The Patriot Post® · Six Murdered in Hate Crime Against Christians

By Mark Alexander ·
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/96062-six-murdered-in-hate-crime-against-christians-2023-03-28

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 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 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 “mass shootings,” 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 her 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.”)

FOOTNOTE: Regarding so-called “gun violence” and “mass shootings”: For the record, murders of multiple people, particularly mass murders, are very rare in our nation of 330 million people. There were approximately 25,000 homicides in the U.S. in the latest year of record, which you can view state by state, and fortunately there are indications that homicides may be declining after the surge in violence unleashed by Joe Biden and his Democrat agitators in 2020.

The Demos ubiquitously and falsely label the generational murderous contagion they have seeded, “gun violence,” and focus exclusively on the infrequent high-profile “mass shootings,” which account for only a tiny fraction of all homicides. More than 99% of murders in the U.S. are not the result of mass attacks. (Notably, guns don’t commit violence, thugs and sociopaths commit violence.) The oft-cited Gun Violence Archive defines a “mass shooting” as any incident that involves a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed.” The vast majority of those violent attacks are the result of drug and gang violence committed on Democrat-controlled urban centers.

In a country and culture that ignores the rising generation of sociopathic murderers – thugs in violent urban centers who are saturated with cultural violence to the point of glorifying it, it is fortunate that the incidence of mass murder is not ten times higher. Arguably, the only thing keeping that number from being higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

Democrats don’t focus on the vast majority of murders, particularly the epidemic of black-on-black murders on their degraded urban poverty plantations because they want to avoid at all cost, the “inconvenient truth” about race and violence, which is the direct result of failed Democrat social programs. Those murders aren’t useful for the gun control narrative they invoke to evoke emotional reaction from mostly wealthy white suburban women, whom form the Demos’ largest voter constituency.

As for actual mass murders, that is detailed in the FBI’s 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” – in 2022 the FBI reported 50 incidents resulting in 313 casualties (100 killed and 213 wounded). That number was up significantly from 2020, when the FBI reported 40 incidents resulting in 164 casualties (38 killed and 126 wounded). A more relevant record of “mass shooting” data is maintained by the Associated Press and Northeastern University, 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.” These numbers fluctuate significantly year over year, and range between 20 and 40 incidents.

FOOTNOTE 2: Regarding why Democrats only focus on less than 1% of murders nationwide – they are intentionally using these rare high-profile tragedies to foment fear – most notably their oft-repeated but erroneous claim that “gun violence is the leading cause of death for children.” If by “children” they mean gang and drug associated murders of those primarily between the ages of 16 and 21, then yes. Democrats are experts at fomenting fear and division.

The fear and angst Demos are intentionally propagating is taking a toll on Americans’ mental health. Psychological researcher Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson observes: “Watching it time and time again on your phone or on the headlines can really impact you in ways that I don’t think we knew before to be as impactful. It’s so ‘in our face’ all the time and we have access to so much footage, so many pictures, so many videos, so many accounts that we’re ingesting it in ways that’s really unhealthy for us.” The result for many mothers is an irrational fear that their children will be shot. That is precisely the fear that Democrats want to perpetuate, especially among their female constituents, in order to advance their gun control agenda.

FOOTNOTE 3: Regarding those so-called “assault weapons,” for much the same reason Democrats focus only on the rare high-profile attacks to generate fear and angst, some of those attacks involve semi-automatic rifles versus pistols, thus the calls to ban them. However, rifles and shotguns of combined are used in less than 3% of all homicides, but Democrats never let facts get in the way of their political agenda.

FOOTNOTE 4: Regarding firearms and violent crime, researcher John Lott reports, “Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.” Again, the only thing keeping that number from being much higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

FOOTNOTE 5: Regarding firearms and suicide, 54% of all deaths involving firearms are suicide, most also involving drugs or alcohol abuse, but the big numbers in “gun violence” reports often do not distinguish between murder and suicide. It would seem that the Demos’ support for assisted suicide is in conflict with their support for gun control.

FOOTNOTE 6: Regarding alcohol v firearm deaths, Demos should ban alcohol because alcohol abuse is far more deadly than firearm abuse. More than 140,000 people died from alcohol abuse last year – that’s SEVEN times the number homicides associate with fire arms. Drunk drivers are responsible for 28 deaths per day. And notably, it is estimated that alcohol is also a key factor in at least 30% of homicides involving a firearm. (Include illegal drug use and that number jumps to about 60%.)

If Democrats are serious about homicides, they should outlaw alcohol. Problem is, the vast majority of alcohol users possess and use it legally and responsibly. Likewise, the vast majority of firearm owners possess and use them legally and responsibly. Enacting a prohibition on firearms is tantamount to enacting a prohibition on alcohol. In both cases, only law-abiding users obey the laws, while lawless users don’t.

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