It’s one of those tragedies the Twitter warriors don’t know what to do with.
On one hand, it’s another shooting. Some maniac uses a gun to erase innocent lives.
OK. Ban guns.
On the other hand, it was a trans person. Someone from a marginalized community that is being demonized for things like sexualizing children.
OK. Trans people are evil.
Both of these are way too simple. Deep down we know this.
Sometimes when something is so fucking devastating, you just want someone to blame. It’s easier than doing the work. It’s a lot easier than mourning.
What both sides don’t see is they are doing the same bullshit.
If we look at Nashville honestly, a trans person did an evil thing with a gun. Two words that trigger both political parties.
Conservatives who are posting headlines about the trans person sure get mad when the left does the same thing with, “white male shooters.”
Liberals posting that guns are the only problem are ignoring that it was a gun that put an end to the violence.
We need to fight the urge to be hypocrites.
The answer is not to demonize an entire community. A deranged person did a deranged thing. This time they were trans. This time they used a gun.
Posts about the entire community being demonic, and evil, are fucking ridiculous. There are bad trans people. There are good trans people. The end.
This kind of fear-mongering will lead to more violence. It will lead to innocent people being bullied and hurt. It will stop that community from reaching out when one of them is planning something unhinged.
It will make it us vs them. This is how you create more violence.
How many LGBT people are horrified right now? How many can’t even mourn because they are braced to be attacked? Put yourself in their shoes.
Trans shooters are a new phenomenon and we need to think about how we handle this. This has not been happening a ton before now. Countries have not been invaded by trans armies. There have not been waves of drag queens holding up banks. This is rare and we need to treat it as such and work to prevent it in the future.
Similarly, we can’t blame responsible gun owners. The shooter picked a target that didn’t have armed guards. SHOCKINLY ignored the gun-free zone sticker. (One day that will stop someone!), and unlike Uvalde, two brave officers went towards the fire and took the shooter out with their guns.
The left hates to admit this, but we called on good guys with guns.
This shit is complicated. But until both sides stop demonizing the other, we won’t be able to come together to make the country safer and healthier for all of us.
While we all argue about if the cops misgendered a murderer what are we doing to honor the victims?
Did we run home to hug our own children or are we ignoring them while we fight in the comment section?
How are we making our schools safer? If we can’t ban guns then what can we do to make it harder for bad guys to get guns? How can we make trans people feel protected? Can we be adult enough to admit that not all trans people would do a thing like this, just like not all gun owners would?
Through loss and tragedy we should be able to see humanity in the other side. This should push us closer to one another not drive us apart. Life is so short. It can be taken in an instant. Let’s not waste it turning on each other. Let’s work together, good guys on all sides before it’s too late.
Can we please please please have "waves of drag queens holding up banks" - while we don't need the social disorder which would be involved there, if we're going to have a bank robbery it really needs to be fabulous and sassy!
On a serious note, what we have here and in any other instance is a person who has done a bad thing. They may be a bad person all the time or they may only temporarily be a bad person for this specific event, but they are the one who perpetrated the incident. Efforts to demonize entire classes of people are distraction techniques meant to belittle opponents or to promote marginally related (or completely unrelated) ideology using the incident as ammunition to their argument.
I guess you learnt something from your time at Timcast- how to sit on the fence and offer an opinion without really saying anything. America is country with too many guns and limited access to healthcare/government assistsnce. What the fuck do you think is going to happen