More than two weeks have passed since six people, including three children, were killed by a transgender-identifying shooter at a Christian elementary school in Tennessee. Law enforcement at the time indicated that the shooter left a manifesto behind, which officials confirmed would be released after review by the FBI. Now, a local news affiliate reports that officials believe there is no "manifesto" at all, only "a series of rambling writings indicating no clear motive."

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In that case, they should have no problem releasing them. It's possible, as officials claim, that the shooter's writings don't indicate a "clear motive." It's also possible, given public pressure from several LGBT groups not to release the manifesto, that the word "clear" is doing a lot of work.

Mainstream outlets treat some tragedies as representative, and others as aberrations. When it was revealed that the shooter in last year's Buffalo massacre was a proponent of "replacement theory," Vanity Fair and other outlets tied the shooting to Tucker Carlson and other immigration restrictionists, suggesting they enabled and were partially culpable for the carnage. When a shooter who identified as transgender killed three nine-year-olds at a Christian elementary school at a moment of progressive moral panic about the rights of people who identify as transgender, the story was out of the headlines in less than a week.

If officials aren't pressured to disclose these documents, odds are they won't.