Christianity in the Crosshairs

The Insane Rhetoric of the Left Puts Christian Schools in Danger and What They Can Do About It

On March 23, 2023, a female former student of Covenant Christian School walked into the school with a KelTec 9mm pistol caliber carbine, a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol and an AR15 chambered in the standard 5.56mm configuration. She shot and killed three young students and three staff members before being cornered by police and gunned down in lieu of surrendering. 

Christian schools are small and generally off the radar of mass shooters, regardless of motive, because they generally target maximum body count areas such as public schools, which often have student populations in the many hundreds if not thousands. Up until the Covenant attack, school shootings were considered a public school problem. Largely, this is still the case. Only about 6% of shootings occur at private schools while about 91% of high school students attend public high schools. 

Nevertheless, within the last year we have seen shootings targeting Covenant Christian, Feather River Adventist School and now Abundant Life Christian School. Some public school shootings appear to have been motivated by leftist, nihilistic rhetoric as well. Many Christian schools are hidden in leased or borrowed church buildings and other low-profile spaces. Covenant is an old and respected school, but it shares its space with Covenant Presbyterian Church in South Nashville on a picturesque hill overlooking the affluent Green Hills part of town and surrounded by large and expensive homes and businesses. It is a beautiful place, and I would regularly go up to the school when I patrolled that area as a police officer on the night shift to write reports in the parking lot or eat my dinner.

About a week ago, there was another shooting in Oroville, California, at a small Adventist school, which resulted in two kindergarten boys injured and on a long road to recovery. The shooter killed himself at the scene of the shooting. This shooting has been mostly forgotten about because of the low body count. It has also been wiped away by the shooting that happened today (at the time of writing) in Madison, Wisconsin, at another Christian school called Abundant Life Christian School. The shooter in the Oroville attack was a homeless drifter with a lengthy criminal and mental health history and may have once attended an Adventist school elsewhere in the state, but had no known connection to the school or the students he attacked. He even visited the tiny school of 35 students ostensibly to discuss enrolling a student, but in hindsight, he was probably planning the attack even then.

At this stage, it is too early to know much for certain about the attack on Abundant Life in Wisconsin. The earliest identification of the shooter seems to have been proliferated by classmates of the student who identified her as the shooter. Authorities have confirmed these reports, and it is generally accepted that she is the shooter and was a student at the school and 15 years old. She was also from a broken home, and some reports say she was a first-year student at ALCS and was enrolled there partially in an effort to reform her troubled behavior, with additional rumors circulating that she may have been involved with regular therapy since her childhood. 

Social media mining has revealed that she has the typical profile of a school shooter in every way but one. Namely, obsession with Hitler (the transgender shooter at Covenant had “Heil Hitler” inscribed on her Keltec Sub2000 at the time of the attack) or with other school shooters, especially the Columbine shooters. Pictures of the Covenant shooter show her wearing promotional t-shirts for one of the Columbine shooters’ favorite bands, KMFDM. KMFDM has unfortunately been so closely associated with shootings because of this fact that a spike in streams of KMFDM songs can be used to anticipate school shootings. The band themselves, as far as I know, do not condone or endorse mass violence. The shooter also had extensive knowledge of terrorists and mass killers worldwide. She venerated them as “saints” of some kind of human progress through violence and bloodshed. 

Many mass shooters are motivated by misguided revenge quests for perceived societal persecution against them personally, though they view themselves as avengers of large-scale society-wide injustices akin to freedom fighters and resistance groups in oppressed nations, and seem to have significant narcissistic worldviews hoping for posthumous fame as a result of their attacks. Early reports indicate the Covenant shooter viewed her parents in an extremely negative light and that she had an online, long-distance boyfriend whom she never met in person, possibly indicating abnormal social cohesion with actual peers in proximity. She seems to have targeted this school because it was her school. The attack was launched from inside the school during the middle of the school day using a handgun of some kind. The last known picture the shooter posted to social media was from a bathroom stall, where her pants and boots can be seen, and anyone familiar with the Columbine shooting cannot help but see the similarities.

The one way that this shooter does not fit the typical shooter profile is simply this: she is a she. Historically and statistically, boys are more prone to violence as a way of lashing out at the world when they become desperate, and the vast majority of this type of mass killing is carried out by male students. Female mass shooters are rare. The transgender shooter at Covenant School in Nashville was a biological female also. 

