We Have Now Reached "Gunperson" Level Absurdity
Another day, another NOBODY-WANTS-TO-SAY-IT tragedy
By now you’ve surely heard about Tuesday’s horrific school shooting in Tumbler Ridge—a tiny, remote Canadian town where the biggest excitement is probably a moose spotting on Nextdoor—that left nine people dead and more than two dozen injured. Monstrous would be an insult to monsters everywhere.
It’s the deadliest mass shooting Canada has seen in more than thirty years. The details are unimaginable, the community is destroyed, survivors are traumatized for life, and none of it is even remotely funny. The news coverage, however, could easily be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Outstanding Comedy Writing category.
Within minutes of the rampage, alerts went out describing the suspect as a “female in a dress.” The minute I saw that, I knew.
I mean, have you ever—even once—seen an alleged perpetrator described as a “male in pants” or a “female wearing shoes?” Of course not! It’s “armed female” or “adult male” or, if the subject is still on the loose, maybe “a white male in a neon green hoodie and purple parachute pants.” But never-not-ever is it “a human in human clothing.” They only threw the dress part in there to avoid stating a politically inconvenient fact, upsetting advertisers, or toppling their own carefully constructed narrative.
By the time officials reached the podium to deliver a press briefing, the description had morphed into “a gunperson.” A gunperson. As if the word “shooter” was insufficiently inclusive or somehow accidentally implied gender? The press spent more time agonizing over culturally sanitized euphemisms than reporting the actual details of the crime.
By early afternoon, every major outlet was doing verbal Pilates to avoid saying the one thing the adults in the room had already figured out: the “female in a dress” was a biological male transvestite. Reporters tiptoed around the truth like it was a sleeping dragon. A lot of “quotes” were used. You could practically hear the gears grinding: “If we get the pronouns wrong, we’ll be accused of hate; if we get the biology right, we’ll be called bigots. So let’s say nothing and hope nobody screenshots this.”
NOTE: I will not be mentioning the shooter’s name, showing his face, or referring to him as her or them. Linguistic autonomy. My stack, my choice.
Social media, as always, was on it. Online sleuths quickly dug up the shooter’s past, online posts, behavioral history, and hobbies—some dark, some disturbing, some tragically predictable for a young person spiraling into violence. They discovered that he was into guns, liked to wear lipstick, and described himself online as MtF, trans slang for someone making the switch from male to female. (I could probably stop there.) They found old Facebook posts written by his mother—who was allegedly one of the victims, along with one of her three other children—asking a private parenting group for advice on dealing with a child who “is angry, mean, and territorial,” “hurts his siblings” and “covers things up and lies.” They unearthed evidence that the mom was also seeking help for his ADHD diagnosis and that the killer was in fact, taking psychiatric drugs. They pointed out, time and again, that Canada has some of the strictest gun laws on the planet, a detail that somehow didn’t stop a deranged lunatic from getting his hands on a weapon and opening deadly fire. Go figure.
The actual press, it seemed, was too concerned with identity etiquette to touch any of those piddling particulars. And even long after the gunperson had been positively identified as someone who was born with XY chromosomes, they still couldn’t do it. They couldn’t bring themselves to have the journalistic decency to make it clear that the suspect was a mentally ill male who at the very, most generous best could be considered a transgender woman.
Nope, it was just woman.
What makes me mental is the media’s absolute allergy to stating the obvious. They refuse to report basic facts because those specifics implicate the very experiment they’ve helped unleash on America’s kids: destabilizing their identities, medicating their emotions, indulging their self-delusion, and then ignoring any possible connection when the result is deadly violence.
The media has a line they will repeat until the sun burns out: “Trans people are far less likely than cis men to commit mass shootings.” You’ll see it on every network, on every chyron, and in every sanctimonious “actually” thread on X. And technically, it’s true—but only because they cheat. The stats they cite routinely fold every gun catastrophe in America into one giant pile: gang shootings, drug-turf shootouts, domestic murders, felonies gone bad, suicides, robberies, drive-bys, and the occasional drunk uncle with a Glock. If you use the standard media definition of “mass shooting”—four or more people shot in a single incident—then yes, trans-identifying shooters make up a tiny slice. So do dentists, redheads, and people named Gary.
But that’s not the category anyone conjures when they hear the phrase mass shooter. We’re talking about public, ideological, spectacle violence—school shootings, mall massacres, club attacks, manifesto-fueled rampages, the “society broke me and now I’m returning the favor” genre. And when you look at those, the ones that shock the nation and lead to “serious national conversations,” a different pattern emerges—one the media pretends not to see.
Out of roughly 150–185 public mass shooters since the 1960s (depending on the database), at least five have been trans, “gender-nonconforming,” or nonbinary. That’s around 3%—and doesn’t include this week’s carnage—in a population where trans-identified people comprise about one percent. In other words: the trans community represents triple the baseline. And if you zoom in on the last decade, when the gender ideology movement hit full throttle, the number jumps to 7%.
It gets worse. If you narrow the subset further to school shooters only—using the standard definition to include non-gang, non-accidental, multiple targeted victims—and suddenly 10% of the perpetrators in the last decade (two out of twenty) have identified as transgender. And if you look at just the past five years, when five of ten shooters were trans—this time, I’m including this week’s horror—that number skyrockets to fifty percent. But nothing to see here, folks. Trust us.
Of course, this doesn’t prove causation. But what it absolutely disproves is the media’s favorite bedtime story: that it’s “baseless” or “bigoted” to notice a recurring theme. It isn’t. The pattern is real, documented, and growing. Yet the folks whose entire job it is to inform us will continue to chant their mantra that “trans people are far less violent than toxic cisgender men”—because they’d rather gargle broken glass than admit the monster under the bed is one they had a hand in feeding.
And I shouldn’t have to say it, but I will: facts matter. Trends matter. Truth matters. Because institutions can’t solve a problem they refuse to see, and you can’t have a public reckoning when half the country is duct-taping their mouths shut to protect an ideological narrative.
Change my mind.
You know I live for your comments. Don’t even think about holding back. ;)
Forget the trans part and look at the drugs part. Was he on hormones? Anti-depressants? ADHD meds? Throw a drug cocktail like that into someone and you get a nut job out of it. Doctors who prescribe drugs without looking at interactions and contraindications should be sanctioned or jailed when this happens.
We don’t hate mainstream media nearly enough.
But I’m trying harder.