[Discussion] Mass Shootings - Yeah, we need a thread just for this...

Another Monday in America and another school shooting. On the morning of December 16th, a female student at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, shot and killed a teacher and fellow student and injured 6 others before killing herself. Initially police falsely reported the shooter was 17 years old, but late Monday night they correctly identified the deceased shooter as 15 year old Natalie Rupnow, who went by Samantha or Sam.

In the aftermath of this horrific event, rightwing influencers and content creators wasted no time in blaming the shooting on trans people, labeling the suspect as another in a series of alleged “transgender terrorists.” But what really happened here had nothing to do with trans people and is, sadly, ordinary for the United States.

In August of 2024, the father of the future school shooter took his daughter to a gun range to do trap shooting. Samantha wore a shirt bearing the logo of the band, KMFDM. In another photo of the shooter we can see the front of the shirt. The same design was famously worn by Columbine shooter Eric Harris, who was a fan of the band.

The bulk of the shooter’s online footprint suggests a general obsession with school shooters and the “TCC,” or True Crime Community, a nickname used for the de facto international Columbine fandom. This sort of content dominates her tumblr, which last posted in May of 2024. An alleged online friend of the shooter said that she “posted about school shooters all the time,” and “had school shooter leanings.”

Samanatha is hardly alone, there have been over 100 copycats inspired by the Columbine shooting since 1999.

A Twitter account believed to have belonged to the shooter posted a series of videos that teased and glorified school shootings in the days leading up to her own shooting. The account was created in December of 2024, and the profile picture featured a young man in camo pants and a tactical backpack.

This male profile picture was used as evidence by some conservative influencers that the shooter must have transitioned, though these same influencers could not agree on whether she was female-to-male or male-to-female. One user constructed an overlay trying to compare the photo of the shooter with her twitter profile picture.

The above post is, however, only proof that most of what gets passed off as “OSINT” online today is incompetent rambling and propaganda. The main issue with this diagram is that the male profile picture is actually another Columbine copycat school shooter from Russia who, similar to Samantha, was 15 years old when he carried out his shooting.

FEMCEL HITLER

Hours after the shooting, while right wing accounts were still arguing what sort of transgender the shooter had been, a neo-Nazi twitter account named Nitro claimed to be friends with the shooter on Discord and repeatedly denied accusations that the shooter was transgender, calling her a “biological woman.” An early complicating factor in establishing the motive and identity of the shooter is that her alleged twitter account posted a link to a google doc of her manifesto, but seemingly forgot to make the visibility setting public. The shooter’s alleged Discord friend, Nitro, claimed to find what he believed to be a snippet of a manifesto draft shared by the shooter in a Discord group chat. Nitro is in the UK, and so if legitimate (big if) this message would have been sent about an hour and a half before the shooting.

Hopefully to most people this should read like unintelligible gibberish, a reactionary “feminist” screed about initiating a wave of male-targeted violence to cleanse the earth, with pepperings of “moids,” “foids,” (internet incel slang for male and female, respectively) racial slurs, and something called “radfem hitler.” The incel content marks her out as a femcel, which means what you’d expect: Samantha was a female incel.

“Radfem Hitler”, meanwhile, is a reference to a Twitter influencer by the same name and the handle @hollowearthterf (“Terf” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”). Her content is a mix of trad-influenced rightwing feminism, advocating traditional gender roles for men and women, with anti-trans flourishes. Radfem Hitler supports a mass purge of “moids” (including trans women). She is derided by both those on the right and left, but has a small dedicated following of conservative radfem women with trad or occult interests.

Nitro claimed the shooter “was a fan of RFH (radfem hitler),” and talked about the account frequently on Discord, though Nitro previously believed her interest was merely ironic. An anonymous twitter nazi is certainly not the most reliable source. Nitro was the first person to correctly identify and post photos of the shooter, but they could be utilizing his newfound clout to troll a widely disliked twitter user. Though the fact that he’s been right about all other details inclines me to not discount his claims all together, just to hold them with a billion pounds of salt.

