The tiny Canadian village of Tumbler Ridge (population 2,400) suffered the nation’s deadliest shooting since 2020, when a troubled young man on Tuesday shot and killed eight people and injured 25 at the town secondary school, before turning his gun on himself. Police believe the alleged shooter may have killed his mother and step-brother (age 11) at a nearby home before carrying out the school attack. The two most noteworthy facts about the shooting are its location and the shooter’s identity.

First, the location of the attack was Canada, where all guns are strictly regulated by national gun control legislation. Guns must be kept locked and unloaded, prospective gun owners must undergo extensive background checks and maintain an active license, and the sale or transfer of handguns has been forbidden since 2022.

About the only thing Canada has not done to crack down on gun usage is go door-to-door collecting firearms that remain at large. Of course, it is hardly likely that such an effort would take every gun away from the Canadian people, especially in a rural town high up in the Rockies, near the border between British Columbia and Alberta (think of it like the border between Idaho and Montana, which lies just to the south).

Strict gun control legislation does not prevent school shootings because it cannot address the real problem, which is the evil desires and intentions of the human heart (Genesis 6:5).

This segues naturally into the second point, where the desires of the shooter’s heart feature front and center. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) deputy commissioner Dwayne McDonald explained that the young man he identified as Jesse Van Rootselaar “was born as a biological male who approximately six years ago began to transition to female.” People who identify as transgender often experience gender dysphoria, or discomfort with their body’s sex. They often feel affinity for and seek to imitate the bodily appearance (but not function) of the opposite sex.

In the case of Van Rootselaar, anime may have played a role in stoking his transgender desires. The Vancouver Sun connected Van Rootselaar with YouTube and TikTok accounts using a profile image featuring a female anime character. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh connected Van Rootselaar with a Reddit user who in 2023 compared himself to the “semi-unrealistic” bodies of anime characters.

Van Rootselaar extends a series of high-profile shootings by people identifying as transgender. These include a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minn. in August 2025 and one at Covenant Christian School in Nashville, Tenn. in March 2023. The TikTok account connected with Van Rootselaar reposted multiple videos of Audrey Hale, the Covenant school shooter, whose anti-Christian motive was self-evident despite the attempts of local authorities to suppress her diary.

Van Rootselaar was known to local police, who had visited his family home more than once on calls related to mental health concerns. Law enforcement authorities have not yet established what interactions he may have had with Canada’s public health care system.

However, early reports seem to imply that Van Rootselaar had at least some mental health struggles in addition to his (likely) gender dysphoria. Jesse Van Rootselaar was also estranged from his biological father Justin, who told Juno News on Wednesday that Jesse used the last name of his mother and stepfather, “Strang.”

Broken families and mental health struggles characterize the lives of many young people who identify as transgender, making them, by definition, unstable. It does not follow that most trans-identifying young people are likely to become school shooters. For one counter-example, Fox Varian grew up in a broken home and suffered from severe mental health issues, but she ultimately detransitioned. But the lack of mental stability means those trans-identifying young people with a predisposition for violence are more likely to act on that predisposition in extreme ways.

This conclusion is unwelcome to contemporary progressive groupthink, which fears that it likely contains an unidentified seed of anti-transgender discrimination. But its obvious truth is attested to by the level of effort used by many government officials and media voices to avoid the plain facts. The shooter’s transgender self-identity led Canadian police to refer to him by female pronouns and even, absurdly, as “the deceased gun-person.”

Nearly every mainstream media organization added their applause to the emperor’s wardrobe by describing Van Rootselaar as a “woman” or at least with female pronouns. An incomplete list includes The New York Times, CNN, Reuters, PBS, the Vancouver Sun, Al Jazeera, and even Fox News. Some, like CNN, even described Van Rootselaar’s changing identity and then came to the wrong conclusion, “She was born biologically male and transitioned about six years ago, police said.”

But such “affirmation” of a lie neither informs readers nor benefits the individuals who are trapped by internal discomfort with their own biological sex. What transgender-identifying people need is to hear the truth spoken in love: that God’s role as Creator gives him an authority surpassing that of their internal feelings (Genesis 1:1), that God made their bodies male or female (Genesis 1:27), that he made them very good (Genesis 1:31).

The point of noticing the disturbing trend of mass shootings committed by individuals identifying as transgender is not to ostracize or discriminate against them. It is to take the focus off of their feelings and emphasize the condition they share with all mankind. God created each person male and female, in his image (Genesis 1:26) to reflect his glory to the world. But, in Adam, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

The sinful desires of human hearts can quickly slip to hatred and then to murder (Genesis 4:8, 1 John 3:12-15), even without the mental instability brought by gender dysphoria and other mental health issues. But these serious mental health challenges certainly do no good. Ultimately, people who identify as transgender do not need to hear the world’s messages: that they are perfect as they are, or that a little counseling or hormones or surgery will make them feel whole. What they need to hear is that they are lost in sin and need a Savior; they need to hear the powerful message of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:17).