Lessons We Must Learn From The Nashville Covenant Shooting

For those of you who don’t remember, Audrey Hale (also known as Aiden Hale) was a transgender man (a trans-identified female or TIF) who went on a shooting spree at a Christian school called Covenant in Nashville, Tennessee.

Debates raged about whether or not Audrey was bullied.  Rumors swirled as to whether or not she was molested, but what we did know was right away our government's behavior towards this shooting was indeed different.

Nashville's local police were initially very forthcoming regarding the case and openly shared body camera footage and videos with the press. They were planning on releasing the manifesto but paused the plans due to litigation.

The National Police Association then sued to make the manifesto public, but since then this case has drifted out of the public eye.

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Then just this week, radio host Steve Crowder got his hands on some pages of this manifesto and published them to X (formerly known as Twitter). At first, many people felt as though this could be fake, but the mayor of Nashville has now ordered an investigation into who leaked the photos, and police confirmed that they were real.

The first entry, dated 2/3/2023, discusses Audrey’s motivations in the killings. She apparently hated white people with their “white privileges” and called them “little faggots”.

This entry was taken exactly fifty-two days before the killings took place. 

Then she wrote out a meticulous schedule about where she was going to shoot and all the steps she was going to take to ensure that she was successful:

The final photo is an entry titled “death day” which occurred on March 27, 2023, the day of the shooting. She writes how excited she was to be doing this, and how she hopes that her victims aren’t ready for her.

She states that there were several times she could have been caught, but that doesn’t matter now.  She was happy the day had arrived, and she prayed that her “wrath” would overcome her “anxiety” and that she hoped she had a high death count.

The lessons we can learn from this is, first and foremost, no amount of gun control laws are going to stop someone who is taking 52 days, nearly two months, to plan an attack.

In that same amount of time, a shooter can learn how to make chlorine gas (its two ingredients), pipe bombs, and Molotov cocktails all with basic household ingredients, and a trip to your local Home Depot.

This is very similar to other mass school shootings, where the attacker planned, organized, and executed the attack.

We also learned the motive behind the Covenant school shooting. This had nothing to do with the students or the teachers, but rather her motivation was simple: kill as many people as possible, and die gloriously, which is clear when she wrote “I hope I have a high death count” and “Ready to Die Haha Aiden”.

So this wasn’t about bullying, or harassment, or truthfully anything the school did wrong, this is someone who is suicidal, and who wants to die and go out in a “blaze of glory” killing all the people that she is insanely jealous of for daring to be alive and happy.

She had been “excited” about the prospect of carrying out these attacks for two weeks. And she drove a tremendous amount of time to get to the school writing that she was an hour and seven minutes away.

This was premeditated in every sense of the word, and the idea that adding more hoops for law-abiding citizens to jump through would somehow reduce these incidents is laughable.

How we can stop this from happening, at least at schools, is relatively simple. 

Notice how no one carries out mass shootings at banks? Or in Congress? Or in police stations? Or courthouses?

The reason why is easy to recognize: schools are easy targets for mass shooters. They are “gun-free zones” so a mass murderer knows that people will be unarmed. 

Most schools don’t have resource officers or security officers who are armed and trained marksmen in the schools. The doors aren’t bulletproof, and windows aren’t reinforced with any type of bulletproof glass, making them easy to shoot through. And finally, the victims, children, are easy to pick off.

And until we spend some tax dollars on basic reinforcement in schools such as bulletproof glass, bulletproof doors, metal detectors, and resource officers, this situation is not going to change.

But this requires looking evil directly in the face.  

It requires realizing and accepting the fact that evil exists, evil people exist, and that no amount of anti-bullying campaigns and mental health resources is going to stop a suicidal psychopath from taking as many people down with them as they possibly can.

And until Americans are ready to do that, and our politicians are ready to put our money where their mouth is, school shootings will continue to occur, each one being a preventable tragedy.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.