The Nashville Shooting And What It Means To Be A Man

The Covenant School shooting was a year ago today.

In the grand scheme of the hot take universe which emerges from any school shooting, you knew the Nashville shooting would be particularly robust because it involved gender and sexual identity, which is a massive trigger point for a lot of people these days. I was expecting us to be awash in lots of podcasts and videos about “the true definition of a man,” and surprisingly, we really haven’t seen a lot of that. Most of the coverage has been on guns (unsurprising), mental health (ditto), the idea that trans means you’re insane (right-side talking point), a war on Christians (ditto), a war on transgender leading to violence against those who started that war (left-side talking point), and the other common ideologies you’d expect people to race towards.

Will Cain tried to do a “deeper masculinity take” on his show, but it came out as a jumbled mess of right-wing talking points:

Let’s see if we can figure any of this out.