Depression and rage: the Nashville school shooter and the Minneapolis school shooter, plus Columbine
One can’t help but notice the similarities between Robert (“Robin”) Westman of the recent Minneapolis school killings and Audrey (“Aidan” ) Hale of the Covenant School shooting in Nashville. There are differences, of course, starting with the fact that Westman was a biological male and Hale was a biological female, and ending with the fact that Westman killed himself and Hale was killed by police.
But the resemblances are striking. Both had not only identified as trans and had given themselves new unisex names, but they also wrote copiously prior to their crimes, were fascinated and inspired by other school shootings and shooters, and both targeted students at religious schools that the perps had themselves attended. Perhaps this latter was more from familiarity and opportunity than anything else. But it’s hard to believe it didn’t involve special animosity at some level, although according to the final police report on Hale:
… [T]he 28-year-old [Hale] relished fond memories of The Covenant School and wanted “to die somewhere that made her happy,” Nashville police said.
“Hale bore no grudge against the school or staff” and considered them to be “‘innocents’ and victims on par with herself,” the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said.
If you want to read the elements of Hale’s manifesto the FBI ultimately released, see this. I’ve only looked at about the first third, but the overwhelming impression I receive is one of profound depression. One would think that would drive a person to suicide rather than murder-suicide, and yet – apparently due to a desire to go out in a blaze of notoriety and gain a fame in death that has eluded the person in life – the person chooses not just suicide but to cold-bloodedly kill the most innocent and heartbreaking victims of all.
Westman wrote this about his depression:
Further along in the manifesto, Westman wrote: “I have wanted this for so long. I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away. I know this is wrong, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years. Only recently have I lost all hope and decided to perform my final action against this world.”
This overwhelming depression was also a motive, and perhaps the primary one, for at least one of the Columbine killers – Dylan Klebold – and possibly a motive for them both, although rage, nihilism, and psychopathy seems to have been more prominent for Eric Harris. I’ve written many posts on Columbine (see this), so I won’t go into too many details about them in this post, except to add the following [emphasis mine]:
The two teens’ attack on the Jefferson County High School was meant to “kickstart a revolution” – a rebellion they could ride to infamy, according to one of five home videos the seniors made in the weeks leading up to the April 20 bloodbath. …
Those videotapes show two teens filled with rage, sick of life and mocking their family and authority. The only remorse the two Columbine High School students showed on the tapes was to their parents …
Sitting next to Klebold, 17, Harris out lined their scheme to kill “niggers, spics, Jews, gays, f—ing whites” to “kickstart a revolution.”
“It’s going to be like f—ing Doom,” Har ris said. “Tick, tick, tick, tick .Haa! That f—ing shotgun is straight out of Doom!” Klebold: “I hope we kill 250 of you.” The seniors then debated if Steven Spiel berg or Quentin Tarantino would better direct the film of their lives and the massacre just weeks away.
Harris and Klebold are so famous they are still being discussed today, which was one of their goals.
But back to Westman and Hale. Why do some melancholy young people decide to take their depression out on others? The desire for notoriety seems to be a huge factor, but I don’t think it really explains it. Way back when I was in college taking courses in what was then called Abnormal Psychology, I remember being taught that suicide is rage turned against the self and homicide is rage turned towards others, but depression is often behind the rage. In murder-suicides, the rage seems to be towards both self and others, combined with depression – but again, that doesn’t really explain the mystery, does it? There seems to be a toxic brew of rage, depression so bad it leads to despair, social media, desire for fame, and often a hatred for life itself.
Were Westman and Hale receiving hormones, which can also mess people up? I don’t know and haven’t found anything about that. Most school shooters come from intact homes (I wrote about that in these posts and also dealt with the common idea that SSRIs are at fault; the evidence for that is unclear). Westman’s parents were divorced, but I don’t know whether his father was in his life much; both Columbine killers had intact homes, and Audrey Hale’s parents were together as well.
