Focus on tragedy, not perpetrator

Much was made of the identity of the recent school shooter in Minnesota because the shooter (we are not going to dignify them by using their name) is reported to have been born male but identified as a woman. This led to the shooting instantly being used as a political football, as everything is in the day and age in which we live.
Because the shooter is transgendered, many pounced on that to declare transgendered people were committing more and more mass shootings because they are mentally ill people. Whether or not you want to believe transgendered people suffer from mental illness is up to you. That is not the purpose of this column. What we can say for certain, however, as that anyone who would knowingly shoot up a school, movie theater, etc., is clearly mentally ill. You don’t have to be a certain gender, color, creed, etc., to be insane, and we don’t have to try to cram shooters into a neat little box that strengthens whatever argument we want to make for political reasons.
The fact that we even have to keep writing about mass shootings is sad enough. When the only reason people want to talk about it is to argue their political position makes it even worse. Two children lost their lives. Too many children—and people in general—continue to lose their lives in these mass shootings. Worst of all, this country seems to just shrug its shoulders when it happens and do nothing. It’s almost as if it’s becoming accepted.
We are guessing that those who are the first to point out when a transgendered person commits a mass shooting probably don’t like it when it is pointed out that white people are responsible for the majority of the mass shootings in the country. In fact, between 1966 and Aug. 28, 54.4 percent of the 502 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. And, an overwhelming majority of those shootings—95.3 percent—were committed by a male. The fact is that mass shootings follow population trends. The shootings mirror the racial distribution of the U.S. population as a whole.
In this case a mass shooting is defined as an incident of targeted violence carried out by one or more shooters at one or more public or populated locations. Multiple victims (both injuries and fatalities) are associated with the attack, and both the victims and location(s) are chosen either at random or for their symbolic value. The motivation of the shooting must not correlate with gang violence or targeted militant or terroristic activity.
Two more children lost their lives while they were going to school—and even more unbelievably, were praying at the time they were murdered. If we’re getting numb to this sort of thing, we better wake up.
Let’s not try to politicize school shootings. Instead, let’s work together to figure out how to make them stop. Black, white, male, female and everything in between—we must work together to prevent them. Regardless of gender or skin tone, mass shooters are scum. Focusing on the who and not the what of these tragedies does nothing to serve the cause. It only serves to divide us. We have enough of that already.