How Do Our Souls Process Horrors Like the Abundant Life School Shooting?

On Monday, MSN reported that:

Two people were killed and six others have been hurt during a shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, police said.

Police had briefly mentioned a higher death toll but later revised the information.

The suspect, a juvenile who used a handgun, is also dead, police said. The suspect is believed to be a student, police said.

As we found out Tuesday, the shooter was a 15-year-old girl. We still don’t know her motive. After taking the life of a fellow high school student and a teacher, she turned the gun on herself.

It’s tempting to protect ourselves from the ugliest parts of our fallen world by any means available. That impulse isn’t limited to people who’ve lost their faith or never had it. None of us is wearing some bulletproof vest against sin, doubt, or denial. So when we hear about something truly awful that has happened, we reach for defense mechanisms that distance us from the victims. It’s a cheap way of staying sane in a world full of sin and suffering.

Maybe the story’s a hoax, we tell ourselves, or think it may be grossly exaggerated (as “good Germans” told themselves when they heard whispers about the fate of all their Jewish neighbors who’d been “sent to the East”).

When that fails, we then grab at easy answers that transform this bleeding chunk of evil into nutritious food for thought or fuel for our private fires. We try to fit the event into a pattern we already accept in order to process it and render it harmless. Or possibly useful.

The Gun Violence Contagion Needs an mRNA Vaccine

So when a killer turns out to be white, or a cop, or a Christian — or best of all, all three — those who have transferred their faith to the post-Christian woke idols latch onto that. They look for evidence of “hate,” as if a willful murder were ever an act of love. Failing that, they will mutter some magical formula that transubstantiates an act of human evil or madness into some impersonal pandemic, such as “gun violence.”

Suddenly we’re deaf to the cries of the victims and their families, and blind to the darkness that motivated the villain. Instead, we’re amateur epidemiologists, spinning theories about how to boost “public health.” And those who oppose us in the name of basic rights (such as self-defense) are virus spreaders, de facto mass murderers themselves.

As I wrote in my book, No Second Amendment, No First, opponents of an armed, free citizenry latch onto shocking crimes like this one and use them for quick political gain, with the speed and efficiency of buzzards on a battlefield:

In the media, we rarely see the faces or hear the stories of the victims of mass killings like this one. For a few days, some will morbidly dwell on the scattered thoughts and hateful writings of the killer. After that, the drumbeat of groupthink that fills our opinion pages, and too many of our sermons, will return to its default mode: collectivist tinkering.

The reporters and TV commentators, the legislators and ministers, won’t ask what fatherless homes or overused psychoactive medicines might lay behind a crime like this one. Nor will they ask why the victims were helpless to save themselves in the “gun-free” zone the legislature created, which too often really means a “free-fire” zone as citizens crouch helplessly behind couches or desks, waiting for the faraway police to at last arrive. … Instead we’ll hear from the usual well-funded suspects about the latest scheme to render more citizens helpless with calls to “cure” the “plague” of “gun violence.”

All the press releases of antigun rights activists are already prewritten, saved in templates on publicists’ laptops with blank spaces where a flak can plug in the place, the number of victims, and the name of the public officials you’re meant to contact.

Let’s Not Appropriate the Victims’ Suffering

Those of us who regard the right of self-defense against street violence and tyranny as absolute and inviolable aren’t immune to the same reaction. Because Natalie Rupnow opened fire at a Christian school — and a second-grader called it in to 911 — can we shoehorn this horror into a narrative of “Christian persecution,” perhaps by citing previous attacks on Christian institutions? Sure, that seems like a stretch and maybe a travesty, given the overt, institutional persecution afflicting Christians in places such as Syria, Nigeria, and China. In those places, it isn’t random psychopaths or possessed people going solo and shooting students and then themselves; it’s militias, police, and soldiers, operating in daylight and beaming with pride.

Why did Natalie Rupnow do this? Details have emerged over time, as rumors have swirled, with speculation fueled by a police chief swatting away legitimate questions during a press conference Tuesday:

BREAKING: Madison, WI police chief says he doesn’t know if Abundant Life ki**er was transgender, then bizarrely uses gender fluid pronouns.

