Audrey Hale, the 28-year-old transgender shooter in Nashville, reportedly wanted to kill children so that she would not be forgotten. According to police, the only concern that she had throughout her “rage storms” was not that she would be called a mass murderer or child killer but a racist. Her primary grievance appeared to be with Creswell Middle School, where she was bullied as a transgender student. However, she dropped that target at the last minute because it had a large black population and she did not want to be thought of as a racist.
Hale shot and killed six victims at a Nashville Christian school on March 27, 2023. However, she originally planned to shoot up another school. She created detailed plans for the attack on Creswell Middle School, which she attended, and she blamed for the past bullying. She said that she wanted to become a “god . . . by killing victims nobody would forget: children.”
According to the police report, she spent months working on the plans for the Creswell attack:
“Her OCD was manifest during this time with the excruciating detail she gave to the attack, including precise timelines, detailed descriptions of the clothing she would wear, and the specific route she would progress through the school. The more she pored over the details, the more convinced she was of her own success. The ‘rage storms’ that interspersed these plans also became more heated, showing Hale’s anger was reaching the boiling point.”
However, by March 2020, she changed her mind. Not to spare the lives of innocent children, mind you. She realized that Creswell Middle School had a large minority population and people might think that she was racist. So, she decided to kill the children at the Covenant Christian School because they were mainly white. She would prove she was not a racist by killing those children because of their race:
Hale began to express doubts about targeting Creswell Middle. Her doubts weren’t necessarily about the intention to kill children, but more about the racial demographics of the school. Hale knew a large portion of the student body was black. Though she had no qualms about killing anyone regardless of specific demographical categories, she worried she might be branded as a racist, which would remove her ability to give the motive and reasoning for the attack and [instead] allow others to choose it for her once she was dead.
She wanted to be a mass child killer. The last thing that she wanted was for people to think that she was a racist.
Evil personified.
Let me make sure I’ve got this right. The party of “love and tolerance ” thinks its better to be a mass murderer than be labled a racist.
Help me understand this s@@tlibs. What am I missing?
antonio
Antonio, you can be anything you want to at any given minute. It’s great to be a left wing progressive.
No, not quite. Though they acknowledge that sex, if not gender, is a biological reality, and claim race is purely a social construct, they believe changing race impossible, but not sex.
Jonathan is saying that the Shooter fully rationalized the actions taken. (By her Manifest and in the Commissioning of the Crime)
Of which I believe that we can all agree were not rational at all in making a ‘morally correct decision’.
The notion of her doing this for ‘a cause’, is slightly applicable, but it was driven by an underlying ‘pain’.
e.g.: She wasn’t doing this ‘For the Movement’. The dots don’t connect, as if there is even a rational to connect the dots.
It was not ‘morally correct’.
Society has pocket that are or become unreasonable. Events such as this pinnacle, the aberration is unique to every Individual.
What appears to be senseless is our inability to understand that what became unreasonable to other Individuals.
(Our trying to understand, What became unreasonable to her, Our trying to internalize her grievance).
We don’t need to share ‘The Pain’, but we should take more time to listen to People. At least to ease their pain, and hopefully avoid things like this.
That’s being a responsible Society.
Tragic what happened here.
Yes, it’s always tragic when a deranged, degraded individual slaughters children. And those are the only individuals who do so.
The truly sick part is this is the face of woke leftist progressives. It is a trend with them. On the lesser side, they just scream at conservatives, flip their tables. On the greater side they commit acts of violence, arson, destruction of property, harassing and intimidation of Jews. And now, we see they are okay with killing children as long as the children are white. Woke leftists are the face of evil. Call it for what it is. Evil.
Let’s see she did what she did because she was bullied, transgendered, non-racist, did I miss anything? How about long ago should have been diagnosed with mental issues, institutionalized and treated before she became a mass murderer? What about real women sports, are we still unable to “provide the definition for the word woman”? How much longer will we all accept this nonsense?
Most of us, no matter our political affiliation, never have accepted it. It’s a desperate leap at a new cause, a new reason for outrage, hatred, and violence, conducted mostly by those who either are too rich to have to work much, or who have jobs they refuse to do properly, like legislators.
Transgender as in divergence from gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes including sexual orientation). She was also DEI where Diversity is an umbrella philosophy based on principles of color judgment and class bigotry. She also entertained abortive ideation to relieve “burdens” in a wicked solution. An albinophobe, too. Here’s to progress (i.e. monotonic process): one step forward, three steps backward.
