Another mass shooting and another political food fight while the bodies are still warm.

In this case, the added twist is that we can fight about the transgender identity of the shooter. Oh, joy…

Seven people are dead, including the shooter. And whatever else she was, the shooter was desperately mentally ill. We have a serious mental illness problem in America, and a total unwillingness to face the fact that there is a normal range of behavior, beyond which we have to conclude that a person is in need of treatment.

I have nothing intelligent to say about the shooting itself. It is too fresh, there is too little information, and reality is always more complicated than what is being dished out to you.

The reaction and the coverage? I have opinions about that. None of them were positive.

The arguments that inevitably erupt after a school or other mass shooting disgust me. Children are dead and it becomes an excellent opportunity to subvert all rational thought and stain the opposition with blood.

Usually, conservatives are on the defense during these moments, but not so much this time because of the transgender identity of the shooter.

That shouldn’t matter, and I am as repelled by those on my side of the aisle latching onto this fact to make a larger political point. There may and likely will be some time when we can connect the shooter’s “identity” with her actions, but that time is not now. Apparently, she has some “manifesto,” and lots of people are using that fact–not having read it–to make broad assertions about the transgender movement’s increasing violence.

That’s easy to do, especially given the treatment Posie Parker got in New Zealand and Australia, and other incidents of late.

But it is also wrong. Whatever else she was, the shooter was clearly mentally ill. Now I would contend that anybody who identifies as trans is mentally ill–despite the fact that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria as a mental illness was removed in the last decade. But there isn’t evidence that links gender dysphoria to violence as far as I am aware.

So the stirrings on the Right suggesting that this was an act of trans “terrorism” are at the very least premature, and possibly entirely wrong. We don’t know, and claiming otherwise is wrong.

On the Left you have the standard anti-gun rhetoric, ignoring the clear mental illness of the perpetrator. Now, in addition, you have the desperate desire to bury the fact that the perpetrator is transgender–as we saw in the gay nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs last November. In that incident the Left flatly asserted that the shooter was lying about being trans, despite trans being defined entirely by the mental state of the person in their view.

Any transgender person who does something the Left hates is by definition not transgender because trans has been deemed holy. Transitioning is a sacrament, and the trans person is in a state of grace. It must be so, according to these people.

So suddenly it becomes not just OK, but imperative to “misgender” the perpetrator. A trans-man is suddenly a “she/her” not a “he/him.” The shooter identified as Aiden as well as Audrey and used “he/him” pronouns which are absent from the news stories. “Deadnaming” and “misgendering” are suddenly necessary to maintain a narrative.

We will be subjected to reams of false statistics, loaded rhetoric, emotional blackmail, narrative building, and general ideological warfare. Because we are so obsessed with confirming our priors and this is an excellent opportunity to score political points.

A community is terrorized, parents are mourning, and the culture warriors are using the blood as war paint and going to battle.

All of this is awful. We should be mourning, not engaging in sophistry.

Until I know enough to have a worthwhile opinion about what happened, I will try not to have one at all. About the shooter and her motives.

Right now my only opinion about the whole affair is that the culture warriors should wait until the facts are in to start the shouting.

UPDATE: Of course–let’s ignore the transgenderism says CNN

CNN's @juliettekayyem encourages news outlets to ignore killer's transgenderism: "Pronouns do not kill children, right? People with guns, kill children, & it’s going to be a distraction in our coverage & keep us from what we now know" pic.twitter.com/vVNeWW5WSW

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 28, 2023