Another shooting in Georgia on September 4, 2024 involved a student who was initially rumored to be transgender, but that has been denied, and no significant evidence exists that he was other than having long, artificially colored hair. According to reports, he was bullied for being gay (though I have not been able to find if he actually was or not) and did express outrage at the lack of acceptance for homosexuals and transgender people prior to the shooting. He was from a broken home and also hated his parents. His family had regular encounters with children’s services and law enforcement for unrelated reasons. He struggled with other mental problems, missing class due to anxiety attacks. This shooting took place at a public school. 

Our society is no stranger to leftist violence. Not many years ago, ANTIFA was permitted to rule the streets in many cities controlled by Democratic politicians. This necessarily resulted in violent confrontations between normal citizens trying to live their lives and the semi-professional protesters and looters that were literally bussed into cities to destroy them, the most famous case being the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting.

When the left has been parroting the phrase “literal genocide” being perpetrated against homosexuals, transgenders, and women for years to their weak-minded constituents, they begin to believe the lie that conservatives in general, and Christians in particular, are trying to destroy their way of life and would kill them specifically, if they could. This is all projection. To arguendo accept the left’s hysterical framing, if there is a “genocide,” what group is being uniquely targeted at this point, especially factoring in size and representation? The left sees its opponents as anachronistic, bigoted, and backward, a problem that, given sufficiently inflammatory rhetoric, will lead some to pursue more aggressive solutions. And Christianity is a convenient scapegoat for socio-political ills, which, they think, includes mental and emotional crises. 

Shootings perpetrated by individuals ostensibly on “the right” are typically blamed on the imagined violent rhetoric of right-wing politicians, and also result in more calls for gun control. The right, for some reason, never tries to lay the blame on the rhetoric of the left, even though it is a direct through-line to many attacks carried out by many shooters, rioters, and would-be assassins. 

What Next?

Those of you who have students in Christian schools must shift your thinking to wartime thinking. Recent trends indicate that the left’s rhetoric will facilitate increased targeting of Christian schools despite the relatively small number and population of the same. 

School security must become a priority in even small Christian schools. The ability to hide and depend on benign measures has expired. Small private schools cannot afford the vast security infrastructure that public schools now have as a matter of course. The Georgia school that was attacked in September had fortress-like defenses internally, including: automatically locking doors in all classrooms, central alarms that overwrote all classroom smart boards with alert messages, panic buttons issued to all teachers, multiple police officers, school electronics set up to flag concerning search queries (the shooter in that case googled how to murder his own father from a school computer, resulting in a visit from deputies at his home, which should have resulted in immediate expulsion) and an untold number of cameras, exterior door locks, ballistic glass and doors and no doubt other measures. What is a small, cash-strapped private school to do when all that still didn’t stop a shooting?

Priority 1: One thing that mass killings have in common is that they mostly stop when they meet resistance. Most shooters commit suicide, freeze up completely, or surrender when they confront armed resistance. With this in mind, my opinion as a former police officer and current teacher is that schools should have armed staff. Clearly, not all teachers should be armed. Some cannot be; they would do more harm than good in an emergency. Those teachers who can be armed ought to be. Your school should have a policy about this issue. Trusted parents, teachers, administrators, faculty, and staff should be able to respond to violence with violence. They should train together periodically, and local law enforcement should be notified of an armed teacher policy. Teachers should be trained on how to respond to threats as well as how to respond if they are armed when law enforcement does arrive.

Public schools have school resource officers to respond to this kind of emergency. It should be noted that in most cases, shooters encounter teachers before they encounter SROs, whom they intentionally avoid, so this is not a replacement for armed teachers. After the Covenant shooting, the families at the school I teach at pitched in to fund the placement of an on-duty sheriff’s deputy to watch over our school during school hours. The parents made it a priority. He has become a member of our school family since joining us. I have no doubt he would die for my kids and everyone else’s in that building. But I will be beside him if it comes to that because I am armed and on duty, too.

Priority 2: Access control to the school must be prioritized. Access control is a pain in everyone’s rear end. Having a secure building means that people who leave their keys or coded badges at home are inconvenienced. It means that parents are annoyed at having to enter through one access point and wear visitor badges. It means not propping doors open to get something from your car. If your school shares space with a church, that is not optimal because unless the church was built in the recent epoch of mass shootings, it will not be designed for security. Churches are meant to be open and welcoming. You should work with your host church to begin to secure the building and convince them of the need for more robust locks and tougher doors. Ballistic film can be added to glass on ground floor doors and windows for a modest cost compared to true “bulletproof” glass. The Covenant shooter, a former student, shot through the locked glass doors of the school to gain entry. 

