One thing we need to do if we’re really going to stop mass casualty attacks is get inside the heads of these people and understand precisely what was going on in there that made them want to kill as many people as possible. And, if there’s any way possible, we shouldn’t just limit that to those who survived. After all, that’s kind of a small sample size. For every Parkland killer, you’ve got a dozen more who either offed themselves or made the cops do it.
If only that were their starting point instead.
But sometimes, they leave clues behind as to why they did it. With the Covenant killer in Nashville, she left an entire “manifesto” that the police haven’t wanted the public to see.
What’s in there, though, is apparently the killer’s motivation, and it shouldn’t be shocking.
The FBI on Monday released new writings by Covenant School killer [name redacted], who identified as a transgender man when she killed six on March 27, 2023, revealing the killer listed hatred for religion as reason to attack the Christian elementary school she once attended.
Hale included the motivator in a list of “advantages” and “disadvantages” the killer titled, “The Covenant School – Alternate Target / 2nd Choice,” which also noted her past history at the school, her knowledge of its layout, but also listed that it was a “bigger school,” and a “private school,” as well as a “school/church,” which meant “more revenue real estate.”
The killer wrote as her last item in the list of reasons to select Covenant as her target, “Christian school (hate religion).”
In the previous section of [the killer’s] writings released by the FBI, which were dated throughout 2018 and 2019, the killer wrote that she considered her Christian religion an impediment to her emerging views on sexuality and gender identity.
“I have suppressed and hid my real gender identity for so long, and a big contributor to it – the nemesis of my true peace within myself – is my spirituality of being a Christian,” wrote [she] in one entry.
In another, the killer opined, “I feel my Christianity is being crucially at threat [and] hangs on a [slender rope] in the balance. It is my sexuality that wants me to cut the rope.”
She later went on to ask God for forgiveness.
While I believe God is a forgiving being, I don’t see how one could decide to slaughter children and hope God would just shrug such an evil act off, especially knowing it was wrong.
What happened, at least as I see it, is that the killer was enraged because the world wouldn’t conform to what she believed it should be, regarding her claims of being trans. Not everyone has to acknowledge someone’s new, claimed identity if they don’t want to. Instead of just cutting them out of her life and moving on, she let the rage build up because, frankly, she didn’t have anywhere else to go.
That’s based on what few studies I’ve seen that look at these killers, and extreme rage is always a part of it.
In this case, the killer liked the Covenant School as a target because of its ties to Christianity. Plus, while some flavors of Presbyterian are open to trans people, that particular church was part of a more conservative group of Presbyterians. I know this is incredibly vague, but I don’t feel like going into a diatribe about schisms in the Presbyterian church, though, as a Presbyterian myself, I’m familiar.
Just trust me on this, and you can find more if you’re interested in the PCA versus PCUSA thing. What matters is that this Covenant Presbyterian (as opposed to the one here I’m a member of) was part of the more conservative group, which might have played a bit of a role.
Either way, though, we know that there was a “hate” for Christianity that ultimately led to that attack.
Somehow, I don’t think the anti-Christian rhetoric from certain groups over the past few decades will get labeled as stochastic terrorism in this case. Weird, isn’t it?
Meanwhile, she also used federal student aid to buy her gun, which Matt Vespa gets into at our sister site, Townhall.
So yeah, this whole thing is a clusterflop of epic proportions.
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