The Media Research Center continued to obsess over the Minnesota school shooter’s transgender identity — and whine that non-right-wingers were talking about the guns — in an Aug. 29 post by Jorge Bonilla:
A full day after the horrific Minneapolis church shooting, the legacy newscasts were mostly trying to render the shooter into an afterthought. But, when forced to mention him in any meaningful way, they continued to adhere to liberal orthodoxy and refer to him by his preferred pronouns.
Watch as ABC’s Alex Perez demonstrates the utmost respect for the gender-dysphoric mass shooter with a fetish for dead children on World News Tonight:
[…]There seems to have been a collective decision to ensure today’s stories took focus away from the shooter. Overall, there was a greater effort to highlight the resiliency of the community and of some of the survivors. That is a good thing. But insisting on calling a man a woman is not.
It is mind-boggling that the networks still struggle to report a motive in this shooting. Rob Westman’s deranged writings made it very clear that he did it for no other reason than for his own pleasure- the natural consummation of a nearly-lifelong obsession with mass shooters. This information has been publicly available for a while. What possible reason could the legacies have not to report this except in order to shield the shooter?
If Westman committed the massacre because she had an “obsession with mass shooters,” as Bonilla admits, that means her transgender identity is irrelevant. So why is Bonilla so obsessed with that?
Bonilla’s nepo-baby boss, David Bozell, ran to the safe space of right-winger Mark Levin (“a longtime friend of the Bozell family”) to whine:
Bozell also criticized the media’s fixation on trivial details: “You would think that the country would sit down and have a discussion about gun control. I really do think that this could happen if the media reported this tragedy, and tragedies like it, soberly, accurately, patiently. Instead, they’re tripping all over themselves as to what to call this guy or girl. Robert or Robin, and so that’s what they’re fixated on.” He added, “Jake Tapper, for an hour, just called him ‘the shooter,’ not even addressing the name for an hour on CNN the other day.”
The MRC also published in Aug. 29 column by right-winger Erick Erickson that pushed transphobia:
Through it all, news of the shooter came out. He had transitioned to female. He had used a picture of Jesus as target practice. He had written “where is your God now” on the gun magazine and “kill Donald Trump” on the barrel. He was depraved. He became another transgender shooter at a Christian school, having barricaded the children into a church at mass and begun firing through the windows.
I gave the Mayor of Minneapolis a pass for scoffing at people offering prayers. Children in his city just died. He was under stress, and his emotions were raw. People online excoriated him. He needed some grace to grieve and be angry. I gave him no such pass when, in the evening, he went on CNN to condemn those who might attack the transgender community. Were the shooter a Trump supporter, you and I both know he would be blasting the president and his supporters. The Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota, just a year ago, wore a trans-rights t-shirt with a knife on it that implied using violence against those who oppose the trans-community. The transgender murderer had a sticker on his manifesto implying the use of violence to defend the trans community.
Alex Christy returned to the old MRC narrative of deflecting from guns:
In the aftermath of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski went after Republicans for their history of resisting more gun control, and ignored the fact that Democrats run Minneapolis and have had complete control of Minnesota’s state government as recently as 2024. Scarborough also bizarrely pined for a wish list of gun restrictions that Democrats have long wanted to enact nationally even though they have nothing to do with the circumstances of the Minneapolis shooting.
[…]The MSNBC host’s complaints about illegal guns, background checks, and people under 21 buying AR-15s fly in the face of the gunman being a 23-year-old man who passed a background check and legally purchased his weapons. Scarborough even seemed to suggest that people should be required to get a background check to receive a gun from a close relative like an uncle.
Christy grumbled further the next day:
Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr pinch-hit for MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart on Friday’s PBS News Hour and, during the discussion on the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis, blamed the GOP and its embrace of gun culture for mass shootings in America. New York Times columnist David Brooks wasn’t much better. While he refrained from that kind of rhetoric, he still pushed more gun control while using female pronouns to describe the shooter.
Christy was also annoyed that the right-wing hollowness of calling for thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting when they do nothing else to curb those shootings got called out:
Atkins began repeating the liberal line about thoughts and prayers, “I feel like all of it is muted. I think that Americans, who are sending their children to school to start their school year, are hearing about the thoughts and prayers and these ambiguous actions that may or may not be coming, and they are gutted by that, because they know that none of that protects their children.”
Stohr then blamed people who had nothing to do with the shooting, “I think that this is not about trying to prevent the last shooting and figuring out what led to that one. It’s about, how do we change the culture in America surrounding guns? Because this does not happen other places. It does not happen in other countries that have much more lax gun laws than we do on the books.”
Brad Wilmouth found another narrative to push in a Sept. 2 post:
On Friday morning’s The National Report on Newsmax, reporter Jason Mattera presented a piece highlighting evidence that the mass shooter in Minneapolis chose to target a school in part because it was a gun-free zone, citing the Crime Prevention Research Center’s Dr. John Lott.
Wilmouth didn’t mention that Mattera is actually a right-wing activist, not a “reporter,” or that Lott’s pro-gun “research” has long been discredited.