Video of Monday’s mass shooting in Philadelphia is a tragically familiar scene: another demented gunman clad in body armor and firing an AR-15 rifle.
“Mass shooters study other mass shooters, so there is an element of having to have your mass shooting conform with the expectation of what a mass shooting looks like,” says sociologist James Densley of the non-partisan Violence Prevention Project Research Center in Minnesota.
But what a host of blindly partisan right-wing loonies focused on was a trio of selfies showing accused killer Kimbrady Carricker wearing a bra and women’s clothing four months ago.
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“Another trans shooter,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) declared on Instagram.
Greene’s use of the word “another” apparently referred to Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who was transgender. Hale departed slightly from standard mass shooter attire by wearing only a black “tactical” vest rather than full body armor but did carry two AR-15s.
According to someone who knows 40-year-old Carricker well, the selfies in women’s attire were an exercise in “self-affirmation” at the urging of a relative. But that person told The Daily Beast that Carricker was not trans.
That was echoed at a Wednesday press conference by Asa Khalif of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s LGBTQIA advisory committee, who said Carricker identified only as male. Khalif condemned a doubly diabolical effort to link a murder spree to a misapprehension about Carricker’s sexuality.
“The language that is spewed out by the conservative press is violent and is dangerous and is targeting trans women of color,” Khalif said. “It’s rallying the community to be violent and we’re better than that.”
Khalif added that far from being killers, trans women and men “are the most vulnerable to violence.”
“They want to live their lives and they have every right to do so, and we will not allow conservative bigots to use that type of language to attack trans people,” Khalif said. “This is about someone who used violence to hurt and harm our city and our community, and I’m sure they will be punished to the fullest extent of the law but we will not allow trans women, and particularly trans women of color, to be the scapegoats of bigots.”
The person who knows Carricker well, who asked not to be identified, said the suspect is deeply attracted to things military. She suggests that the body armor says much more about him than a bra.
“There’s a lot of people [who are] vicariously military: ‘Hey, I’m a soldier! I get to wear a bulletproof vest!”’ the person said.
The right-wing loonies who fixated on the bra conveniently ignored Carricker's Facebook posts—now taken down, but cited by the Daily Mail and Vice News—of garments stenciled with various messages such as “I LUBRICATE MY AR-15 WITH LIBERAL TEARS” and “THE FIRST AMENDMENT DEFINES US - THE SECOND AMENDMENT DEFENDS US.”
There was also “THE TRUMP .45” along with an image of a semi-automatic pistol of that caliber. And a Trump 2024 post with an American flag and the slogan “God, Guns & Trump.”
And then there were various anti-Biden posts, including one regarding a recent gun control speech.
“I told you he wanted your rights,” Carricker wrote, sounding very much like Greene and her ilk.
While ignoring all that, the right-wing folks combined the selfies with a single image of a power fist, a shared video of a burning police car, and the fact that Carricker followed a Black Lives Matter Facebook page and declared him to be a “trans BLM activist.”
The last post on his Facebook page before the mass shooting was a YouTube promo for a new assault rifle “coming soon.” The man wielding the weapon in the video is, of course, wearing body armor, just as Carricker was when he allegedly strode onto a Philadelphia street with an AR-15 and killed five people, one of them a teen.
As with any mass shooter, body armor is not so much protection as part of a spectacle. They know this is a final act that will end with them either dead or in jail for life.
“Going out with a bang,” Densely, the sociologist, notes. ”Quite literally.”
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