“So whether or not she was, he was, they were transgender is something that may come out later.” pic.twitter.com/0wQPv2WWnJ

— Sara Gonzales (@SaraGonzalesTX) December 17, 2024

We do know there have been multiple attacks on Christian facilities by people completely unhinged by demonic gender ideology, dosed up on the hormones prescribed them by unethical professionals. The great Darren Beattie has opined on the creepy parallels between castrated Muslim janissaries and mutilated “tranissaries” in post-Modern America.

Obsessed with Death

But as information continues to emerge, it suggests that the young woman who slaughtered her schoolmates had different dark motives, as Andy Ngo revealed on his Substack:

I am the first to report that the deceased mass shooter at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisc. is a 15-year-old girl named Natalie Lynn Rupnow.

A teacher and student were killed. Six others were wounded, two with life-threatening injuries. The female shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

She carried out the mass shooting in the school’s second-floor study hall, according to a source. She did not identify as trans.

The teen girl used the name “Samantha” and the online username “crossixir.” She had an extensive online obsession with school shooters and death, particularly the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Rupnow was a big fan of the KMFDM rock band, which was also referenced by one of the Columbine shooters. (She often wore the shirt of the band.) …

A purported “sneak peek” of her manifesto was posted on her Discord account, where she discussed a desire to kill in a rant inspired by fringe extremist online culture. A screenshot was posted on X by a person who was her Discord friend. The account also posted a mirror selfie photo of Rupnow. Journalist Anna Slatz posted the entire purported final draft of Rupnow’s manifesto on X, in which Rupnow allegedly wrote about her admiration of mass killers and her family’s dysfunction.

Rupnow’s Cash App account is a picture of the Columbine shooters. She had an account on “Watch People Die” where she commented on the videos. Her Spotify playlists featured themes of s–icide and killings.

Her Tumblr account features content about mass shooters. She also posted images suggesting she acquired a pistol for her birthday.

What Not to Do

We aren’t forbidden to speculate about motives and meaning in the face of such a horror. But let’s not ape our enemies by taking a mental leap right over the bodies lying on sidewalks, shoving aside the mourners and grabbing the media microphones, the better to appropriate some tragic tableau for our own message, however truthful.

That’s what some on the left did recently when a demented young son of the rich allegedly murdered a healthcare CEO, allegedly to avenge the victims of our Obama-ruined insurance system. They saw a piece of gun violence they could get behind and started braying their bloodlust. Thankfully, no Christians have gone down this road yet. But are we really immune? If the victim were Anthony Fauci or George Soros, how would you react?

We grab at ideological answers (even true ones) as a means of avoiding the deeper and troubling questions. When we say that the world is redeemed, that Christ conquered death as we prepare to celebrate His birth, how do we deal with the hard, unmelted core of evil that still pulsates in each of our hearts and which eventually froze Natalie Rupnow’s?

That’s the fundamental question of human life since the bright Judaean Thursday when Jesus ascended into Heaven.

As the antihero of Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood says scathingly to comfortable Christian believers, “If you had been redeemed, you would care about redemption but you don’t.”

As we stumble through darkening Advent toward the feast of Jesus’s birth, we must grasp horrors such as we see in Madison and in Damascus as thorns that prick us into actually caring about redemption more deeply and completely.

We can’t undo past evils. Even when Jesus rose from the grave, He still bore His wounds. But we can embrace moments of darkness as chances to kindle another candle.

Rupnow’s private torments, whose nature we may never learn, drove her to hate human life itself, to see it as a plague to be extirpated. We answer that she was wrong; we rebuke the dark spirits who whispered it in her ear, and we work to combat those lies wherever we encounter them. We act to prove the opposite, to make life more of a blessing.

What to Do

The Church historically compiled a list of ways for us to do this. They’re called the Works of Mercy, and come in two varieties. These are the Corporal Works:

Feed the hungry.
Give drink to the thirsty.
Clothe the naked.
Harbor the homeless.
Visit the sick.
Ransom the captive.
Bury the dead.

And the Spiritual Works of Mercy:

Teach the ignorant.
Counsel the doubtful.
Admonish sinners.
Bear wrongs patiently.
Forgive offenses willingly.
Comfort the afflicted.
Pray for the living and the dead.

We can’t eradicate violence as if it were some virus. We can’t remove every means of harming our neighbors. But we can do something even more radical: We can amplify God’s mercy, love, and hope–which are the only effective answers. There’s no better way to prepare for His coming in the flesh, which we mark on Christmas Day.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

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