One person shoots 6 people – and Fox News immediately knows what the problem is

A person entered a Christian school in the United States on Monday and shot and killed six people. It is the 129th mass shooting of the year in the United States. What sets the current case apart from the many previous “school shootings”: The alleged perpetrator is a 28-year-old trans man.

This further fuels the already fraught arms debate in the US. For the right-wing conservative TV channel Fox News, for example, the cause of the bloody deed is obvious:

In all three cover stories, the perpetrator’s trans identity is highlighted. “Nashville police identified the shooter as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, a former trans student,” Fox News said in the introduction. Similarly, Fox News reported last November’s mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado:

Here, too, the focus was on the perpetrator’s self-identification, although this was strongly questioned from the start:

According to court documents, the shooter never came out as non-binary in the family and never insisted on the pronouns “she/it” before the court hearing. In addition, LGBTQ flags were found as targets in the basement.

No comparable framing in white shooters

In contrast, according to a National Institute of Justice study, 97.7 percent of perpetrators since 1966 have been male and 52.3 percent predominantly white. For example, on May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, New York, there was a school shooting that killed 10 people. In his 180-page manifesto, the perpetrator devoted himself to the “White Supermasists” and American neo-Naziism. But there’s nothing about it in the Fox News headlines:

In the lyrics, the perpetrator is typically referred to as “the shooter” or “the white man”. The political motivation or sexual orientation is not mentioned at all. (lion)