Never Give Guns to Girls Who Never Grew Up

Audrey Hale

1,823 words / 12:59

In late March when 28-year-old Audrey Hale, armed with two rifles and a handgun, blasted through the glass doors of Covenant School in Nashville and proceeded to murder six people — three nine-year-old students and three employees in their early 60s — most of the coverage hinged around the idea that Hale was a tranny.

Right off the bat, people were referring to her as the “Troonabomber” (“troon” is a portmanteau of “transgender” and “goon”) and clamored to see her “tranifesto.”

Both CNN and The New York Times apologized for “misgendering” and “deadnaming” Hale by daring to refer to her as a woman and being reckless enough to use her legal name. Even the Wikipedia page for the “2023 Nashville School Shooting” calls Hale a “transgender man” and refers to her as “Aiden Hale.”

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My article on the incident, which was published three days after it happened, was called “Shooting Up a Grade School Doesn’t Make You a Man.” Even back then, I questioned the extent of Hale’s “transition”:

. . . it only seems that she started calling herself “Aiden” quite recently, perhaps less than a year ago. And from social-media posts that were available before they were all scrubbed from existence, she apparently kept calling herself “Audrey” as well. . . . I haven’t seen one scrap of evidence that Hale was receiving testosterone injections or had undergone any kind of surgical mutilation.

But after reviewing three hand-scribbled pages that Hale had written before her rampage and were leaked only this past Monday, I suspect that the whole “tranny” angle was massively overblown and may, at most, be only a weird little footnote to what actually happened.

According to an FBI search warrant, police had found 20 journals, five laptops, a suicide note, and various other scribblings Hale had left at her parents’ $700,000 house, where she was still living at age 28. But authorities vigilantly suppressed the contents of what she’d written, which led many Right-leaning pundits to insist that whatever they contained must be unflattering to the Left, particularly the unwarranted and untouchable sanctity of the mental cases who are afflicted with gender dysphoria.

Critics noted that many other shooters’ manifestos were almost instantly available, but the most obvious answer is that in a lot of cases, the shooters themselves posted them online before going on their killing rampages. In the case of Hale — who was shot dead by police and died without leaving a will — her parents assumed legal ownership of her writings. They handed everything over to the surviving parents at Covenant School, who filed legal motions to prevent their contents from being divulged, arguing that it would only retraumatize them.

Police claimed almost from the start that what was originally called a “manifesto” was skimpy on political content. In mid-April, an official at the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said that the word “manifesto” was a “mischaracterization.” He claimed that Hale’s writings contained specific plans for a shooting spree, but mostly consisted of “journal-type ramblings.”

In late April, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee said that Hale’s writings would be divulged to the public “very soon.” But it wasn’t until Monday, when conservative shock jock Steven Crowder leaked screenshots of three separate pages from Hale’s meanderings, that the public got a preliminary peek at what made the girl tick.

Only the first page, which was dated 2/3/23 and written more than seven weeks before the massacre, gives us an inkling about the type of people she wanted to kill. I’ve transcribed everything exactly as Hale wrote it:

Aiden

kill those kids!!!     2/3/23
those crackers
going to private fancy schools
with those fancy kwakis + sports
backpacks
w/their . . . daddies mustangs
+ convertables
fuck you little shits
I wish to shoot you weakass
dicks w/your mop yellow hair . . .
wanna kill all you little crackers!!!
bunch of little faggots
w/your white privlages
fuck you faggots

The other two pages both appear to have been written on the day of Hale’s shooting spree. Page 2 has a yellow Post-it note affixed atop it on which is written, “Lunch may be around 11am-1pm?” From what’s on the rest of the page, I’m assuming that Hale intended to shoot students while they were eating lunch:

1 Later Scheduale
DEATH DAY
(6:30) — desired
7:00am — Get dressed
7:05am — 8:55am — [covered by PostIt note] w/ stuffed animals + possessions
9:00am — Eat breakfast at home [heart symbol drawn around “home”]
9:30am — Pack up special belongings in backpack(s)
9:50am — test knifecor[p] glass breaker
(dad’s old cars)
10:00am — Leave for Royal Range
(19-20 min)
10:20am — Gear up + set up guns in
trunk (assemble) + get out rest
(w/ mags inside)
11:20am — Final video tape (10 min)
(11:30)
11:35am — Leave for Covenant school
12:00pm — Arrive at Covenant
(check parking lot for security)
12:05 — arrive in designated parking space
12:05-12:10 — prepare for attack
12:– — Lock + load all weapons
12:33 [circled] Open fire towards SW enterence
Let massacre begin Time2die XXX

Unlike the first two pages that Crowder leaked, the third page looks like it came from a stitch-bound notebook rather than a spiral notebook:

DEATH DAY [the words “DEATH” and “DAY” are separated by what may be a drawing of an Iron Cross or a “Resident Evil” logo? . . . to the right, there’s a drawing of a handgun]

To day is the day.
The day has finally come!

