Note that I’m not saying she is … was … trans. I’m just saying that there seems to be an attitude that it shouldn’t matter.
There was speculation Monday that the shooter was transgender, although other sources disputed the claim. Some said she had an “online obsession with school shooters.”
Barnes insisted that he doesn’t care whether Rupnow was transgender, as some reports indicated. It’s not important, he said, when asked by a leftist reporter about “misinformation” online. The Madison journalist effectively wagged her finger at parental rights group for claiming the shooter was transgender, “which is a reaction that we see across the country linked with mass shootings to claim that trans people are dangerous.”
Barnes, a far-left police chief in one of the most LGBTQ agenda-pushing cities in America, said he wished people would “leave their own personal biases out of this.”
“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,” the chief told reporters at an evening press conference. “I don’t think that whatever happened today has anything to do with how she or he or they my [sic] have wanted to identify …”
Barnes subsequently acknowledged that Rupnow’s gender identity “is something that may come out later.”
Ackshully, it might matter a wee bit. Even id she wasn’t, at least three recent school shootings were carried out by trans-identifying persons.
Seventeen-year-old Dylan Butler killed one and injured five at Perry High School in Iowa on January 4, 2024 before killing himself. According to reports he was trans/genderfluid, used the pronouns he/they, and “loved” trans kids.
28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale killed six at a private Christian school in Tennessee on March 27, 2023. She was transgender and wanted to be called “Aiden” and to be referred to by male pronouns. She was shot and killed by responding officers.
Sixteen-year-old Maya McKinney killed one student and injured eight others at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado on May 7, 2019. She identified as male, went by “Alec” and targeted classmates who she claimed bullied her because she was transgender.
So, yeah, my immediate thought when I heard about the shooting was to wonder if it was a transgender student. And I won’t apologize for thinking that, no matter how much the Leftists scold me for my “bias.”
It’s not without cause.
What we know about 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow is that she went by “Sam” or Samantha, she idolized the German industrial rock band KMFDM (also idolized by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of the Columbine High School massacre), had an interest in mass shootings, had “a long, disturbing online history of being obsessed with school shooters and death [and] used the moniker “crossixir” online,” and somehow got a 9mm pistol (for her birthday!) that she used to carry out her attack.
Andy Ngo says Natalie “did not identify as trans.”
I don’t have screengrabs, so I won’t name the publication, but I could swear that the text of a report I read after the shooting originally said, “himself” and then it changed to “themself” and then the entire sentence disappeared in which those words had appeared.
The investigation is still ongoing, but I won’t be surprised if we learn that she was sexually confused and/or mentally unstable.