The Shooter Was Evil. I Condemn the Shooter.

I understand why people want to talk about the identity of yesterday's school shooter. There was a lot going on there. (The shooter was, it seems, trans and antisemitic and racist and anti-Christian).

A strange combination, for sure.

But let's not lose sight of the most important aspect of the shooter's identity: the shooter was evil.

Not mentally ill, as far as I can tell. (The shooter knew what they were doing and knew it was wrong.) Nor should they be pitied as a victim of society. All trans people face prejudice. Almost none of them become school shooters.

Rather, the shooter was morally bankrupt. They were an asshole They were a murderer, a criminal, and ultimately a pitiful coward who could only find solace in targeting vulnerable people at a vulnerable moment.

Fuck the shooter. Fuck evil.

Evil: our modern, secular sensibilities recoil at the use of the word. Sure, we might use it to refer to a character in a comic book, video game, or movie. The word seems most appropriate in that melodramatic context. But we fail to acknowledge its reality in the actual world.

Perhaps we think it sounds hokey. Perhaps we feel slightly embarrassed, as postmodern, 21st century folk, to dredge up a term from the Medieval period, a word that some see as having a religious connotation, and use it in our secular internet discourse. For some reason, we take the blame off the shooter and try to place it on public policy.

Liberals will blame guns. Conservatives will blame the trans community. Both will blame the mental health system. No one will center the blame where it belongs: on the evil nestled in that one individual's heart.

Perhaps we avoid blaming the individual because it's just not satisfying. The evil fuck shot themselves. So, blaming the individual is no longer actionable. There's no way to hold the individual accountable, there's no defendant to be tried, no one for grieving family members to direct their victim impact statement toward.

But all that rage has to go somewhere, right? So it gets misdirected at the self-defense weapons misused in the attack. And it gets exploited by transphobes. And it gets channeled into calls for more mental health care. (Mind you, we probably have more people getting more mental health treatment at earlier ages than we've ever had. And yet our society has never been more unhinged! Mind you, I'm a big fan of skilled, effective mental health care for folks who need it. But I do not think it's a panacea. I think too many kids are being raised by schools and counselors, and that just doesn't work.)

Anyway, I think we have to be wary of what's to come in the wake of this shooting. The antigunners will use it as a reason to pass more objectively dumb gun laws. The anti-transers will use it as a reason to further persecute the trans community. Quite worrisome.