By now you’ve surely heard about Tuesday’s horrific school shooting in Tumbler Ridge—a tiny, remote Canadian town where the biggest excitement is probably a moose spotting on Nextdoor—that left nine people dead and more than two dozen injured. Monstrous would be an insult to monsters everywhere.
It’s the deadliest mass shooting Canada has seen in more than thirty years. The details are unimaginable, the community is destroyed, survivors are traumatized for life, and none of it is even remotely funny. The news coverage, however, could easily be nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the Outstanding Comedy Writing category.
Within minutes of the rampage, alerts went out describing the suspect as a “female in a dress.”
The minute I saw that, I knew.
I mean, have you ever—even once—seen an alleged perpetrator described as a “male in pants” or a “female wearing shoes?” Of course not! It’s “armed female” or “adult male” or, if the subject is still on the loose, maybe “a white male in a neon green hoodie and purple parachute pants.” But never-not-ever is it “a human in human clothing.” They only threw the dress part in there to avoid stating a politically inconvenient fact, upsetting advertisers, or toppling their own carefully constructed narrative.
By the time officials reached the podium to deliver a press briefing, the description had morphed into “a gunperson.” A gunperson. As if the word “shooter” was insufficiently inclusive or somehow accidentally implied gender? The press spent more time agonizing over culturally sanitized euphemisms than reporting the actual details of the crime.
Hellbound and Down 