“one step forward, three steps backward.”
Where, pray tell, did you find a “step forward” here?
We’ve seen many such incidents. This raises a critical question: Are we overprotecting individual rights while failing to adequately protect society as a whole?
S. Meyer at 9:45 AM
Your critical question raises another, How (Who, What, Where, When and Why) do we regulate individual rights to adequately protect society as a whole?
[Unless of course your prose was a rhetorical question]
” How (Who, What, Where, When and Why) do we regulate individual rights to adequately protect society as a whole?”
The answer to your (also presumably non-rhetorical) question is: we do not. “Society” is an abstraction. It is impossible for an abstraction to have rights. Anyone who asserts otherwise is either deluded, or an intrinsic part of the problem. We do, according to both the doctrine of natural rights, and the recognition of those rights in the U. S. Constitution, MINIMALLY regulate the rights of INDIVIDUALS so as to safeguard the ability of other INDIVIDUALS to exercise those same rights.
Joseph Frady at 10:34 AM
I like it! (your response)
S. Meyer’s prose: “Are we overprotecting individual rights …” suggest that there are the Constitutional [K] rights that which overprotect society as a whole. Further suggesting that there are ‘limits’ to [K] protection.
But what of the Criminal Code and it’s efficacy to ‘squelch/deter’ individual rights? Are these not “failing to adequately protect society as a whole? -S. Meyer”.
This seems to be in a No Mans Land. How,Who, What, Where, When and Why do we enforce (regulate) the [K] rights?
“How,Who, What, Where, When and Why do we enforce (regulate) the [K] rights?”
If you read the first 10 amendments, you will clearly see that those put no burden on individuals for observing specific behavior. They constrain what government (initially, the Federal government only; subsequent to the 14th Amendment, Section 1, much of those restrictions were extended to the States. The first necessary order of business is to curtail the powers of government to exceed a plain reading of that document. If that can still be accomplished (quite debatable) we shall soon see if the confidence of the Founders in the People to self-govern themselves within very broad limits was valid. If it was not, the Constitutional system will fail, but it will still have exceeded in virtue and outlived virtually every other form that government may take.
“But what of the Criminal Code and its efficacy to ‘squelch/deter’ individual rights? Are these not “failing to adequately protect society as a whole? -S. Meyer”.”
That is why we require a moral code to create a “code” protecting society. My moral code is the Torah, which greatly influenced the Western world’s legal systems. Without some moral code, in most cases provided by religion directly or indirectly, there is no good or evil. Killing is the same as not killing.
Of course, we could all be atheists, but then, our existence would be random. Here is what the atheist Richard Dawkins says: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”
“Of course, we could all be atheists, but then, our existence would be random.”
Yet again, you are mistakenly assuming that religion has a monopoly on morality. You might want to try reading some history of ethics.
(And Dawkins does not exhaust that history.)
“Yet again, you are mistakenly assuming that religion has a monopoly on morality. “
Sam, I empathize with your misinterpretation of simple language. Nowhere did I say religion had a monopoly on morality. Instead, I wrote the contrary.
You ask me to read about the history of ethics. Let’s begin with you reading what was said.
I would like your comment 1,000 times if I could.
@ Frady: What is society? It is a group of individuals, each with the liberties of an individual. Many individualists are strong adherents to Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, but that is not entirely true in man, where it is survival of the fittest group, not the fittest individual.
Each individual ought to have the same rights as another. Still, in a group environment, sometimes, the rights of individuals have to be curtailed for the survival of the group, such as in the case of a mentally unstable person who resides in a group.
I am primarily libertarian, but we must recognize survival as a necessity.
“in a group environment, sometimes, the rights of individuals have to be curtailed for the survival of the group, such as in the case of a mentally unstable person who resides in a group.”
That may be so, but such actions must be severely limited, and much care is needed. I think that most of us who hold libertarian beliefs would prefer to err of the side of individual liberty, even it that may result in allowing quite a bit of aberrant behavior. Ideally, no aggression will ever be taken against an individual unless that individual has initiated aggression against another. I won’t completely rule out any kind of preemptive action against someone as obviously disturbed as the subject of this column, but great diligence care must be exercised to avoid acting on mere assumptions and trampling the rights of the targeted individual. I have a problem with the bold assertion of the “group” as a primary actor. We do sometimes for the sake of brevity need to refer to a collection of individuals with common characteristics as members of a certain group, but that is a convenience only. It can become far too easy to fall into the intellectual fallacy of imputing the rights and responsibilities of those individuals to the group, and that leads to all manner of irrationality.
