We are grieving today for the families and friends of three nine-year-old children — Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney — and adults Katherine Koonce (headmistress), Cynthia Peak, and Mike Hill. They were all murdered by an assailant who entered The Covenant School in Nashville, a Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) elementary school.

Many of our staff have deep ties to PCA churches and many friends here have ties to The Covenant School. The clerk of the denomination, Bryan Chapell, a family friend of our managing editor Nate Jackson, offered condolences to the victims on behalf of the PCA: “Our heartfelt concerns and prayers are for the families of Covenant Presbyterian Church, the Covenant School and the Nashville community. We grieve the loss and trauma associated with this horrible tragedy. May God comfort all who mourn. May He provide wisdom to the authorities as they investigate as well as to the church leadership as they minister to a grieving congregation and community.”

It is not only the families of those slain whose lives have now been forever changed, but all of the children in the school will be indelibly scarred by the actions of this violent assailant.

As I have written before, all murders are hate crimes, but when a mass-murdering assailant takes the lives of children among their victims, it seems especially egregious.

In this case, the 28-year old emotionally disturbed female assailant was killed by two Nashville Police Officers, Rex Engelbert and Michael Collazo, who did exactly what they are trained to do: Enter the building, engage the assailant, neutralize the threat.

The brave actions of officers Engelbert and Collazo prevented the loss of many additional lives, in stark contrast to the police response in the last high-profile school assault, that in a Uvalde, Texas elementary school.

Notably, there are common denominators in the Nashville and Uvalde assaults, consistent with many similar attacks. The assailants had a history of mental distress and psychotropic drug use, manifested gender-confused pathology and were immersed in video gaming. They were also deeply imprinted by deviant identity influences propagated by social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok.

Additionally, it also amounted to “suicide by cop.” Almost all mass murderers are suicidal – as psychologist Joel Dvoskin notes: “The best way for us to think about mass shootings is as acts of suicide. With very few exceptions — in fact, almost no exceptions — anybody who does that has given up on their life. They’re going to kill themselves, they’re going to get the police to kill them, or they’re going to go away pretty much forever.”

It is unusual for a woman to commit mass murder, and the assailant’s emotional instability is, I suspect in part, the outcome of the mass emotional assault on young women today.

Beyond the appropriate response to family and friends, what follows are observations about the disgraceful politicization of this tragedy.

Before the blood of innocents had dried, predictably Joe Biden found an open mic and called for more laws to solve the “gun problem,” but first, making jokes about how much he likes ice cream: “My name is Joe Biden. I’m Dr. Jill Biden’s husband. And I eat Jeni’s ice cream — chocolate chip. I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream. By the way, I have a whole refrigerator full upstairs. You think I’m kidding? I’m not. If I were allowed to take you upstairs, you got a whole freezer full of Jeni’s chocolate chip ice cream. You know it’s pretty dull when you’ve been in public life as long as I have and you’re known for two things: chocolate chip ice cream and Ray-Bans sunglasses, but what the hell.”

Of course, no responsible parent would allow their child to go upstairs with “Creepy Joe.”

Biden followed his ice cream comments with a demand that Republicans in Congress join with Democrats to pass another so-called “assault weapons” ban, his latest gun confiscation scheme, and then he ordered flags to half-staff. The latter move is, ostensibly, to honor the victims, but it is actually to extend awareness of his anti-2A political agenda beyond the media cycle coverage of the Nashville assault.

As I have noted previously, Biden uses flags as political agenda rags. For the record, he is not lowering flags for the other (on average) 50 people who were murdered the same day. That is because Democrats don’t want you to focus on the violent demographic committing those assaults as the offenders are primarily their constituents.

For her part, Jill Biden said, “Our children deserve better,” and indeed they do.

While the Bidens and their Leftmedia talkingheads and scribes ubiquitously refer to these assaults as “gun violence,” the hard reality is, violence is a culture problem. In fact, the vast majority of violence today is associated with cultural devolution directly tied to generations of failed Democrat policies, including the surge of violence unleashed by Demos since 2020.

Thus, I suppose it would be more accurate to refer to mass assaults as “Democrat violence.”

On the subject of so-called “mass shooting,” many articles about the Nashville murders include some version of the following claim: “The tragic incident marked America’s 129th mass shooting of 2023, according to Gun Violence Archive which tracks gun violence data.” That implies that there have been 128 similar attacks this year, but that is a deceptive and fallacious claim.

To be clear, the so-called “Gun Violence Archive” defines a “mass shooting” as any incident that involves a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed.” In other words, the vast majority of “mass shootings” are drug and gang violence committed on Democrat-controlled urban poverty plantations — thus again, “Democrat violence.”

As a reality check, in 2021, the FBI data on “active shooter incidents” — which it defines as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area” — indicates there were 61 incidents resulting in 103 deaths. Consistent with the Demo-induced surge in violence, that was up from 40 incidents and 38 deaths in 2020.

The point is, in a nation of 330 million people, these incidents are very rare, but given the 24/7 wall-to-wall commercial media churn to sell advertising, it seems these incidents are daily and next door.

In fact, both “mass shooting” and “active shooter” incidents dropped significantly in 2022. The most comprehensive site maintaining such data, the Violence Project, which uses the Department of Justice definition of mass public shooting, “a multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms,” recorded 7 such incidents in 2022, with 48 dead and 90 injured.