Eric Harris – of all people – quoted Shakespeare’s The Tempest thusly on the question of parental responsibility:
Good wombs hath borne bad sons …
I’ll leave the mystery there for now.
NOTE: The left is of course pushing its preferred political angle, which is gun banning and don’t demonize trans people, you vicious hateful Republicans!
The hatred starts with themselves. They believe (or have been persuaded to believe) they are living in the wrong sex’s body. It must seem like a cruel joke.
But then the hatred of themselves transfers to hating all of existence, which they were born into to feel this pain. At that point, see people innocently living their lives, being happy, working for the future, must cause such offense in them. How dare they be satisfied with an existence that is causing the trans person such pain.
And so the desire to strike back. The desire to make all people just as miserable as they are. And how to do it other than to destroy life? But which lives? Which lives ended will maximize the torment inflicted on others? Children.
They know the death of a child who is innocent and has an entire life ahead of them is the worst pain a parent can suffer. The blast wave radiates out to siblings, cousins, friends, neighbors. And so once those innocents have been killed, once such unimaginable pain has been caused, such a strike against existence has been made, once such infamy has been achieved, then they can end their own suffering by killing themselves, too.
I sincerely hope there is a Hell for the people who do this. Instead of seeking help or waiting for life to change them or merely having the honor to suffer in silence, they choose murder of the innocent. That can’t be forgiven. Not ever.
Demonic possession seems a more plausible explanation.
==
Audrey Hale was under the supervision of mental health tradesmen from age six until the time she died. Heckuva job, guys.
The internet publicity given to the previous school shooters only adds to the intentions.
Gender dysphoria is a delusional mental illness. Affirming the delusion is dangerous.
Actual gender transition via advanced medical science may be possible in the distant future. Until then, transgenders should be counseled to avoid genital mutilation and get psychological help to accept the reality of their biological genders.
Prayers requested:
12-year-old Sophia is fighting for her life in the hospital after she was shot by a trans lunatic.
See also:
Nurse Mom Was Working in ICU When Her Critically Wounded Daughter Arrived After Minneapolis School Shooting
Sophia Forchas, 12, is among the 18 people who were injured in the shooting that killed two children, ages 8 and 10
Aidan is a unisex name?
Its sadly not unique
https://x.com/DanODonnellShow/status/1961167169699680376
Some people have always been depressed. Some people have always been angry.
The crucial accelerant I see in today’s violence is the constant cultural message of victimization. It’s a constant drumbeat on the left.
You are a victim. It’s not fair. You have the right to be angry. You have the right to push back. You have the right to be violent in return.
It’s easy to feel victimized when you’re depressed. But that won’t get you out of depression.
I am not well. I am not right. …I know this is wrong, but I … have … decided to perform my final action against this world.”
The world (i.e. God) made me do it!
Of course we don’t know all of the facts yet, and I’m afraid we never will. But the shooter’s statement that he was severely depressed and had been suicidal for years makes me wonder. We’ve been hearing over and over again for the past few years that many mental health professionals have become so captivated by the trans hysteria that they have been ignoring genuine symptoms of real mental illness in their haste to encourage troubled kids to transition — while scorning those who tried to address depression, autism or anxiety as “trans-phobic.” Could something like this have happened to this person? Could he have gotten so caught up in the trans hysteria that he, and his family, and whoever was supposed to be helping and treating him, ignored his real needs while encouraging him to switch Robert for Robin, until his illness spiraled completely out of control?
I’m not exactly trying to sympathize with this person. But if that’s what happened, the chilling question is, how many more out there are like him?
There is a strong thread of nihilism in leftism: the relentless push to tear down flawed social systems as if every failure of perfection were the same thing as irremediable rot. Some sad, mentally ill people are vulnerable to nihilism; it mirrors and explains how empty and worthless they feel, and how estranged from every ordinary sense of joy or connection. They can come to hate their own lives and by extension the lives of others, whose apparent contentedness is either a reproach to their own misery or taken as a sign of superficiality and falseness–in either case, something that deserves to be destroyed.
