Responsibility for the Dead, the Dying, and the Injured: Regarding the Minneapolis Shooter Zeitgeist
(Content Warning: Mass murder, demonization, and suicide)
Despite how much experience we have as a country with mass shootings, you’d think we’d be further along in solving the problem. Solutions are trotted out, then ignored—so many times that they’ve faded into the negative space of the page. Unworthy of discussion, their presence notwithstanding. One had best attempt not to notice them. We’re told it’s a disservice to the victims of the violence to do so.
The grisly horror that unfolded in the Annunciation Church of a Catholic school includes the stories of children shielded from bullets by other children. Harper Moyski, 10, and Fletcher Merkel, 8, were killed. Another 15 children were injured, as were 3 adults.
It would seem that many of us are expected to weigh in on the horror afflicted on these grieving families and friends. Prayers are being offered. Prayers, and thoughts. And thoughts. And thoughts. And thoughts. 5 articles from one paper in London, two days after the event. A familiar pattern is forming. It’s been a while. This is coverage of a notable mass shooting.
The thing is, there have been so many national tragedies over the course of several months that the presence of a mass shooting in the center stage of political news nearly lapsed into unfamiliarity, and its sudden return brings with it a certain degree of whiplash. Much like COVID-19, our politicians bickered feebly over mass shootings until arriving at a seeming resolve to ignore them. So like deaths from COVID-19, or car accidents, or 400 heat related deaths being recorded mid-summer in a single county in Arizona, mass shootings had faded into the negative space.
But they occur nonetheless.
Another different mass shooting occurred in the very same Minneapolis, Minnesota the previous day. It occurred on a sidewalk in a targeted attack with a high-velocity rifle, killing 1 and grievously injuring 6. Two weeks before that, Grant’s Pass, OR experienced the most common and least reported type of mass murder event: a father allegedly murdering his entire family (his wife and three children aged 7–11) and then committing suicide. This news item was deprioritized in search results for “Grant’s Pass Mass Shooting,” not showing itself in the first query, then appearing about five items down in the second set of results. Your thoughts are not needed here. Another shooting killing 4 adults occurred in Montana on August 1st. There were other lethal events that occurred in August which we can only allow to swim around the words on this page.
All these tragedies in a single August, and yet it is one in particular that we are asked to think about. But if solutions are not allowed out of the negative space, then perhaps we are being made to feel rather than think.
Then we must ask: Feel what?
One would hope the obvious go-to feeling is grief. Sympathetic grief for the lives lost, voids created in families and circles of friends, the futures of the injured who will have to endure our massively cut social safety net, and the mental health outcomes of those with no physical wounds. The families of the deceased have invited us to feel these things, and many of us have. For all that these words can help the survivors endure and the dead be put to rest, we feel for them.
But some pundits and politicians from outside of this tragedy seem to be inviting a different feeling in reaction to this one of many August events. Newsweek reports that Majorie Taylor Greene posted on X:
"Gender dysphoria is a mental illness and children are being targeted by the multi billion dollar medical and pharmaceutical industry. If they are willing to destroy themselves and how God made them then they are willing to destroy others and we saw that happen today."
They go on to report these words by TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk:
"If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically 'change your sex,' you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm."
Yet another pundit from Fox, Tomi Lauren says:
"To all those on the left and the right who support red flag laws, would you concede that transgender dysphoria is a red flag?"
How very solution-minded of Lauren and Kirk, to propose outlawing gun ownership for a demographic that commits 0.11% of gun violence (hopefully you saw the decimal after the zero!), according to Gun Violence Archive. Newsweek concludes their helpful collation of contributory opinions with this from right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson:
"One thing is VERY clear: the trans movement is radicalizing the mentally ill into becoming violent terrorists who target children for murder."
Newsweek then provides this… single quote from GLAAD, for “balance”:
“Social media accounts with a history of anti-transgender rhetoric frequently and falsely accuse transgender people of crimes, particularly during mass shooting events, before facts are known.”
How fair and balanced of them.
Dreadfully sorry to inform you that we buried the lede, readers, having not mentioned until now the crucial report that THE Minneapolis shooter was trans. Why “the” in bold, all caps?
The answer is in the negative space. The emphasis was already there; we simply made it visible. Other gun violence events have been happening—but the perpetrator of this shooting is THE shooter.
There’s an important term to understand here: “transvestigating”. To define it curtly, “the usage of speculation and pseudosciences to make an argument that people are trans when they probably aren’t.” Right-wing accounts make it a habit to transvestigate every notable mass shooter in their desperate push to construct a false narrative blaming trans people for mass shootings, along with all the other ills of the world.
Right-wing figures have done this with every notable mass shooter this year. And if you throw enough darts, eventually you hit the bull’s eye: This time, they dug up a name change in court documents—though they conveniently leave out that the shooter subsequently detransitioned (realized they weren’t trans after all and backed out of transition).
You know what right-wing media doesn’t mention? That the shooter was also prone to Nazi salutes and using racial slurs—features common to mass shooters, but nothing to do with being trans.
So we are pressured to feel fear and hate for trans people, and ascribe guilt to all trans people for unconnected, disjointed events, laden with conspiracy theories, so we can’t think about the solutions that drown in the negative space.
There is a historical parallel that we must name: Der Stürmer, the propaganda arm of the Third Reich, would post caricatures, opine about conspiracy theories like blood libel, and accuse Jews of crimes they hadn’t committed. All to foment suspicion of and undermine support for the people they targeted.
We aren’t there yet. For now, our media are still free, and (outside of right-wing media) their lapses in coverage owe more to bad habits, corporate pressures, and hectoring from the right than to any active malice or capture.
Legacy media has a history rife with lazy habits, often latching onto existing reporting—even if nebulous or manipulated—and reproducing it with minor checks for accuracy, which could have led to this fixation on the shooter’s identity.
The US media ecosystem is still diverse, with people in the rank and file trying to do good journalism in large media conglomerates. We need to give those people a helping hand, and speak in support of good work, to help them resist their employers’ slide toward becoming an outlet for Trump and Stephen Miller’s scapegoat politics.
Thus, it is crucial to hold outlets chasing clicks and promoting bogus narratives accountable, while applauding the efforts of outlets like USA Today to tell the truth.