On the subject of targeted violence, it is notable that the Nashville assault comes just days ahead of the April 1 “Trans Day of Vengeance” – planned protests at the Supreme Court and nationwide, including calls for action in Nashville. (Yes, they planned this for April Fools’ Day.) The “Trans Vengeance” is part of a larger movement advocating that “LGBTQ+ People Take Up Arms.” One notable group, Rainbow Reload, was promoted recently by National Pubic Radio.

Is that call for violence connected with the Covenant attack?

After Nashville Police Chief John Drake joined Gov. Bill Lee calling for prayer, Chief Drake announced, “We have a manifesto, we have some writings that we’re going over that pertain to this date, the actual incident,” including “a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place.” He added that the assailant was “prepared to do more harm than was actually done.” He added: “There’s right now a theory that we may be able to talk about later, but it’s not confirmed. So, we’ll put that out as soon as we can. There’s some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school.”

David Rausch, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, noted: “It’s been characterized as a manifesto. I think that’s a mischaracterization.” He said the writings consisted of “journal-type rantings,” consisting more of “unfortunate mental health issues that you can see as you read through the journals.”

Drake indicated the writings would be released to the public, but I doubt that will happen because it may connect the dots confirming this is a hate crime.

Nashville city councilman Jeff Syracuse, who chairs the public safety committee, says: “At this point, I think the metro police department is backing off with making any judgments or assumptions on the manifesto and leaning on TBI and the FBI. There are pieces to this whole story that we don’t know and I don’t know if it will ever give us closure or answers.”

We know that the attack against the Christian school where the assailant was a former student, was premeditated. The day of the attack, the assailant sent a message to a friend, saying it was her “last goodbye,” that she was “planning to die today.” She added: “One day this will make more sense, I’ve left more than enough evidence behind. But something bad is about to happen.”

She then targeted Christians in what clearly constituted a hate crime. For that reason, homosexual advocates are lobbying to have her manifesto concealed.

Fact is, the delay in releasing the assailant’s writings is because she is among the Left’s prized “protected class” of gender-confused constituents. If release of her rantings indicate the motive for her attack was hatred for those who disagreed with her “identity,” thus fitting the criterion for a hate crime, the Department of Justice would be obligated to classify it as such. The Biden administration will vigorously reject any effort by DoJ to do so, because that would result in immediate blowback from their leftist Rainbow Mafia.

Democrats know they can give no ground regarding defense of their transgender-outlier constituents, because doing so would result in much broader protest from their Democrat base who support the whole LGBTQ+++ (ad nauseam) gender deniers.

When asked whether he thought the shooting was a hate crime hours after his ice cream chuckles, Biden laughed off the question saying, “I have no idea.” When pressing for an answer, a reporter noted, “Sen. Josh Hawley believes it was.” Smirking again, Biden replied: “Well, I probably don’t then. No, I’m joking. I have no idea.”

Hawley, who has asked the FBI and DHS to investigate the shooting as a hate crime, responded to Biden’s dismissal of the question, “What a disgrace.”

Indeed.

Finally, I can assure you that before this week is out, the Left will spin this attack to suggest the hater who committed the assault was actually the “victim,” and the Christian victims were actually the “haters.” One group has already blamed the assault on Christians, claiming the assailant “had no other effective way to be seen than to lash out by taking the life of others,” and concluding, “Hate has consequences.” Of course, WaPo is already blame-shifting, claiming the incident is being “exploited by right to escalate anti-trans rhetoric.”

Update

Four weeks after the assault, the Nashville assailant’s writings indicating her motive have still not been release. As for why her sociopathic rants have not been released, professor Joseph Giacalone of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice speculated, “I think what the FBI is really concerned here with…is that if there is something in there that is truly damaging for the transgender community, I think they are hesitant to do it because they are afraid of a violent backlash against that protected class of people.”

Or in reality, as I noted originally, release of anything that would would require Biden’s DoJ to declare that someone in their prized “protected class” of gender-confused constituents committed a hate crime, would result in a much broader “backlash” from their Demo base who support the whole spectrum of gender deniers.

Regarding violence, three days after the the Nashville assault, on what was scheduled to be a national “Trans Day of Vengeance,” a Colorado Springs man, who claims to be a woman named “Lilly,” and who had his own contrived manifesto, was arrest after it was discovered he planned to attack schools and churches. Information about that case was not released to the public until six days after the suspect was arrested.

As for Leftmedia coverage National Review notes, “The media is strangely cautious about a mass shooter’s motive, just this one time.”

Further, after Nashville PD correctly identified the assailant as a woman, the MSM followed by correctly using “her” as her pronoun. Now, after outrage from the leftist gender-confused pronoun crowd, Leftmedia platforms are doing contortionist backflips to apologize for “misgendering” the assailant, calling her a “her.” CNN is even scrubbing female gender references from their coverage.

(PS: Remember earlier this month on ABC’s “The View,” that “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, when asked what should happen to those who oppose her leftist views, responded, “It does involve murder.” When asked to clarify, she restated, “Well, I’ve thought of murder.” Responding to objections, in a statement issued later, Fonda claimed, “I was using hyperbole to make a point.”)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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NOTE: The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

All defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate and refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists.

See these updated Footnotes for key points of rebuttal: Firearm Fiction v. Facts.

Only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

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