Friday, January 05, 2024

Iowa school shooting

Thursday morning in the US, 17-year-old student Dylan "DJ" Butler went on a shooting spree and shot six people, killing one—a sixth-grader—before he killed himself.

Headline:

17-year-old Perry High School shooting suspect posted photo on TikTok before shooting

The student identified as the Perry High School shooter posted a photo of himself on TikTok shortly before police say he shot multiple people and then turned the gun on himself.

Dylan Butler, 17, of Perry attended the high school where the shooting happened about 20 minutes before school was scheduled to start Thursday, the first day of school after the winter break. Police said Butler shot six people, including a sixth-grader who died.

Before the shooting, Butler had posted a selfie on the social media platform of him in a bathroom stall with a blue duffle bag by his feet. The caption read "now we wait."

[ ... ]

An emoji of the gay Pride flag was featured in the TikTok page's bio and an image of an anime girl was selected as the profile's avatar. In another TikTok video, the account used the hashtag "genderfluid." Using an identical profile picture on Instagram, user @DylanSayWhat212 identified as trans non-binary with "he/they" pronouns. However, the account has also since been scrubbed. 

Okay, that last part means the story's going to end up buried. Later in the article, we find out that an IED was also found at the school and disposed of. Butler was armed with both a shotgun and a pistol. I wonder what we'll find out about his psych profile. Another autistic?

VAGUELY RELATED: six years ago, transgender Evie Amati, in Australia, calmly walked into a convenience store while holding an axe, then proceeded to bash two customers, both of whom ended up severely injured. I'm on record as pushing back against the idea that being trans automatically makes you mentally ill, but it's getting harder to deny—the more cases like this that I see—that many trans people are indeed unbalanced and in desperate need of mental and emotional help. Believe me, I don't like talking this way. If such incidents weren't happening—school shootings and axe bashings by trans folks (e.g., Nashville)—I'd be happy to adopt a live-and-let-live policy: let trans folks be trans folks. But many of these people who claim to be trans are proving themselves to be mentally unstable, violence-prone individuals. Are they really trans, or are they insane people using the label "trans" as a cover for their insanity? Southeast Asia has a huge trans subculture, and you don't hear about constant violence and aggression coming from those parts of the world. I think something about the trans situation in the US is terribly wrong, but I can't put my finger on what the problem is. 

The above paragraph is a jumbled mess of unsorted thoughts, but the problem could be that there are "faux" trans people out there, and they're the real danger. The SE Asian trans community strikes me as more or less mentally healthy aside from their obvious dysphoria. I have no research to cite, but I'd assume that most real trans people in the States also simply want to live their lives without making everything into a confrontation. The people on the edge, then, seem more likely to be "faux" trans than trans-gone-wrong. It's a topic worthy of research. Or am I engaging in the No True Scotsman fallacy?



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