"Female in a dress with brown hair."

Mass shootings happen often in the United States, so - naturally - there are people who collect data about the subject.

More than 95 per cent of the killers are male.  More than half of them are white. About a third of the mass-murders happen in workplaces, and about a quarter of them in schools. Handguns are used 75 per cent of the time, followed by rifles (33 per cent) then shotguns (15 per cent). The killers tend to be 35 years of age, on average.

In that troubled country, since 1966, thousands of people have been killed and many more injured in mass shootings. They are happening more and more often, now. Since 2019, there’s been a mass-killing every day - sometimes, twice a day.

In Canada, as everyone knows, we don’t have mass-shootings happening that often, because we haven’t made it as easy for sick people to get guns designed for wartime. But here, like in America, they still happen. This week, it happened again - in a tiny town in a far-away corner of the country, where such a horror was supposed to be impossible.

There is a grim cycle to these things. Someone posts a wisp of something on X or Facebook about gunfire or a lockdown. A location is given. Police issue terse statements about an “active shooter” or to warn people to stay away. The Internet comes ablaze with anonymous losers speculating about multiple killers, and ethnicity and race. 

And then, inevitably, the number and age of victims starts to seep out, along with footage and photos of shattered human beings, clustered outside yellow police caution tape. Clinging to each other, their faces the faces of people for whom life cannot, will not, ever again be life.

Like I say: it happens so often, now, there is an established routine to these things. But in the case of Tumbler Ridge, something a bit different happened. It came early on.

The killer - who, per my usual practice, I will not ever name - was born a man and became a woman.

At one of their early press conferences, the RCMP confirmed this. I didn’t watch the entire press conference, so I don’t know if the Mounties did so in response to a reporter’s question, or if they said it without being asked. But I do know what my reaction was: Uh-oh. Here we go.

We live in an age of extraordinary cruelty, which manifests itself in all of the ordinary ways: racism, Jew hatred, Islamophobia, misogyny, child abuse, and on and on. And, in these dark days, people who are transsexual - that is, the puny fraction of one per cent of the population who have a gender that they genuinely do not feel is theirs - have come in for more than their fair share of hate. 

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