More on the Annunciation Catholic School Shooting Being the Columbine Effect and Not a Trans ‘Threat’

The Minneapolis shooting at Annunciation Catholic School is yet another tragic addition to a long and grim pattern. Police say that former student, 23-year-old Robin Westman, had a “deranged obsession with previous mass shooters.” That single detail alone gives weight to what I’ve long argued. Columbiners, those who idolize and mythologize previous killers, are not a fringe curiosity. They are an active cultural current that feeds these attacks.

Westman reportedly filled notebooks and videos with references to other shooters, doodles of weapons, and violent fantasies. It’s a well-trodden path. Copy the iconography, immerse yourself in the mythology, and then try to add your own name to the roll call of infamy. The fact that this continues to happen decades after Columbine shows how little has been done to cut off that pipeline of idolization.

Investigators recovered three weapons at the scene: a rifle, a shotgun, and a handgun. They also confirmed that all three were fired. To me, this is telling. Anyone with actual familiarity with firearms knows that juggling three different weapons is inefficient and unnecessary. The fact that all were discharged suggests Westman’s understanding of guns was not practical but performative, informed more by movies and first-person shooters than by reality. Fire everything, make noise, leave a spectacle. It’s the ritualized fantasy Columbiners buy into.

However, much of the online discourse has already turned to the fact that Westman was transgender. Again, this has nothing to do with being trans. People can be marginalized and still choose to follow philosophies or actions that actively work against their own communities. I’ve pointed before to Solomon Henderson, the Antioch High shooter, a Black man who immersed himself in neo-Nazi extremism. Identity alone does not determine morality. A killer is still a killer.

Of course, the usual suspects from MAGA world have already tried to hijack this tragedy to smear trans people as a whole. They’ve been slobbering all over social media, insisting that gender identity itself is a mental illness and that trans people shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms.

It’s the same tired script they dust off whenever a shooter happens to be anything other than a white right-wing male. They seize on it, scream about it, and hope people don’t notice that the overwhelming majority of mass shooters in this country look an awful lot like their own fanbase.

These assclowns aren’t interested in mourning dead kids or preventing the next shooting. They’re interested in weaponizing grief for culture-war points. The reality is simple. This wasn’t about being trans. This was about being a Columbiner, a violent obsessive who worshipped past shooters and wanted their own name etched into that macabre canon. But God forbid the MAGA cult ever admit that guns, extremism, and the glorification of killers are the actual problems.

For perspective, look at the roster: Nikolas Cruz at Parkland, William Atchison at Aztec High, Elliot Rodger in Isla Vista, Dylann Roof in Charleston, Chris Harper-Mercer at Umpqua Community College, Phoenix Ikner at Florida State, and Ethan Crumbley at Oxford High, just to name a few. The overwhelming majority of modern American mass shooters have been radicalized, angry, or steeped in extremist and misogynist ideologies. They vastly outnumber the handful of trans shooters.

Westman doesn’t represent trans people. Westman represents the Columbiner problem, the cult-like obsession with violence, past shooters, and notoriety. Until that culture is addressed, until the internet spaces and communities that sustain it are dismantled, we’ll keep seeing more names added to the list, no matter what background they come from.

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