Not buying that depression explains his conduct or that depression is an illness.
I am not well. I am not right. …I know this is wrong, but I … have … decided to perform my final action against this world.
–Robin Westman, suicide note
Geoffrey Britain:
Those lines stood out to me as well and reminded me of the first piece I read by Dostoevsky, who knew a thing or two about the human shadow:
_____________________________
I am a sick man…. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can’t explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “pay out” the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well—let it get worse!
–Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Notes from Underground”
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/600/600-h/600-h.htm
_____________________________
It’s morbidly funny and it’s OK to stop when you feel like it. The Underground Man does not have a character arc, he just reveals in more detail how stuck he is.
“Demonic possession seems a more plausible explanation.” Art Deco
This.
Mrs. Whatsit, 8:45 p.m., points to what is going on with many of these “transgender” minors. For many, they have a lot of other problems, but those are not sufficiently addressed because a sex change is considered to be the solution.
And huxley is right (as he so often is) about the drumbeat of victimization. Suicidal becomes homicidal/suicidal. It’s someone else’s fault.
Sharon W, I consider leftism, as with Islamism, particularly vulnerable to demonic possession.
I learned today that the shooter had actually written in his manifesto that he intended to operate in a gun free zone. Not necessarily an important detail but I doubt you’ll be hearing anything about that elsewhere.
Another Mass Shooting in a ‘Gun Free Zone’
https://archive.md/DsVvN
With transgenderism being so “in fashion” (I believe the latest statistics say that 40% of the freshman class of 2030 starting at Ivy League colleges this month identify as transgender), why wouldn’t these murderers’ transgenderism be a product of their depression rather than the reverse (which everyone supposes)? They believe themselves to be so flawed that they turned to the latest fad (transgenderism) in a futile attempt to ameliorate things.
Content from Westman’s manifest reads:
“I’m Tired Of Being Trans” – Minneapolis Shooter Confesses “I Wish I Never Brain-Washed Myself”
THIS ought be a T-shirt slogan to shame Trans iatrogenic activists.
I posted this comment to a WSJ story re Soelberg the Chatbot-supported paranoid who killed his mother and himself:
This Chatbot and AI are signals of civilization’s inexorable march to lifelong solitary confinement in delusions. In the absurd and dangerous move into individual isolation.
Humans are social creatures.
This has been a disastrous history, Consider that we are increasingly lonely, evolving into meaningless solitary states. Chatbots are a false solution, as we thunder down a seemingly inexorable solitariness lacking in human-to-human relationships and commitments, replaced by libertinism. No church attendance , no-fault divorce, the disastrous portend of low birth rates, the finding of refuge in drugs and booze.
PowerLine is reporting on the pretzels the press are twisting themselves into in an effort to avoid calling Westman “trans,” ostensibly for fear of backlash/scapegoating. One the one hand, don’t you dare misgender him/her. On the other, it’s “not clear” what his/her gender is, apparently because the 2019 name-change filings were crystal clear on the subject, and Westman signed his suicide note/manifesto “Robin,” but he also expressed regret for letting himself be brainwashed into the trans dogma.
@ falco > “why wouldn’t these murderers’ transgenderism be a product of their depression rather than the reverse (which everyone supposes)?”
Probably there are some people on either side to begin with, and then the two become a feedback loop.
@ Cicero – there is a plethora of posts now on the connection of Chatbots and suicides/killers.
https://notthebee.com/article/teen-commits-suicide-with-assistance-from-chatgpt
“A teenager from California named Adam Raines committed suicide and his mom is blaming it on ChatGPT.”
I recommend reading the entire post because of the details on how the ‘bot escalated Adam’s suicidal thoughts, and how he got around the alleged safety precautions in the AI platform.
