An undated photo of Jesse Van Rootselaar. New York Post.
A transgender person has killed two members of his family and committed a major school shooting at a school in Canada leaving an additional six people dead. New York Post. The attacker was 18 year old Jesse Van Rootselaar, an 18 year old male to female transgender person. Rootselaar had a long history of mental health concerns and police had visited his home multiple times in the past couple of years. He had also been taken into custody for his mental health concerns and police even took guns from their legal owners due to how concerned they were about him. The attack is the 2nd most deadly school shooting in Canadian history. No motive has been revealed for the crime.
My Comment:
Rather bizarre and tragic case out of Canada. And it looks like it was a preventable one. Rootselaar was, to be frank, a nut and a danger to himself and others. It's surprising that he was out on the streets and it's not a surprise that he ended up killing his family and six people at a school.
It's also pretty clear that Van Rootselaar had been radicalized online. He was an active Redditor and was active on transgender subreddits, including ones focused on guns. He also had an active account on X/Twitter. The Reddit account concerns me more as he was there long before he was 18. Reddit allows people under the age of 18 to join and I think that is a mistake given how radical so many political subreddits are, with the transgender community there being among the worst of the worst.
However, we shouldn't really lump in Rootselaar with other transgender shooters, or people like Tyler Robinson, who wasn't transgender himself but shot Charlie Kirk anyways because he was in a relationship with a transgender person. Those shooters committed their crimes in support of transgender ideology and left wing political thought.
Rootselaar though? He was supposedly far right. From what I have seen of his X account and Reddit posts he was actually pretty antisemitic and his family was libertarian. Plus, given the attack happened in Canada, his politics wouldn't really link up to American politics anyways.
Indeed, it doesn't appear to be political at all. He was a nihilist who was obsessed with school shooters and regularly watched gore videos and videos of mass shootings. I am guessing that he was obsessed with this content, which he was viewing as an underage teenager. He probably wanted to experience what he was viewing first hand. And he probably killed his mother and stepbrother to keep them from stopping him.
Given this is Canada, I am guessing that the response to this shooting will be even more gun control, which obviously didn't prevent this shooting. But I think they should take some kind of action against Reddit an WatchPeopleDie, which are the websites he was radicalized on. I am, of course, deeply suspicous of things like digital ID's of course, I don't think the government should be able to see what websites I am visiting. But there is zero reason why Reddit should be allowing people under the age of 18 from using the website. Simply making the whole site age 18+ and fixing the obvious problems of moderation the website has (seriously, 4chan has better moderation of extremist content and it's not even close) could have prevented this attack.
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