Allegations the shooter was a neo-nazi radfem certainly sent RFH into a panic, who quickly deleted her account. Meanwhile, some of her online associates worked damage control, claiming to have contacted the alleged boyfriend that the shooter had been “e-dating,” with the apparent intention of disproving any ties the shooter had to the twitter radfem orbit. Through the alleged online boyfriend, the rightwing TERF ecosystem claimed to have acquired a copy of the “full manifesto.”

This purported manifesto lacks the anti-male (moid) ramblings of the Discord screenshot, but unsurprisingly shares its use of racial slurs and glorification of violence, at times evocative of Pekka Eric Auvinen’s manifesto (a Finnish school shooter from 2007 who killed eight people). Auvinen considered himself a “natural selector” who had evolved beyond the classmates he gunned down. In Samantha’s purported manifesto he is mentioned by name as a “true inspiration.”

Over the course of 8 hours a radfem Twitter account released 6 pages of what appears to be Samantha’s writing. It contains general misanthropic rambling about humanity and parents being “scum.” The writing describes a difficult family life, suicidal thoughts, and admiration for school shooters and white supremacists. Though it briefly references Terrorgram “saints,” the whole of it is much more reminiscent of old school Columbiners than the modern white nationalist terror milieu.

The alleged manifesto directly names the two Columbine shooters, and includes a paragraph on Vladislav Roslyakov, another Columbine copycat but from Crimea, who also cosplayed one of the shooters.

Though the Discord nazi and the reactionary radfems question the authenticity of the other’s alleged manifesto, what both sides of the incel war do agree on is that Samantha was not transgender. It seems these days the fastest way to get transvestigated is to do a school shooting.

“Never believe that [fascists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”

Some US states have firearm death rates comparable to countries in conflict, report says

A new report by the Commonwealth Fund finds some US states have firearm death rates comparable to countries in conflict, and even states with the fewest firearms deaths are far higher than peer developed democracies.

For instance, Mississippi’s rate of firearm-related violence (28.5 per 100,000 people) was nearly double that of Haiti (15.1 per 100,000) in 2021, when mercenaries assassinated the country’s president, unleashing a fresh round of gang warfare which pushed the country into a state of civil war.

Rhode Island, which has the lowest firearm death rate in the US (three per 100,000) is still 23 times higher than the United Kingdom (0.13 per 100,000) and nearly 1.3 times higher than France (2.3 per 100,000).

The US overall is in the 93rd percentile of all countries and territories for overall firearm mortality, at 13.5 deaths per 100,000 people, the Commonwealth report found.

“No country we compare ourselves to has the rates and absolute deaths like we do in the US,” said Evan Gumas, a research associate at the Commonwealth Fund in international health policy and practice who helped author the report. “It comes up anytime there’s a shooting that makes the news, when it should be something we’re paying attention to.”

In another example, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico all have higher firearm mortality rates than Mexico, where decades of violence between state forces and rival drug cartels has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and left more than 115,000 people missing.

Notably, firearm-related death and injury is not synonymous with an increase in crime. Violent crime fell 15% from 2023 to 2024, according to the FBI. More than half of all firearm-related deaths (56.1%) in 2022 were from suicide, according to a report from the US surgeon general.

Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general, declared firearm violence “a public health crisis in America” in a June report, citing statistics that firearms injuries in the US far surpassed peer wealthy nations and were growing quickly, especially among children and adolescents.

Firearms became the leading cause of death for American children aged one to 17 in 2020, surpassing car accidents and all other causes of illness and injury, such as drowning or suffocation. For comparison, the rate of firearm deaths among American children is 72 times higher in the US than in the UK (36.4 deaths per million versus 0.5 deaths per million).

“I went to public school in the wake of Sandy Hook,” said Gumas, referencing the Connecticut massacre in which a gunman killed six adults and 20 first-grade children. “School shooting drills were a very big part of our every day. That’s not normal.”