I remember my first time driving into Nashville. It was 1988 and I was coming from the west. I crested a big hill and suddenly, there it was, a beautiful shining city in a valley ringed by a haze visible in the early light. It must have been about 5 or 6 in the morning, and the haze was the residue of tobacco smoke I could clearly smell through my open window. I saw the Cumberland River snake through the city, and I heard faint hints of music on the wind, although that was really the radio station I had on.
I haven't spent appreciable time in Nashville since then, a quick drive=through skirting the city on my way somewhere else, so I don't know what it's like there. But my reading has given me some indication that, like most big cities, it has citizens who love and cherish it and would protect its people from their fears. For some, that's the easy accessibility of guns, and for others, it's the life-altering identities their children can access.
I fear the proliferation of guns, myself, and I try to understand the fears of the opposite side. Usually that's a moot debate but a week ago the two fears collided in the person of Audrey Elizabeth Hale, born a woman and often seen dressed and acting like a younger kid, but also identifying as Aiden and using male pronouns. Audrey had attended the Covenant School as a child, leaving for middle school in 2006, but why Aiden went there with guns and shot three adults and three 9 year-olds, we don't know.
I'll admit to being conflicted, because I want to honor Aiden's choice and use male pronouns. But I don't want to honor what Aiden did. I'm uninterested in the rationales school shooters tell themselves and I don't want to start now. But I don't want to lend ammunition to haters telling us it was Audrey's opting to be Aiden that somehow caused the "quiet, shy girl", as Audrey is described by nearly everyone who knew her, to purchase seven (!) guns, all legally despite being treated by a doctor for an "undisclosed emotional disorder.
They try to lay Audrey/Aiden's possible use of medication containing testosterone as having been responsible for the shooting. Per experts, there's anecdotal evidence that high testosterone levels can lead to more aggressive behavior than usual. I don't know if Audrey or Aiden took testosterone in any form but I know any doctor trusted with a patient's well-being monitors both dosage and behavior. closely I also know the desire to kill strangers is not a side effect of taking too much. Testosterone is no more responsible for this horror than it is for other male public shooters.
So how do I deal with this conflict? Do I mourn Audrey and condemn Aiden? That may be one solution. As possible as it is to hold two conflicting thoughts in your head, it's possible to celebrate one person's life and disdain a part of the same person. If there's a model for this, it's my former friend Chambers.
Chambers was a good man who was a road dog of mine. We traveled many places together, visited Rainbow Gatherings together, sometimes worked together. I went across country to start a new life and eventually heard from another good friend he had murdered a woman. There were probably signs most of us ignored or were blind to, but Chambers had become a dealer, and while there is much more to this story, the upshot is that one early evening he broke into another dealer's home, was surprised by her, and beat both her and her dog to death. It was neither drugs nor testosterone that gave him the impetus to kill someone, it was simple greed.
None of us knows what caused Aiden to dress in camo, take two long guns and a handgun -and shoot his way into the school, and then shoot six random people including three 9 year-olds but he left a "manifesto". Once it's read and its contents reported, we may have an idea what prompted his action.
Meanwhile, we have a situation different from and yet too-similar to other mass shootings. A person undergoing treatment legally purchased a number of guns and then shot several vulnerable people. Despite other information we also know, it comes to that.
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