In re Chatbot & AI dangers, this story is a warning about how LLMs are (inadvertently) leading users astray, if they aren’t alert to the problems.
Which includes most users who are not studying LLMs.
https://scitechdaily.com/this-one-twist-was-enough-to-fool-chatgpt-and-it-could-cost-lives/
Best-guess isn’t good enough.
What seems to be happening is that the LLMs have “learned” a lot of the classic ethical dilemmas and their “surprise” solutions, and use those to “solve” similar problems presented to them, instead of looking at the actual wording of the new problem.
Some of the familiar hypothetical dilemmas
*Note the implicit assumption of gender bias; I wonder if anyone ever actually studied the thinking of the respondents?
Another fatal Chatbot attraction – and the victim was NOT an impressionable teenager.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/29/business/ex-yahoo-exec-killed-his-mom-after-chatgpt-fed-his-paranoia-report/
The ‘bot, Delphic Oracle style, doesn’t say WHOSE last breath, and I seriously doubt that all good chatbots go to heaven, even if there are good ones.
(Yes, huxley, I know you are being a rigorous vetter and finding them useful; but every tool has a dark side).
Another scary story.
Get the message, folks: AIs are not your doctor, and they can kill you with incorrect “advice.”
(Well, so can doctors, but that’s a different rant.)
They are not reading or evaluating anything, they just rummage through their input data for anything related to your question and spit it out.
https://nypost.com/2025/08/11/health/chatgpt-advice-lands-a-man-in-the-hospital-with-hallucinations/
“According to a 2025 survey, a little more than a third (35%) of Americans already use AI to learn about and manage aspects of their health and wellness.
Though relatively new, trust in AI is fairly high, with 63% finding it trustworthy for health information and guidance — scoring higher in this area than social media (43%) and influencers (41%), but lower than doctors (93%) and even friends (82%).”
— Mitchell Strand
Which is a very human reaction. Parents of severely disabled children sometimes come to hate families that don’t suffer from that. Very sick people with long-term ailments often come to hate the healthy. Not always, of course, but it happens often enough to be noticeable.
But few such resort to murder. What drives this, IMHO, is a feedback loop of false hope and manipulation. When a kid with a messed up sense of who or she is, someone who wishes they had been born the other sex, is told ‘we can fix it’, that ‘we can make you what you wish you were’, and ‘your desires are natural and normal and reality messed up’, at first it probably comes as a desperate relief.
Of course, false hope is often perceived as worse than no hope at all, when the false hope crashes and burns. When the ‘fix’ in question involves irreversible chemical and surgical mutilation, the agony of that false hope is magnified a thousand times, because now the subject is worse off then before and unless that realization comes very early, it can’t be entirely repaired.
‘Detransitioning’ is a thing. But the mutilation and chemical damage can’t be entirely undone, one can only partially ‘detransition’. The damage lasts a lifetime.
— Mitchell Strand
That’s for God to decide. I don’t wish Hell on anyone, because I’m a Fallen man and I might well deserve it myself, for all I can know. I prayed for the victims and the killer both for that reason when I heard about this.
— AesopFan
That’s the key right there. LLMs should be treated as, and looked at, as tools. Nothing more. They can be useful for certain purposes, but that’s all they are, and like any tool they can be dangerous if mishandled.
But they are marketed and hyped as if they were R2D2. They are designed to pretend to be a person, to interact with the user as if he or she was interacting with a mind. But pretense is all it is. Just the use of the initials ‘AI’ is a lie, because there is zero intelligence in an LLM.
People debate what is needed to deal with this problem. I don’t have a universal answer, but one option that might be doable is for regulators to require LLM coders to make the things seem less personal, less like a collaborator and more ‘mechanical’. That could likely be done simply by tweaks to the user interface.
And also, regulators could require that they be labeled as LLMs, rather than AI.
Doing that much, I suspect, would at least help.
— Huxley
It’s much worse than that. The problem is not just the victimization cult, though that’s bad enough. It’s the Happiness Cult.