Priority 3: Expel problem students and families. No teacher wants to write off a student as a hopeless case. It is not the job of a private school or any school to stop criminal behavior. School shooter profiles should be known, and teachers must be trained on what to look for. Students exhibiting bizarre fascination with Hitler, the Columbine shooting, or other terrorist mass murder events should be expelled immediately and not allowed to return to campus even once. Families that are undergoing repeated law enforcement or children’s services interventions or confrontations should be removed from the school. Transgender students should be expelled. Students suffering from serious mental health problems or who are being treated with psychopharmacological substances for serious mental illnesses should be removed and placed on a homebound program or expelled. Many school shooters, including the Columbine shooters, were on medication for anxiety, major depressive disorder, or other mental health problems at the time of the attack. Children prone to violent outbursts should be expelled. 

It should be hard to get into a private school and easy to get out of one. School policy may need to be rewritten to accommodate this. Schools should consider reaching out to Alliance Defending Freedom to discuss policy documents to prevent legal trouble for expulsions that society, particularly the left, would disapprove of. Unless your school is an actual reform school, you should not admit troubled students in an effort to improve their behavior. That is not the school’s job, and it will not work even if the student doesn’t ever devolve to the level of a spree killer.

Priority 4: Mentally prepare teachers and staff for a shooting. In many school shootings, a common refrain is that early in the shooting incident, students and teachers do not believe that a shooting is going on. Chalking up the sounds to slamming doors or, bizarrely, fireworks in the building. The day of the September shooting in Georgia, the smart boards I mentioned above alerted, as they were designed to do, all students and classes to enter hard lockdown. The students believed it was a drill and did not take it seriously. Teachers and staff must be taught to assume the worst in a situation that resembles an attack. Upsetting the learning environment briefly is a small price to pay for reacting appropriately to signs of violence. During my police training for active killers, our priority was speed. This is actually a deviation from normal training, as officer survival would dictate caution and sound tactics of advancing to maximize officer tactical advantage and survivability. In an active shooting, each gunshot is a dead child. Speed is most important. Reacting appropriately and swiftly is what keeps the body count low in a shooting incident.

Any faculty or staff who intends to carry weapons must be mentally prepared to fight against a shooter. They must be prepared to bypass dying children and coworkers in the hallways to pursue the threat. They must be prepared to get shot themselves. Teachers must be prepared to be mean to students to get them to obey promptly, such as pushing them down forcefully or through doors to get them where they need to be instantly. This is not a small thing to ask, and it is why training is a must. The student may remember you forever as the mean teacher who sat on them when there was that weird alarm one day in 2nd grade, but at least they will be alive to laugh about it at graduation. Teachers who are not armed should be trained in first aid and at least know how to stop bleeding. 

Teachers and students, especially older ones, should be trained on not opening exterior doors, not letting in strangers, and remaining observant for strangers in and around the building. Students should be encouraged to speak to faculty about troubling behaviors in peers. 

Other security measures should be brought online as they become available, such as exterior cameras. In the Covenant school shooting, the shooter can be observed coming on campus in her vehicle, initially not suspicious, and heading toward the building, visibly armed with two rifles. Cameras are only good if monitored by a human being as much as possible (though they can deter more mundane criminal activity just by their presence).

Conclusion

It is becoming increasingly clear that Christians need to operate under the assumption that they are a targeted group. Why? In part because Christians are resistant to all lesser forms of brainwashing, as their most powerful tool has been the educational apparatus of the US for some time. They are enemies of or at least impediments to “progress” and a convenient scapegoat for slowed “progress.” Christian schools seek to steward the soul of the Christian West and transmit that soul to the next generation. Those who seek the destruction of the West and Christendom are turning to more and more desperate methods. Calling upon their mentally unbalanced followers with implied threats that Christians seek their deaths should they rise to power, they have sown the wind. Christian schools are reaping the whirlwind. Historically, Christians defend our own from violence. Now should be no different. We must be the new defenders of the West. While it is true that the meek inherit the Earth, it is also true that the peacemakers will be called the sons of God. 

And, si vis pacem para bellum.

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Editor’s note: This early in the investigation, it is possible that some of the information known about the shooter at Abundant Life Christian School is subject to change. Information about that shooting is still evolving and is all believed to be accurate at the time of writing. This article may be updated if that information changes.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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