A few Augusts ago, the day after a hurricane passed through, I drove through lush, green Tallahassee, past Florida State University. I was interviewing local students and residents, mostly at Florida A&M University, the historically Black college nearby. Classes were canceled because of the storm, and the porches were filled with students that could’ve been pulled from a Bama Rush TikTok, the portrait of a stereotypical white college experience.
Following yet another school shooting on April 17, this time at FSU, a 20-year-old junior who witnessed Phoenix Ikner open fire, told NBC News that the shooter was a “normal college dude.” Two people were killed and six injured.
To her point, the alleged gunman is a quintessentially American school shooter: a radicalized young white male who, classmates tell NBC News, espoused white supremacist rhetoric. The son of a longtime local sheriff’s deputy, according to NBC, he used one of his mother’s guns to commit the shooting. At the sheriff’s department’s press conference about the shooting, Leon County Sheriff Walt McNeil told media that Ikner was a “longstanding member” of the office’s youth advisory council, and that, due to his training, it was “not a surprise to us” that Ikner had access to a gun.
So, just to sum up the state of things in this country: The American government is so hostile to immigrants and those sympathetic to Palestine that they’re deporting them, snatching them off college campuses, and separating them from their families. Meanwhile, the real threat to college campuses are people like the FSU shooter, who a fellow student told NBC was kicked out of a campus debate club over his white supremacist views.
Per NBC, Ikner was a registered Republican, and in a January story in the school newspaper, FSUNews.com, he ridiculed anti-Trump, pro-Palestine protesters. “These people are usually pretty entertaining, usually not for good reasons,” the gunman said of those protests in the story, which NBC reports was since removed by the student paper “to maintain ethical journalistic standards and avoid amplifying the voice of an individual responsible for violence.”
Florida – not its residents, but its politicians – breeds mass shootings, to the extent that multiple past shootings haunted yesterday’s. The shooting resulted in the cancellation of a memorial scheduled for that day for FSU senior Maura Binkley, who was killed in a 2018 Tallahassee shooting by a man with a history of misogyny.
Survivors of the 2018 Parkland shooting were also on FSU’s campus as the shooting shut down campus. “FSU, I’m so sorry our government has failed you,” Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) — the first national organizing director of March for Our Lives, the anti-school shooting group that formed after Parkland — posted on Bluesky in response to the news.
