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Republicans are now weaponizing the Nashville elementary school shooting to attack transgender people.
Since details emerged of 28-year-old Audrey Hale, who was behind the shooting at Covenant Elementary School, conservatives have used it to create a smear campaign against the trans community.
“How much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville school shooter taking?” Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted earlier this week.
“Everyone can stop blaming guns now.”
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There is no indication that testosterone or hormone medication had any involvement in the shooting.
The shooter's gender identity is unclear at the moment as authorities reported Hale was assigned female at birth however used ‘male pronouns’ on social media.
According to The Violence Project, female shooters are extremely rare, and only a handful of those perpetrators identify as trans.
Around 98 per cent of mass shooters in the US are men.
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The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh also declared war on trans people following the elementary school shooting in Tennessee that saw three children and three adults killed.
“I came to the conclusion years ago that the trans movement is the greatest evil our country faces,” he wrote.
“I only become more and more sure of this fact with each passing day, and more and more determined to oppose it until my last breath.”
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Amongst the voices painting trans people are mentally unhinged and dangerous was Candace Owens - of course - who compared hormone treatments to ‘human experiments’.
“We deserve to know exactly what drugs Audrey Hale was on,” she wrote.
"No one talks about big pharma’s contribution to shootings. Virtually all of these psychopaths are on anti-depressants, hormones (trans), anti-psychotics, etc."
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However, Jennifer Mercieca, a communications professor at Texas A&M who has studied Republicans’ use of anti-trans rhetoric, said conservatives want the public to forget their complicity in all of this.
She told Vox: “My guess is that this tragic story is being used to further the ultraconservative narrative that transgender people are a dangerous threat to the public.
“Statistically, that narrative is untrue, but this is a salient example that has propaganda value for the extreme right who would much rather focus on the gender identity of the shooter rather than the fact that guns are too easy to access.”
While writer for The Nation, Elie Mystal, said that Republicans want to make the latest shooting a trans issue to divert from the ‘blood-soaked murder factory’ they've created.
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“We live in a country where there are more legal restrictions on where a person can bare their breasts than brandish their guns,” she wrote.
“We live in a society where people are more interested in banning books than guns. We live with state governments that will force people to give birth against their will, but shrug when actual children are killed at school.”
The Nashville shooting is the 129th shooting in the US this year.
Topics: LGBTQ, News, Politics, Gun Crime
