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This time, it was in Minneapolis. The 44th school shooting in the United States this year.
The day after the tragedy, I came across a particularly distressing social media post made by a popular tabloid. The post showed a video recording of the perpetrator’s high school graduation. I expanded the caption under the post, and read that although the shooter hadn’t shown up to their graduation that day, they still received cheers from their classmates in the audience.
In two days, the post had reached 11.1 million views. The comments make fun of the shooter’s appearance, gender identity and political ideology. None of the comments mention Harper Moyski or Fletcher Merkel, who were killed while attending mass at school. None of them mention that Harper and Fletcher were ten and eight years old. None of them mention that eighteen other children and adults were injured by gunfire, and that six are in critical condition.
Another post reveals details about the shooter’s life, told by their father. It is August 30th — three days since the shooting. News websites offer up what they know about the killer: manifestos, sketched maps, and threats made online. They tell us where they went to school and where their parents worked. They tell us about recent hardships and a nihilistic outlook.
Alongside this comes discourse from both sides of the political spectrum. Some left wing voters are disturbingly triumphant, boasting that the shooter isn’t an immigrant. Meanwhile, some right-wingers use the shooter’s transgender identity to buttress their anti-trans arguments. Surprisingly, topical arguments like gun control become less and less common as both sides use the tragedy to further their political agendas.
Anti-transgender discourse has become more common in the aftermath of school shootings since the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, where a transgender perpetrator killed three children and three adults. This time is no different. The Daily Wire, a conservative newsroom founded by Ben Shapiro, is abuzz with articles covering the Minneapolis shooter.
In “How State and Medical Institutions Enabled the Trans Church Shooting,” Shapiro refers to healthcare for transgender youth as an “ideological ill” as he blames state and medical institutions for enabling the shooting. Although Shapiro himself admits that “there’s a bizarre transmission effect when the media grants enormous attention to evil, mentally ill people who go and shoot a bunch of schoolchildren,” he continues on to weaponize the shooter’s identity for his own gain. While Shapiro acknowledges that “not every crime in a country of 340 million people indicates an institutional problem,” he addresses the proposed ideological ill with no evidence or data to support his claim. He uses crass language such as “fake medicine” in reference to the American Medical Association’s advocacy for transgender youth, arguing that the shooter was “not satisfied with solutions provided by the trans fake medical community.” Nowhere in the article does Shapiro note that over the past decade, 0.11% of mass shooting suspects were transgender, according to the Gun Violence Archive. In September of 2024, Reuters analyzed school shootings in America since 2012, reporting that only 2% (1 in 50) of the shooters had been transgender.
It is true that school shootings are often made into a topic for political debate. However, these conversations are usually sparked around the topic of gun control. Gun control is a political issue. The gender identity of the shooter, keeping in mind the statistics above, is not. Nevertheless, Will Ainsworth, lieutenant governor of Alabama, took to social media after the Minneapolis shooting, writing, “The sooner everyone accepts that God made men, and God made women, and one can never become the other, the quicker we can lessen these events from happening.”
It is 2025, the beginning of another long Republican regime. Already, we see the loss of innocent lives being weaponized against marginalized communities which are already being attacked by the Trump Administration. Particularly, we see a great tragedy being exploited by politicians and media outlets to benefit their hateful rhetoric.
In the aftermath of a school shooting perpetrated by a transgender individual, news outlets are pushing more and more information about the life of the shooter. Most of this information details their name change, but multiple national sites report that the shooter had gone through a breakup the day before the tragedy and was living with an older friend. One Fox News article goes as far as to show a photo of the exterior of the perpetrator’s father’s home in Minneapolis. Numerous channels tell the details of the shooter’s online presence, manifesto, and family life.
“Mass Shootings: The Role of Media in Promoting Generalized Imitation,” a study published by the American Journal of Public Health, provides evidence showing that media can promote generalized imitation when covering mass shootings. This effect is compared to a contagion, wherein “the occurrence of one mass shooting increases the likelihood of another mass shooting occurring in the near future.” In 2015, a study titled “Contagion in School Shootings and Mass Killings” analyzed data from the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports, concluding that “when a mass shooting occurs, there is a temporary increase in the probability of another event within the next 13 days on average.”
The evidence does not support that a person will directly copy an observed person’s actions. It instead suggests that a person will perform an action with similar characteristics. In Albert Bandura’s bobo doll experiment, learning is theorized to be social. His experiment showed that children learned violence through observation whether the violence observed was live or filmed, proving that media influences imitation. Variables that impact imitation include: similar age and gender, elevated social status, and perceived honor and competency. Media coverage of school shootings often include dramatized presentations of the perpetrator’s image, manifesto, and life story, as well as details of the event. This directly influences imitation, particularly in displaying honor, competency, and elevated social status. “Mass Shootings” argues that “social status is conferred when the mass shooter obtains a significant level of notoriety from news reports… Fulfilled manifestos and repeated reports of body counts heap rewards on the violent act and display competence… All of these instances serve to create a model with sufficient detail to promote imitated mass shootings for some individuals.”
It has been 26 years since Columbine, the event that marked school shootings as a worsening problem in the United States. In the year 2025, we continue to see affronts to devastating tragedy by the conservative media and sensationalization of the shooter from popular news networks.
The stream of information regarding the shooter’s life that we receive comes with the risk of generalized imitation. As we tell the public irrelevant details that diminish lost lives, we risk promoting violence and educating a new generation of killers.
For those of us who continue to push back as our country falls into the hands of less-than-capable leaders, we must remember that the exploitation of disaster for political gain is unprincipled. Do we want politicians who label a historically marginalized group as the whipping boy of America after two young lives are lost to gun violence?
New gun control policies will likely not be on the ballot in the next four years, but as we look towards the future, we must acknowledge the harmful way that school shootings are portrayed in news and media.
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