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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

pragmatically, you can't kill an idea with bullets. terrorism does one thing only: it triggers retaliation. nihilistic accelerationists who want a war can use terror to provoke one.

some of Charlie Kirk's last words:

> ATTENDEE: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

> KIRK: Too many. [Applause]

I don't think the shooter was trans. but I'm trans, and I don't see this going well for me, or for my community. the DoJ was already talking about classifying us as "mentally defective" to take our guns. now there's a martyr. the hornet's nest is kicked.

murdering this man was not just wrong, it was stupid.

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I vehemently disagree with all that Kirk seemed to advocate for, but agree that this debate, not murder, is the solution.

That said, Kirk, in this exchange was not engaging in debate so much as theatrics. The question that was posed to him was intended to force him to acknowledge that being trans doesn’t seem to be associated with a unique propensity to engage in mass shootings. Instead, he responded in a way that was ideologically motivated. Quite a few people praised Kirk for engaging in debate, but if this is exemplary of his format, not bringing in facts, then I would call it more performative than debate.

Regardless, this is awful; and I hope the repercussions for the trans community aren’t dire.

At the same time the POTUS calls for murder of a metnally ill man should have been in treatment instead of being at large.

Strong families, community centred around positive religious values, open debate.

Creating a society where women feel less inclined to have abortions.

You mean where woman are not allowed to have an abortion under any circumstance? Cause that is where you are headed at.

I was adopted. Maybe I should have been aborted.

Definitely would have paid less tax!

There is a lot of space between outlawing abortion and finding ways to help women choose not to abort their babies.

murdering this man was not just wrong, it was stupid.

Depends what your objective is. If your goal is to accelerate political violence and set Americans at odds to an even greater degree than they already are, it's completely rational. I have no idea who did it; it could be domestic extremists, foreign actors, cynical strategists. It might be some isolated murderous person with a chip on their shoulder who totally hated Kirk, but that seems like the least likely possibility because of the fact that they've made a clean getaway - 12 hours with no CCTV imagery or even a good description is unusual for such a public event.

Genuine question.

2 Minnesota lawmakers shot in politically motivated killings, governor says (cbc.ca) 102 points by awnird 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments

What retaliation did this trigger?

that's a good point. honestly, very little. though the lawmakers almost certainly had a smaller, and less.. vigorous.. fanbase than Mr. Kirk. and it could be my bias, but I think the Right is more likely to react vigorously to assassinations than the Left.

You triple-posted this comment that "The Right cheered when 2 MN lawmakers were killed..." Literally the only thing the Right said was that the killer claimed Tim Walz paid him to kill them and someone else; how did y'all manage to hear about the Right's "celebrations" when y'all never leave your echo chambers?

> but I'm trans, and I don't see this going well for me, or for my community

A crackdown on trans people would be disastrous for the Rust community.

I don't know if I should be laughing or outraged. But I feel neither. I'm anxious. This is serious, guys! You're sitting on a powder keg.

S-tier dark humor. thank you, I needed the laugh.

As an outsider, how did trans people get dragged into the gun debate?! Did I miss a major mass shooting by a trans person? Was their gender relevant to the shooting?

The Annunciation Catholic Church shooting this past month was perpetrated by a trans person who targeted young children attending Mass.

Being transgender is not relevant to shootings, but there are voices that are trying to make that happen.

My opinion on why it gained traction: the group is already marginalized, is part of a larger, also marginalized group (lgbtq community), and shootings are unpopular, while guns are, so it benefits the speaker to connect the two. There are also narratives floating around that are in synergy with this connection, such as the tragic statistic that trans people have a very high suicide rate, and the false narrative that being transgender is a mental illness.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/transgender-mass-shootings...

Some shooters are transgender, some people try to paint it like transgender people are more likely than others to become shooters.

Fun fact, the percentage of transgender mass shooters is lower than the perecentage of transgender citizens.

> murdering this man was not just wrong, it was stupid.

We heard what happened on July 13th, and even from this far, culturally and physically, we could see (and this is not to play down an attempt on someone's life) – ah, there goes that election.

How the impulsive acts of violence have changed the course of history too many times, how people in power, people looking to take power twist and use such events. We don't learn from all that history, do we?

Fear for retaliation from something like this is almost as if there’s a bigger problem we are not addressing here

I saw this post a day ago and upvoted; totally agree with your comment.

I too am trans.

Unfortunately, and you probably have already heard. ATF leaked that the rounds were etched with pro-trans messaging and the shooter is allegedly a trans man.

Assuming this all turns out to be true. This will lead to greater hatred; far more than before.

Hard to predict what will happen but let me give examples from history each time this has happened.

Christians were thrown to the lions in Ancient Rome.

Many times through history for the jews.

Muslims and crusader kings of spain.

Irish and chinese, the chinese exclusion act of 1882?

armenian ?genocide?

rwanda tutis.

We now have a situation where government must do something about the trans shooter issue. LAwfully they'd have to take each trans person to court to prove mental illness to ban them from 2nd amendment right. Technically... DSM5 is pretty clear about it...

> Unfortunately, and you probably have already heard. ATF leaked that the rounds were etched with pro-trans messaging and the shooter is allegedly a trans man.

fortunately, this was bogus! the "pro-trans messaging" was that the bullets were stamped with "TRN," which was the manufacturer's mark, and the shooter was a 22yo cis Mormon male.

Assassinations, opposed to terrorism, can cause more positive? political change.

The effect would be subtle, but following Peter Turchin's theory of elite overproduction, assassinations of union elites after the civil war supposedly blunted the effects of the reconstruction.

[flagged]

To be a person that has a gender identity different from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender

It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. I'm not going to ban you for this right now because so many other accounts are doing that and worse in this thread, but I do want to let you know that it is a line at which we ban accounts - see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

The issue isn't just about one thread, it's about the overall pattern of using the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

OK. I will follow the rules.

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