The Nashville Christian school shooter, like many people who commit mass shootings, warned a friend in advance to watch the news for what the shooter was going to do and left behind a “manifesto” of grievances. Thus far, it has not been released to the public.
Because the shooter identified as transgender, LGBTQ+ activists are pressuring the Nashville police department and the press not to release or publish the manifesto.
Activists argue that publishing it could encourage copycats.
They are also trying to change the subject from the shooter’s motives.
Laura McGinnis, a spokesperson for the national group PFLAG, told Newsweek, “The contents don’t change the outcome of the tragedy.”
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Jace Wilder of the Nashville-based Tennessee Equality Project told NBC News, “It is unfair and inappropriate to ask trans people to speak on this person and the lives they took.”
NBC Out published an article titled “Fear pervades Tennessee’s trans community amid focus on Nashville shooter’s gender identity,” warning of a backlash against people who share things in common with the shooter.
These are fair arguments. But they also reek of cynical hypocrisy.
Progressives, LGBTQ+ activists and the mainstream press are not at all consistent in how they approach atrocities committed by unhinged individuals.
Why are these groups so worried about people reading the shooter’s thoughts?
Follow The Post’s coverage of the school shooting in Nashville
Because they are afraid that using the shooter’s own words might cause people to blame other people who share some of the shooter’s ideas and might be used to discredit those ideas.
That should not be the case. It is sadly true that whatever your worldview — Republican, Democrat, conservative, progressive, libertarian, socialist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish — there will always be some people out there who share some of that worldview but are deranged into extremism and violence.
Some of them take their ideas too far; others are just nuts who latch on to a way to channel their anger at the world.
Often, the press portrays them as ideologues, then it turns out that they are incoherent loons whose opinions are all over the place.
When acts of political violence happen, we should not blame people who share some or many of the killer’s opinions any more than we blame people who share their skin tone or eye color.
We should not blame political leaders for their rhetoric, even if it is very hard-edged — so long as they do not advocate violence or openly call for mobs to seek personal conflict with their political enemies.
But we know from experience that this kind of blame-casting is exactly what left-leaning groups, and their media advocates, would be doing if the tables were turned.
It is, for example, how they acted just before the midterm elections in 2018 and 2022 to a synagogue shooting and an attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.
If a conservative Christian shot up a transgender institution, these same quarters would be trumpeting the manifesto to discredit people who shared some of the shooter’s ideas — not trying to make those people the real victims on account of a potential backlash.
Even now, where are the handwringing articles about the threat to Christian schoolchildren after three 9-year-olds were murdered along with their teachers just for being Christian schoolchildren?