The Minneapolis Catholic school shooter wrote a rambling manifesto that even he didn’t seem to have patience for in one of two videos posted to YouTube. He flipped through continually, at some points muttering, until the last page. It went on for twenty minutes.
The second video showcased his hardware, the guns and bullets...and magazines, the ones lots of people mistakenly call “clips.” Those brandished messaging, hand-scrawled in white-out or marker.
“Israel must fall” was denoted on the shotgun barrel. “Nuke India,” too, toward the trigger. On and on, in similar tones across his array of weaponry. Then one of the rifle magazines read, “Where is your God?”, and “For the children” on another — and it’s become clear, in retrospect, that he accomplished his mission with the targets he intended.
These videos came down from YouTube, but not before they were captured and embedded elsewhere online. They serve now not to give a platform to derangement, to view that derangement head on. Not to breathe life into the hate messaging, but to discern the twisted purposes behind it.
At one point, in video two, the camera cuts to a shooting target, with an image of Jesus’s face pasted in place for the head shot. The shoot spoke of “tomorrow,” which meant this was taped ahead of time, but apparently just one day before. He shuffled in his room, in white socks, and down the hall — never passing by a mirror, and not in selfie mode, to get any image of what he looked like. Just hands sifting bullets through his fingers as if they were gold coins — those soft and pale hands with short, neat fingernails.
His arsenal was spread across his bed, arranged for their photo-op, like proud splendor he didn’t seem not to have a concern about hiding.
And apart from the manifest videos, news separately spread that this man changed his name from “Robert” to “Robin.” It’s been intoned, if not outright stated, that this shooter is or was transgender.
So much now is in common with the “other” church school shooting — the one two years ago in Nashville, by a female shooter who changed her name from Audrey to Aiden.
A picture begins to take shape, one of transgenderism and church school hate, that none of us should look away from. There is an issue at hand here, in this combination, that we cannot afford to conceal or otherwise closet away.
Jason James Barry is an award-winning journalist, essayist, and author. He previously served as a police officer and as a DEA special agent. His police-life memoir The Midnight Coffee Club: A Memoir of Grit, Glimmers, and the Pull of Police Life is available on Amazon.
Image via Pxhere.