I don’t have a good name for this trope of modern Western society. The Happiness Cult. The Fulfilment Cult. You could call it a lot of stuff. In some ways it’s the supertrope of the Victimization Cult.
Modern advertising, marketing, cultural assumptions, even to an extent mental health and medicine, for decades now have worked from an assumption of personal happiness and fulfilment as the default, and seeking reasons for it when actual people are frustrated, unfulfilled, etc. Sometimes there is a reason keeping a person from being as happy as they could be. Sometimes there is something legitimate that can be done about that reason.
Sometimes. But not nearly all the time.
Sometimes a person is depressed or sad or unfulfilled for reasons that are beyond anyone’s control. Sometimes there is a reason that could be changed, but only by illegitimate means. Even a person who is not unhappy may not be completely able to have what they want, and even if they could, it wouldn’t necessarily satisfy that inner longing for long.
(One of the best lines from the old original Star Trek, one that stuck with me from an early age, is when Spock tells a Vulcan romantic rival who got the girl: “You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting.”)
Coupled to that assumption of default fulfilment is the cult of autonomy, that you are an autonomous individual, free to set your own standards for everything.
Real life isn’t like that. Some ‘problems’ just are, with no solution. If you are 5’10” at age 20, no matter how hard you practice and how skilled you become, there’s likely no American Basketball Association contract in your future. If you’re seriously nearsighted in a way that can’t be corrected, being a professional pilot is not an option.
If you’re in love with Sara/Joe, and they don’t feel the same…that’s life. If you’re married with kids when you meet the person who could have made you blissfully happy…well, it’s too late. You have obligations.
(I remember JRR Tolkien pointing out in a letter to his young son that most people who marry marry the wrong person, in the sense that it’s mathematically unlikely that you married the one person in the world out of billions who would make you most happy. But that doesn’t matter.)
The Cult of Autonomy/Fulfillment brings great misery, because it raises expectations out of all synch with reality. People used to know that life was not always what you wanted, and you had to be able to tell the difference between stuff that was fixable and stuff that was ‘just life’. Too many people have never been taught that in today’s world.
The Trans insanity is an extreme expression, IMHO, of that Cult of Autonomy/Fulfillment. It leads to the denial of basic physical reality, at great cost.
Parents of severely disabled children sometimes come to hate families that don’t suffer from that. Very sick people with long-term ailments often come to hate the healthy. Not always, of course, but it happens often enough to be noticeable.
==
Never encountered either.
Re: The Happiness Cult. The Fulfilment Cult
HC68:
I believe I understand you. I say those “cults” play straight into depression.
As I understand depression, based on Cognitive Behaviorial Therapy (CBT), the main cause of depression is negative self-comparisons:
__________________________________
Why does one person respond to a particular negative event in his/her life with short-lived sadness after which normal cheerful life reappears, whereas another responds to a similar event with persistent depression?…
The answer in brief is as follows: Some people acquire from their personal histories:
1) a tendency to make frequent negative self-comparisons, and therefore a tendency to have a Rotten Mood Ratio;
2) a tendency to think one is helpless to change the events that enter into the Rotten Ratio; and
3) a tendency to insist that one’s life should be better than it is.
–Julian Simon, “Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression”
https://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Good_Mood/Part_I/chapte03.html
__________________________________
Yes, there is a default belief that we should be happy and fulfilled. Furthermore we are bombarded by tv, movies and social media with images of other people being happy and fulfilled.
From there it is easy for a normal imperfect human, subject to the ups and downs of life, to negatively compare oneself with those shiny, happy people, focus on that sadness and become depressed.
As I see it, social media, with so many people flaunting their apparently wonderful lives to the world, becomes a pathogen for spreading depression.
“Good Mood” was the best book I read when I was dealing with depression. Simon himself used CBT techniques to cure his longstanding depression within a few weeks.
The whole book can be found online at the link above.