Mass shootings in America follow a grim media choreography. Two children are dead in Minneapolis, seventeen others wounded. Yet in the Daily Mail’s framing, the victims barely exist. They are props in a morality play where the real story is the sex of the shooter, the fact of a name change, the existence of a manifesto. The children’s live (snuffed out in a church pew, in the first week of school) are background noise.
This is not an accident. When the perpetrator is transgender, the right treats it as a gift. A tragedy becomes an opportunity: to reframe systemic American violence as a question of individual deviance, to place gender identity at the centre, and to imply that queerness itself is a threat. Add a stray anti-Trump message, and the narrative is complete: a cultural war story dressed as crime reporting.
What drops out is the obvious. The shooter had a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol. All lawfully purchased. Three weapons, each fully legal. No scrutiny of how. No demand for background checks, waiting periods, or limits. Instead, the Mail catalogues the weapons like museum exhibits, then drops the subject entirely. To talk about laws would be to admit the systemic cause: America’s saturation in guns. Better to talk about transgender identity than about the gun lobby.
On BBC Radio 5 this morning, a caller reviewing the day’s newspapers from the US said that in American newsrooms the spin is already set: Minnesota has strict gun laws, so this proves gun control doesn’t work. This is the contortion of logic that allows a country to see two children murdered at mass and decide the lesson is not enough freedom. It is the same contortion that allows a British tabloid to put the killer’s gender in the headline and bury the dead at the bottom of the page.
The Guardian’s report, for all its restraint, still ends where truth must end: the weapons were lawfully purchased, and the community says it needs an end to gun violence. That is the real story. Not the name change, not the sex marker, not the ideology of one killer. The truth is structural: guns, everywhere, available to anyone who wants them.
Until that is faced, every mass shooting will be re-scripted into culture war theatre, where the victims are minor characters and the star is whatever identity marker the right can seize upon. Children’s lives are secondary; the battle over narrative is what counts. And as long as we allow the Mail’s framing to dominate, the only people who benefit are the gun manufacturers and their political allies.
