The Falsest Narrative

This is typically referred to as the “STEM School Shooting,” or the “STEM Highlands Shooting.” It was in Colorado. It is generally not well-remembered for three or four different reasons, including happening in 2019 (pre-COVID), only one fatality, and because it involved a minor at the time, some details didn’t come out in full until later.

The basic story is that Alec McKinney, who was born Maya McKinney, was 16 years old and basically seemed to hate the STEM school they were attending. The home life situation also seemed bad. Apparently Alec/Maya lived with 14 other peers (siblings, cousins) and the dad had been deported to Mexico a few years prior. A single mom was basically managing a household of 14 pre-teens and teenagers, best I can tell. That’s a recipe for a mess.

Alec began transitioning and at some point, he became friends with a kid named Devon Erickson. It does not appear Devon was homosexual, and in fact many reports paint him as a ladies man. There are all sorts of rumors in the Internet ether that Alec (bio female) was hooking up with Devon (bio male), even though Alec identified as a male. Anyway, their relationship — be it intimate or just friends — got intense and there’s a lot of very random Snapchats involved. It seems like both were completely broken teenagers (Devon was slightly older), and Alec seemed to convince Devon to join him (her?) on a mass shooting effort. Ultimately it was a “school shooting” but not really a “mass shooting” as only one person died. That’s still obviously awful, but in vaguely positive news, the STEM lab at the school is now named for that kid.

If you want to try and follow the confusing relationships here and see some Snapchats that will make you cringe, here is a video with all of it:

I do think one part of this discussion is important, however — besides what is seemingly the general decline in youth mental health, examples of which we receive every day. There is a big talking point on the right side of the ideological spectrum about trans = insane = prone to violence, which is mostly driven by the Nashville Shooting (I believe 2022 or 2023), which also involved a trans student.

I am not a clinician or a doctor, but I would assume that if you don’t feel comfortable in your own actual body — and especially if your parents are pumping that sense of disconnect in and for you — you are going to be very confused and depressed. I’ve personally never understood why “OMG the trans!” is a flashpoint for anything, because it impacts the air space of a very small number of families and doctors, and typically doesn’t come for all the people who complain the most about it. (Although we had rumors for a while that Ted Cruz’s daughter was trying to transition.)

While I have seen ties between transgender and autism, there are no ties between transgender and violence that I have seen, except the anecdotal 2–3 cases that rose above the YouTube true crime fray and entered into the Daily Wire zeitgeist.

If anything, the Alec McKinney case is fascinating because you can see how families dissolve and how kids are impacted, and what declining mental health does to teens without developed brains. That part of it, regarding humanity and the paths we all walk, is interesting. The fact that he was born a girl? Really the least of my concerns here. And I don’t think that’s where the violence came from.

Now, if you want to talk about how a chaotic home life and a deported father caused some potentially attention-seeking behavior, I’d entertain that slightly more than “All trans kids are soon-to-be school shooters.”

What’s your take?