans who have waged a culture war against trans
people for most of the past decade.

It’s crucial that trans allies see through the GOP rhetoric on all of
this.

School shootings are always tragic events, but this country decided a
long time ago that these things are acceptable so long as the free flow
of guns remains unhindered.

There were 646 mass shootings last year, according to the Gun Violence
Archive. There have already been more than 100 in 2023. With their
constant pushback against even the slightest restrictions on gun rights
over the past few decades, Republicans have all but ensured that
statistically speaking, sooner or later, the perpetrator of a deadly
mass shooting would be trans.

Easy access to dangerous semi-automatic rifles is an obvious problem in
America. And yet this latest shooting is already becoming a convenient
vehicle to advance the conservative narrative on trans rights.

Several details of the suspected shooter’s profile fit neatly into
pre-existing GOP talking points about trans people, like Hale’s autistic
identity. For years now, conservatives have claimed that trans people
were using “trans ideology” to “recruit” autistic people into trans
identities, though many autistic trans people feel like their
neuro-divergency led them to be less committed to societal structures
like gender.

Expect Republicans to use the Nashville shooting to attempt to add
“gender dysphoria” — the clinical term used to describe the incongruence
between a trans person’s physical sex and their gender identity — or the
taking of cross-sex hormones, to the list of reasons to deny a gun
license to citizens.

Though an unpopular notion among many of the more progressive trans
circles, a gun ban for our community would be dangerous for the trans
rights movement. It would leave our community defenseless against the
growing number of far-right paramilitary gangs showing up armed to
protest drag queen story hours and gender clinics. It would also
represent a legal distinction that could mark us as inherently dangerous
in the eyes of the law — and could serve as a pretext to deny us other
rights that non-trans citizens take for granted. After all, if we’re too
risky to own guns, why would anyone want to let us use the bathrooms we
need to use in public life?

According to a recent report by the Anti-Defamation League, the majority
of ideological shooting sprees are committed by members of the far
right. Where was this outrage after a right winger shot up a supermarket
in Buffalo, killing 10? Or the El Paso massacre at a Walmart?

After each of those shootings, the stock Republican response was to
chide the left and claim that now was not the time to politicize
shootings or to claim that the shooter was mentally disturbed or a lone
wolf. They reached for anything that might disassociate their own
politics from the motives of these shooters.

Yet, mere minutes after discovering this latest shooter belonged to one
of their already favorite targeted minorities, they immediately sprang
into action, seeking to further inflame their culture war on trans
people.

If identity is such a motivating factor in these shootings, as many
Republicans are now saying, shouldn’t we be having a conversation about
why so many conservatives have committed so many heinous acts in the
past decade and a half?

Trans people are regular human beings, with our own thoughts, desires
and motivations. There’s nothing inherently violent about being trans,
and the actions of one member of a demographic is obviously not
representative of the rest of us. Trans people are no different in this
regard.

Mass shootings are always highly emotional news events, and school
shootings even more so because the victims are typically children. But
we must not let emotion override our common sense and allow the GOP to
seize upon a narrative that demonizes the entire trans community.

More hate and more guns are the solutions being offered by conservatives
when what we really need is more love and understanding and fewer
AR-15-style rifles on the street.

Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist and podcast host. She was the
first openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history.

<https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/nashville-school-s
hooting-audrey-hale-trans-17864905.php>

TAGS: Mental illness, Katelyn Burns, Insane, Gender confused, sick-in-the-
head, sick-in-the-crotch, Perverts, Bathroom confused, Science deniers,
Biology deniers, Gender deniers, Liberal, Progressive, Gone too far,
Sanitarium candidates, Democrat, Fear everything, Hate themselves