Last week’s school shooting in British Columbia would have probably been minimally remarked upon if it had occurred south of the 49th Parallel. The main reason is simple – we have a lot more school shootings. I’ll leave the politics of gun control aside here, except to mention one thing, which is to say that America has had lax gun laws for a very long time, but frequent school shootings have only been a standard feature of American life for 30 years or so, which suggests to me that while gun availability might be a catalyst for the spike in school shootings, it is not a cause. Causes, it seem, run far deeper than these sorts of technocratic issues. And I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve been so morbidly fascinated with the events in the remote Peace River Country of Northern BC, both in terms of the events themselves and the ways in which the media responded.
Firstly, this is the largest school shooting in Canada since the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre, perpetrated by célibataire involontaire avant la lettre Marc Lépine, who, product of a very 1960s pairing of a former Catholic nun and a largely absent Algerian businessman, who then failed out of multiple technical fields and blaming feminism for his failures and seeking salvation through a Ruger Mini-14, really was decades ahead of his time. That alone makes it distinctive, but even more interestingly, this shooting was carried out by a woman. Not that it’s completely unique – Alina Afanaskina, age 14, shot up her school in Bryansk – but it’s certainly an oddity. But I would say neither of those things would make this stand out in my mind.
What first fascinated me was the media treatment – they were awfully cagey about the specifics, which, to a certain degree, should be expected from an ongoing investigation. The shooter was reported to be a “female in a dress,” which immediately led to speculation among the hardworking bottomfeeders of the internet that the shooter was trans. This turned out to be true, which had the unfortunate effect of confirming the preconceptions of said bottomfeeders – both in their preconception of trans people as socially maladjusted freaks, but also in their presumption that all trans women are actually men, because, y’know, it’s not like feeeeeeemales can shoot up a school this efficiently. To belabor the point, they posted pictures of the presumed shooter, which emphatically were not photos of the shooter themselves – rather, they just found pics of a sufficiently fat and unpassable Canadian trans woman who could reaffirm their disgust.
To which the response from the more gender-accommodating left was that the shooter was a “literal Nazi,” precluding them from any membership in their own community. As far as I know, there’s no evidence for this claim either. What’s the worst thing one can be? A Nazi. Therefore, the shooter must be a Nazi, because they had bad vibes and stuff.
For their part, our friends at the Anti-Defamation League claimed that the shooter was antisemitic and anti-Zionist, ensuring that their own political agenda was confirmed. This, of course, was also bullshit.
In other words, everyone projected their neuroses onto this person at a time of terrible tragedy, because we needed an explanation, we needed some order in this disordered world. We needed to know that whatever the bad guys were, this bad guy was a member of Team Bad Guy, and could function as an avatar for all the Bads. We wanted to ignore the entropy that was building until the final heat death of the universe.
And when more was found out about actual shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar, she seemed almost too perfect an avatar for the horror of life in the present moment.
This is her, at some point in her transition – a transition that will be called into question, but I’ll take her at her word for now – amid what is presumably the gorgeous lichen-spattered granite of the far north.
What photos of me were taken, wearing a hoodie, somewhere in the outdoor spaces in which I found refuge? The reindeer lichen, Cladonia rangiferina, grows in only a handful of places below the boreal forests, one of which is Ledges State Park in Boone County, Iowa, where I’ve been photographed countless times between the rocks.
If I look for anything about Tumbler Ridge, BC, before the shooting, I’m confronted with this sort of duality. On the one hand, it’s treated like a sort of golly-gee Twin Peaks PNW community, right down to news articles about beavers chewing through data cables, and on the other, it’s a company town built around coal extraction, subject to the vicissitudes of mineral-based economies.
I didn’t grow up in a faltering coal town in the taiga. I grew up in a larger small town that remains relatively prosperous compared to the nearby towns, which is to say that it’s still something of a dump, but less of a dump. I still found it alienating. The railroad sidings of Dakota quartzite gravel, the big box stores, the cul-de-sacs… they all seemed so haunted. A slug of gin and Sprite brings back instant memories of empty lots and 2 a.m. gas stations and low winter sunsets traced with smokestack plumes. Strange that, more than 20 years after I left for good, it still chills me.
She had an affinity for violent fantasies, creating a mall shooting game on Roblox (a concept I only vaguely understand) and having signed up for a gore website. She fetishized guns. You get the idea. Other than the technology involved, is there any qualitative difference between these reports and those on school shooters past?
I came of age in an era when something was awful and ebaum had a world. In our Target cargo shorts, murder and rape were abstract concepts, and therefore quite likely to be hilarious. The printouts of, say, someone with half their head lopped off by industrial equipment, or for that matter John Bobbitt’s severed penis, were distributed among the playground boys as early as elementary school. And when I finally first fired a measly .22 as a youth, and when the hot shell casing burned my exposed forearm, I could only think… I could get used to this. This story is hardly even remotely unique.
This all, honestly, feels kinda standard, but then I realize for a lot of people it doesn't. I thought about going on into detail, but at a certain point it stops being forensic and starts being lurid.
All of this is to say that there were a few critical switches that were set better for me, no propensity for outward violence certainly being one of them. I can’t say how many of those critical junctures were contingent upon my own decisions.
I don’t want to rely on the many-worlds hypothesis here – I hate it as a plot device, and don’t know enough to know if I even ascribe validity to it – and instead I’ll rely on the idea of ghosts that we’re among. I mentioned avatars earlier – that’s more a symbol of a set of conditions, but I think of ghosts as more a product of a set of conditions.
And it’s discomforting to see those ghosts, whatever their form, all around.
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