I agree with your hesitations, as long as libertarians recognize that sometimes pragmatism is more important than ideology.
” I have a problem with the bold assertion of the “group” as a primary actor. ”
It all depends on the circumstances under discussion.
There is no right, morally or legally, to initiate violence against any human being.
Ellen, I see your point, but sometimes violence is necessary. It is all a matter of defining terms and limits.
In 1980 the US FDA approved the expanded use of added MSG as an alleged “flavor enhancer.” Since, we have multiple epidemics of chronic diseases and of mass/school shootings (e.g., https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/). Cause and effect or coincidence? I say cause and effect, and politics and prejudice are interfering with solving the problem.
More likely the releasing of mentally ill people from psychiatric hospitals under the banner of “freedom” has caused our fractured society. A casual glance at more than 90% of the online comments on the internet reflect people with grave mental issues
The release was based on budgets not freedom.
Prior to the FDA approval of the expanded use of added MSG in 1980, the FDA approved adding modified common allergen, incomplete protein, phytoestrogen-rich soy protein processed more cheaply with toxic hexane with some residue by the early 1970s. The US female cancer epidemic presented by 1979 (ACS and NCI data). By late 2006 there was some recognition that phytoestrogen rich soy was turning some boys gay and causing some older men to have enlarged breasts (https://www.wnd.com/2006/12/39253/). For me it now begs this question: how can any young American be held fully legally responsible for their actions after two and a half generations of ignorantly ingesting toxic brain damaging, mind altering FDA approved food poisoning, with many of their parents ingesting those same substances before they were even conceived, with no multi-generational studies with humans done first? Again, it goes much deeper than politics and prejudice. Anecdotally, along with some 20,000 others before me (website counter in the day), I first wrote the FDA (with replies) about added MSG in October of 2005. In seniors, the brain damage tends to present as dementia.
The rooster crows then the sun comes up. If there weren’t a rooster the sun would not come up. Protect all roosters, anon.
which means she’s a racist.
The authorities hid the truth for political reasons. If Harris had been elected, I seriously doubt this report would have seen daylight.
My heart goes out to all the families who were victimized by this disturbed, young woman. This was an abomination driven by madness. These innocents did not deserve this tragedy.
But I also have sympathy for the family of the shooter. I’m absolutely sure these killings horrified them, too.
I’ve seen first-hand what it is like to have a violently-disturbed family member. The strategy is to take it one day at a time, hoping today will be quiet. If it’s not quiet, the family spends their life savings, trying desperately to keep their loved one out of juvie or the morgue. Once that child reaches majority, it only gets harder to manage.
There’s little sympathy from officials. After the first 911 call, the police start to blame the parents just to get them to stop calling; the police aren’t babysitters. School officials make one effort, and after realizing the futility, they punt as well. Other parents have their own quack theories: you’re too hard on the child, or you’re too soft on the child! But the truth is that some families face all alone problems for which there are no solutions.
And the penal system doesn’t want to handle it because the system is already full of bed monsters who are even worse, believe it or not. Within 24 hours, the problem child is returned to the family.
Between the family members there are also terrible tensions as they quarrel about what to do with a problem that never gets better. Divorces and runaways can result, especially when some family members feel threatened or abused. It doesn’t just exhaust your finances; it can exhaust every part of your being.
And the least sympathy of all comes from the beloved child, who often expresses a bottomless hatred for his or her parents, which sometimes manifests as vandalism or domestic violence.
And finally, there is the nightmare fear that that child might harm others. Room searches for drugs, alcohol, and weapons are necessary, but that doesn’t prevent a determined murderer or drug trafficker, and if that child is an adult, he has more rights than his parents. In all of this, dad can go to jail if he steps over any of a hundred lines–and guess who might press charges.
Living as a family with a criminally-disturbed individual is a lonely journey that thankfully most families won’t have to endure.
Your response is the most profound reply to any article I have ever read. Even medications only vaguely work if ever and for short periods of time and that’s if the child/adult will even take them and then if a family has willing and more importantly, a qualified mental health physician. Your message makes it clear; you don’t want anyone to know what it’s like and there are no words. Not every case we see on TV is one of neglect and no effort. I pray for your energy and endurance.
