After evading and obfuscating for much of the day, Madison, Wisc. Police Chief Shon Barnes finally revealed the identity of the suspected shooter found dead inside a private Christian school on Monday – but, said he won’t even consider whether gender ideology may have been a motive. It's biased to merely ask the question, he says.
In earlier press briefings, Barnes first denied knowing if the body found was either “male or female,” then later said he would not reveal the students “gender.”
At his last update of the day, Barnes identified 15-year-old biological female Natalie Rupnow, who went by the name “Samantha,” as the suspect in the deadly shooting.
But, when asked if the suspect was transgender, Chief Barnes said he didn’t know, wasn’t interested and wouldn’t consider gender identity as a factor in the shooting:
“I don’t know whether Natalie was transgender or not. And quite frankly, I don’t think that’s even important. I don’t think that’s important at all. I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they may have wanted to identify.”
Barnes dismissed the suspect’s gender identity as “of no consequence”:
“Whether or not she was, he was, they were transgender is something that may come out later, but for what we’re doing right now, today, literally eight hours after a mass shooting in a school in Madison, it is of no consequence at this time.”
Chief Barnes went so far as to suggest that people who even ask the question are bigots:
“I wish that people would kind of leave their own personal biases out of this.”
“Very odd and bizarre…,” Libs of TikTok commented in a viral social media post, noting how the police chief used three different pronouns to refer to Rupnow:
“Madison, WI police chief says he doesn’t know if the shooter was transgender and then uses he, she, and they pronouns to describe the shooter. Very odd and bizarre...”
Replies to the post largely attributed Chief Barnes’ comments to political correctness run amok amid the woke culture prevalent in Madison.