Democrats Continue to Get It Wrong on School Shootings

• A 15-year-old shooter killed two at a Wisconsin Christian school, spurred on by radical feminism and neo-Nazi influences

• Democrats pushed for gun control, though Biden's proposals wouldn’t have prevented this attack

• The media continues to push misleading school shooting statistics

The story

On Monday, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow opened fire on her classmates and teachers inside the K-12 Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin. She managed to slay a teenage student, a substitute teacher, and injure six others.

A 2nd-grade teacher dialed 911 at 10:57 am, and the police arrived within four minutes of the shooting. When they arrived, the shooter had already taken her own life.

Early reports on X began to surface with some information about the shooter. A picture was circulating, now confirmed to be Rupnow, of her wearing a t-shirt of the German industrial rock band KMFDM, which was worn by one of the Columbine school shooters.

She was supposedly in an online Discord server where she posted a snapshot of her manifesto. Independent journalist Andy Ngo later confirmed its existence and shared screenshots of two pages from her manifesto.

Rupnow engaged with radical ideologies that are not clearly left-wing or right-wing. On the one hand, she espoused radical feminist rhetoric, asserting that “women are the only hope for this wretched world” and that “every single male must be wiped out, from babies to the elderly.”

Elsewhere, she described her hatred for her parents, specifically for her father, who she claimed was a heavy drinker. She also used racist language, using the word “n****rs” several times in her manifesto, and specifically praised Arda Küçükyetim, a Turkish neo-Nazi responsible for a mass attack in Eskişehir earlier this year, describing him as an inspiration for her own attack and referring to him as “an ultimate saint.”

The politics

Immediately following the attack, many on the left took to calling for gun control measures. President Biden asserted, in only the third sentence of his statement, “We need Congress to act. Now.” He then touted his administration passing “the most significant gun legislation in 30 years,” without so much as mentioning mental health, the responsibility of parents, or school security measures. Every solution is aimed at rolling back gun laws.

Wisconsin Rep. Mark Pocan (D) posted a similar message, stating, “Thoughts and prayers without action means more school shootings, more dead kids. More ACTION is needed by our elected officials.”

Some right-wingers, like commentator Joey Mannarino, have highlighted the hypocrisy of Democrats now demanding control while they remained silent after the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Tomi Lahren also called out the left for selectively supporting gun control based on certain shootings, labeling them “as dishonest as [they] are disingenuous.”

Misrepresented in the media

National Review Senior Editor Charles CW Cooke highlighted the glaring hypocrisy in President Biden’s calls for gun control in response to this school shooting, which involved a teenager using a handgun. Biden’s demands for “universal background checks,” red flag laws, and an assault weapons ban had no relevance to this case, as the shooter was underage and obtained the gun in a way that could not have been tracked.

Further, President Biden recently pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, for lying on a federal background check form when purchasing a firearm — undermining his credibility when calling for universal background checks.

Additionally, in CNN’s coverage of the shooting, they displayed a chart showing how there have supposedly been 83 school shootings this year. This information is extremely misleading.

Many of these “school shootings” are not one student murdering his or her classmates, as was just seen in Madison, WI. Many of these incidents involve gang violence, suicides, accidental gun firings, or stray bullets fired from outside school grounds that hit a school building or window. While tragic instances of unnecessary violence, they are not what most people would consider to be deliberate shootings of one's classmates.

And many other “school shootings” simply do not exist. In 2018, left-leaning NPR investigated the government’s claim that there were 235 school shootings; they confirmed 11.

Why it matters

This is the second major shooting to rock the nation in as many weeks, with another young American influenced by a depraved worldview to justify cold-blooded killing. Though the Wisconsin Christian school shooter’s exact motives are still unknown, her writings reveal a misanthropic worldview that not only encouraged, but required, large-scale murder.

Rather than addressing why Rupnow frequented dark corners of the internet where she spun her ideological cocoon, Democrats are advancing their legislative agenda — measures that would have had no impact on preventing this tragedy. Young Americans, especially young females, are mentally ill at unprecedented levels, and federal legislation banning “assault weapons” will do nothing to cure such deep-rooted despair.