Thank you, Susan 🙂
You’re right about medications. In the worst cases, they’re not effective, and many patients refuse to take them. Our prisons are full of such people. Many are a threat to the public and have to go to some controlled environment, even if it’s not very therapeutic. The human condition is far from perfect.
Psychiatry has moved almost completely to a med management program, perhaps because of the financial incentives making billions for big pharma. I know medicine has a valid place, but something important has been lost.
Bingo.
“Living as a family with a criminally-disturbed individual is a lonely journey..”
Excellent analysis. I asked an earlier question: Are we overprotecting individual rights while failing to protect society adequately?
Protecting the individual’s rights increases the “loneliness factor” since it prevents others, especially family, from being able to help the individual. The patient is left with the therapist and a wall blocking outside contact.
S. Meyer writes, “Protecting the individual’s rights increases the “loneliness factor” since it prevents others, especially family, from being able to help the individual.”
How right you are, Allen. Mental patients will always give therapists half the story. Families could correct the record, but the patients can veto their involvement (which usually happens). Thus, therapists often get misled. HIPAA has consequences.
True, sometimes I think these privacy acts do more harm than good. They let politicians virtue signal and get re-elected but then others are harmed who stay silent.
Another example is Ferpa. I could tell stories but I don’t want to get sidetracked.
Diogenes, some Psychiatrists or therapists recommend that an enablement problem be treated in the open, where all family members and others know what is happening, and the “patient” understands the environment. This prevents all sorts of enabling and blame shifting.
Good idea. Psychiatrists need to put their foot down about this.
So targeting a white population means you’re not racist?
What is racism then? Does it even exist?
Not if you’re a member of the minority du jour.
They hurt you by hurting your children.
So, Audrey was born a boy? We need clearer language for describing transgender persons, such as “born male” or “born female”. It helps to be precise with language.
Trans male means she was born a female. Trans woman is a biological male.
We need clearer language for…
Less, as in many things, is actually more. This individual is now a male, dead murderer…period.
Sex and gender are synonyms with overlapping but generally different areas of use: sex for biology, gender for linguistic discussions.
There is no such thing as transgender or transsexual in the human species. Yes, you can stick a valid prefix on a common word but the resulting hogepodge is not representative of anything in the real world.
No amount of expenditure or effort in plastic surgery, hairdoos, makeup, or method acting can change one human sex into the other. Hasn’t happened, and won’t. The only result is, at best, a more damaged psyche, at worst, unconscionable butchery.
Instead of foisting all this crap on people how about teaching kids that everybody is not the same, treat others decently, and you get to choose your friends.
“We need clearer language for describing transgender persons, such as “born male” or “born female”. It helps to be precise with language.”
Agree with that. Language precision is best served by using the terms you suggest: “born male” or “born female”; or, if brevity is needed “XX” or “XY”. Further elaboration in terminology tends to contribute to confusion (often the purpose of it) and may be taken for (often correctly) virtue signaling or other self-aggrandizement.
How thoughtful of her! It just shows the true malignancy that was festering in this person’s mind. She says she was bullied but millions of children get bullied all the time. Is it right ? No. But it is a fact of life. The key is what you do about it. Do you just become a victim or do you learn the facts of a sometimes cruel life and harden yourself towards life so you can cope. You have to learn how to walk the line to protect yourself and yet also be a compassionate human being, in spite of the slings and arrows thrown your way every day.
This person had some deep seated psychological and psychiatric problems. OCD was only a manifestation or symptom of a much greater problem. This particular person was a bomb waiting to explode. Since she is not here to be analyzed and assessed, we really don’t know her.
Her mish mash of ravings are her interpretation of her life and thoughts. The can give you some clues but she was not clinically sane and her interpretation of evens and her struggles with life are colored by her mental pathology.
We don’t know. The fact the she thought killing children was ok casts some real doubt on any of her conclusions and interpretations. That she did not want to be considered a racist for shooting minority children is a small inconsistency in a life of contradictions and outright pathology.
Ellen Evans should be aware that racism in jury trials occurred both in the north and south, last I looked. And poor vs not poor was also there. We can spread the wealth of jury verdicts that did not match the crime everywhere even to a white Ford Bronco driving around Los Angeles with a Football star in it.
I don’t think there are enough characters allowed in a comment to list every single example of disparate sentencing and jury bias I can think of. I used a couple of examples. Many writers do that.
Sorry that is your only takeaway.