I can’t believe it’s here.
Don’t know how I was able to get this far,
but here I am.
I’m a little nervous, but excited too.
Been excited for the past 2 weeks.

There were several times I could have been
caught especially back in the summer of 2021.

None of that matters now. I’m almost an
hour + 7 minutes away.

Can’t believe I’m doing this,
but I’m ready . . .

I hope my victims aren’t.

My only fear is if anything goes wrong.
I’ll do my best to prevent any of the sort.
(God let my wrath take over my anxiety)
It might be 10 minutes tops. It might be
3-7. It’s gunna go quick.
I hope I have a high death count. Ready to die haha
Aiden

Since I still have no idea what was contained in the 20 journals, five laptops, and assorted other notes that police say they found, I can only riff on what dribbled out through these three leaked pages.

You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.

Hale uses the name “Aiden” twice in these pages. Otherwise, there is no mention of “transphobes,” a “Trans Day of Vengeance,” and no lamentations about how society denied her the right to shoot herself up with testosterone or saw off her tits.

Contrary to many reports, there was nothing specifically in these three pages about attacking “Christians,” although she was attacking people at a Presbyterian school. In fact, she included a brief prayer to God.

The mention of rich “crackers” who attend “private fancy schools” and enjoy “white privlages” [sic] is ironic, seeing as how the undeniably white Hale had attended this school when she was ten and who at age 28 was still living off her parents’ largesse at their tony, high-priced home.

The use of the word “faggots” is puzzling, because although it was rumored that Hale was a lesbian, I’ve never seen any evidence that Hale had any sort of romantic or sexual history with anyone, whether male or female. I have noticed, though, that the kids these days, especially the extremely online ones, tend to use the word “faggot” as an all-purpose pejorative that may or may not have anything to do with sexuality.

But if she was a lesbian and sought to kill affluent white homosexuals who attended fancy private schools, it could be argued that her massacre was a bizarrely violent exercise in projection and self-hatred where she sought to murder people who reminded her of herself.

The only suggestion I’ve seen that Hale ever had any kind of social life was back in her middle school days, most likely after she’d left Covenant School, when she’d been part of a mostly black girls’ basketball team. Hale seemed to have clung tightly to those distant memories from half a lifetime ago as if those were all she had.

She seemed deeply affected by the August 2022 death of Sydney Sims, a black girl she’d known back in school who died in a head-on collision. In late March of this year after the Covenant School massacre, another black acquaintance, Samira Hardcastle, told the New York Post that Hale, whom she described as “tomboyish,” had been emotionally wrecked by Sims’s fatal car wreck:

After Sydney’s tragic death, Audrey was really heartbroken over it. . . . I just feel like she took it differently than some of us did. She was still posting about Sydney almost daily. . . . What I knew of her was more admiring [Sydney]. Maybe even infatuation. That’s specifically who she really, really looked up to. . . . I don’t think that they were very close but I think Audrey looked up to [her], like, she looked up to Sydney. But I don’t know that it was ever, like, a two-way thing.

A month before her rampage, both Hale and Hardcastle appeared at a taping of a radio show by their mutual friend Avieranna Patton, another black girl.

Only minutes before her rampage, Hale sent Patton a message on Instagram:

So basically that post I made on here about you, that was basically a suicide note. I’m planning to die today. . . . THIS IS NOT A JOKE. . . . You’ll probably hear about me on the news after I die. . . . This is my last goodbye. I love you. . . . See you again in another life.

She signed the message “Audrey (Aiden).”

A case could be made that Audrey Hale didn’t want to be a white man so much as she wanted to be a black girl — emphasis on “girl” — rather than “woman.”

On her personal website, which has since been deleted, Hale had written, “There is a child-like part about me that loves to go run to the playground.” She had eked out a living as a graphic designer, and her online portfolio included an image she’d designed with the phrase “To Be A Kid (forever and ever).” Her bedroom at her parents’ house was reportedly filled with stuffed toys, and a classmate at Nashville’s Nossi College of Art & Design said she “dressed like a little kid” and brought stuffed animals to class.

So rather than the two dominant narratives that have emerged about Hale — the first being that she was a bloodthirsty tranny hopped up on hormones, and the second being that she was a crazed Leftist indoctrinated to hate and kill white people — she may merely have been a severely autistic person who’d absorbed these ideas through osmosis and then parroted them without giving them much thought at all.

Audrey Hale may have been little more than an asexual adult with Peter Pan Syndrome who was still living in a childlike fantasyland — which is why, I suppose, you should never give guns to girls who never grew up.