As you’ll recall, on March 30th, a 15-year-old student walked into Hill Country College Preparatory High School near Bulverde, Texas, carrying a .357 revolver he had taken from his grandfather’s home. He made it into a second-floor classroom, shot a teacher, and then turned the gun on himself. The teacher survived and has since been released from the hospital. The student did not. From the beginning, the one detail that mattered most was also the simplest one. The gun came from home, and it was accessible.
Since then, a lot of people have been asking why we still don’t know the names of either the teacher or the shooter. The answer isn’t as mysterious as some want to make it. The shooter was a minor, and the district has been citing privacy protections under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. On top of that, the investigation is still ongoing. That part seems to get lost because people hear that the shooter is dead and assume everything must be wrapped up.
It’s not.
There’s still the matter of how a 15-year-old got his hands on a firearm in the first place. That doesn’t get resolved just because the person who pulled the trigger is gone. If anything, that’s where the real investigation begins. A gun doesn’t just appear in a kid’s backpack out of thin air. It came from somewhere, and in this case, we already know it came from inside the home.
That hasn’t stopped some people from getting impatient and trying to fill in the blanks themselves.
Over on the Old Man Trench Facebook page, someone decided to ask why there’s ‘silence’ about the shooter, then immediately answered their own question by guessing the kid must have been transgender. No evidence, no facts, just a leap straight into a culture war talking point.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it. Being trans does not make someone a killer. That’s not how any of this works. The overwhelming majority of violent offenders are not transgender, and trying to pin acts like this on an entire group of people says more about the person making the accusation than it does about the case itself.
So what is the rush to get a name? Is it really about transparency, or is it about finding someone to turn into the next target? Because it starts to look a lot like people want a name so they can start a witch hunt, assign an identity, and then pretend they’ve explained something.
That kind of thinking doesn’t answer anything. It just drags the conversation further away from reality.
And reality is still sitting in the same place it was on day one. A teenager had access to a gun at home, took it to school, and shot a teacher and himself with it. Everything else that’s come out since then has either circled around that fact or tried to distract from it.
Some people will latch onto identity. Others will argue about privacy laws or whether names should be released. There will be debates about response times, school security, and who said what beforehand. All of it gives the impression that this is complicated, that there are layers upon layers to peel back.
There aren’t.
There’s just a question that keeps getting ignored while everything else gets debated to death.
How did the kid get the gun?
Until that gets treated like the center of the story instead of an afterthought, you’re going to keep seeing people try to steer the conversation anywhere else they can.
(Sources)
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