Ellen Evans – No that was not my only takeaway. That was the single thing that I disagreed with in your statement. I have no doubt about racism in Jury trials because it was seen everywhere. Too many people seem to think that just occurred in the South, yet having lived all over this country I know it was a problem everywhere. Far too many people from outside the South were quite self righteous when they only needed to look into their own community to see the same thing. And the South was not homogenous in its problems with racism or even with juries. There were many who stood up and spoke out against racism at significant personal costs and many who did not. A finer brush should have been used in your statement than a broad white wash, so to speak.
Thanks for clarifying, but I only listed the one example for ease and brevity. I have seen plenty of racism in the north.
Good comment Ellen. I believe we should always endeavor to understand the psychology of a crime to prevent future crime. But it should not be (insanity notwithstanding) used to mitigate the punishment. Today, the Frankenstein monster would have a GoFundMe campaign, hook-up offers, and fawning interviews on The View or by Leslie Stahl.
Intent: Moses would not have survived the mountain had he asked God “but what if…”
Thank you. Regarding intent, one thing we have lost in our abandonment of religion is the remembrance that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
There are signs that religion may be resurfacing in the lives of our citizens; I think that a good thing.
Ellen Evans at 7:51 AM
Murder as a Crime of Passion.
a Crime of Dispassion
a Crime of Compassion
in the same moments of the crime.
This indecent is an example, Dispassion for some, Compassion for Others.
Murder/Suicide of Families is an example,
Spouse murders Spouse in Dispassion, but spares or murders young Children out of Compassion.
It happens mostly when a Person is ‘Pushed over the Edge’ mentally with no end in sight (Their Pain),
and looses the ability to rationally constrain themselves failing mentally.
I rather double spousal murder is ever truly dispassionate. Most murders incorporate significant emotion of one sort or another.
Dout, not double, sorry.
OLLY,
Great comment. Like the View and Stahl references.
Black Lives Matter
But the only reason they matter is that all lives do. If not all lives matter, then who is selected for survival and who not will always be malleable and therefore eventually a matter of the preference of the seat of power.
Yeah, he was a big fan of Mussolini, too.
Killing children is OK but killing blacks is not. How very consistent with progressives – throw in a little gender-confused mental illness and you almost have the entire Democrat platform.
The mentally ill diagnosing the mentally ill is always amusing.
I agree you do have a certain knack for self-analysis
“She wanted to be a mass child killer. The last thing that she wanted was for people to think that she was a racist.”
You know…because being a racist is so much worse.
It used to be that male homosexuality was considered to be a mistake committed by nature, even a disease. Since the 1960’s, the Left has convinced male homosexuals that they are one of numerous “victim groups” oppressed by society, a new “minority”. Their inner confusion and unhappiness has been turned into a rage against society in general, especially the more conservative, and seemingly happy, elements of society. Thus, whereas the “trans community” was harmless before the 1960s, now they are dangerous to innocent children.
Then explain every other mass shooting in a school, performed by heterosexual white men…No wonder you believe Turley, you’re a moron
ummm… check the stats, most mass killers are mentally deranged and that falls into the category of democrat…
More recently school shootings have been trans
Before that mostly paranoid schizophrenics
This can in part be traced back to the institution of greater sentences for “hate crimes” than for the same crimes committed for other motives.
Once it was easy for most people to coalesce around the sentiment that murder is a filthy, depraved and degraded action.
Now, we care more about motive than actions, where motive used not, in fact, to be an element of any crime, merely corroborative.
Witness the disparate treatment of many wholly nonviolent January 6 participants versus that of leftist motivated actors. The antifa member who literally took an axe to the door of the local office of an elected federal representative – he not only got off with no serious consequences but the police gave his axe back. Slaps on the wrist for two attorneys who firebombed a police car in New York City. Etc., etc., and so forth, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
We need to both progress and regress to the former view – that the crime is heinous, and motive is only an indicator that the accused might well have been disposed to commit that crime.
Insofar as we can, of course – there will always be human emotion to factor in; recall the old “Irish acquittal” of “My Lord, we find the man that stole the horse not guilty.”
But jury nullification is better than hearing, from jurors following the trial of Derek Chauvin, that they felt tremendous pressure to bring in a certain verdict as opposed to its opposite. I wonder how many Southern jurors would have voted to convict lynching murderers if they had not felt such community pressure.
But these are not reasons to now let off any individual. Society making another mistake can never erase the initial mistake the new one is intended to “correct.” It just keeps us sliding from one grave error into another.