When Despair Turns to Violence

🩸 Two Shooters, Two Manifestos: When Despair Turns to Violence

By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com

Author’s Note

This essay walks into delicate ground. We are looking at two tragedies, two shooters, and two manifestos that ended in murdered children. It is not an easy story to tell, nor should it be. My intent is not to offer pity, nor to sanitize what happened. It is to lay out the truth as plainly as possible, so that readers can feel the despair that drove these acts—without ever excusing the evil choices behind them.

What emerges is a study in contrast. Robin Westman, the Minneapolis shooter, was the ideological hater: obsessed with mass murderers, lacing his weapons with antisemitic slogans, and mapping his attack with tactical precision. Audrey Hale, the Nashville shooter, was the abandoned benchwarmer: consumed by loneliness after losing her basketball team, grieving her invisibility, and unable to handle rejection when her fragile sense of belonging evaporated.

Both stories are very different, yet both are bound by the same dark thread: self-loathing that metastasized into violence. By humanizing these killers we do not show mercy, and we certainly do not forgive. But we seek understanding. Because only by facing what truly drove them—rejection, despair, loneliness—can we hope to recognize the warning signs before the next tragedy unfolds.

Two Lives, Two Manifestos

The Minneapolis shooter, Robin Westman, and the Nashville shooter, Audrey Hale, came from entirely different emotional landscapes. One wrote in venom; the other in grief. Westman’s manifesto is ideological, cold, and tactical. Hale’s is nostalgic, mournful, and desperate for recognition. Yet in the end, the results were the same: dead children, shattered families, and a society once more left to ask how despair turns so easily into violence.

🔥 Robin Westman: The Ideologue

Westman’s writings and videos are a catalog of rage: antisemitic slogans scrawled on rifles, names of past mass shooters painted onto magazines, tactical maps of a Catholic school. His manifesto is chilling in its coldness—not a cry for help but a declaration of war.

He wrote in English mixed with Cyrillic, partly to conceal his thoughts, partly to indulge his own sense of being untouchable. The FBI labeled it domestic terrorism for good reason. His words are explicit:

“I desire to be the scary monster standing over powerless kids.”

Westman regretted transitioning, confessed suicidal depression, and yet fused that personal collapse with grandiose ideological hatred. Jews, Christians, even Donald Trump became targets in his mind. It was politics as poison, self-loathing mixed with supremacy, and the outcome was inevitable: a plan carried out with cold efficiency.

There is no sentimentality here, no nostalgia. Just venom.

🏀 Audrey Hale: The Benchwarmer

Hale’s manifesto is altogether different. It reads less like an ideological tract and more like the diary of a lonely kid who never got over middle school. The centerpiece isn’t politics, but basketball.

She wrote about her 7th-grade basketball team, the thrill of winning a third-place trophy, the pride of being part of something—even as a benchwarmer.

“I was so proud when we got that trophy… it felt like we mattered.”

But when her teammates graduated to high school, she was left behind. Her 8th-grade team was weak, her new coach indifferent, and her old friends barely noticed her anymore. In her eyes, the glory year was gone, and with it her fragile sense of identity.

She wrote bitterly about her new coach:

“I hate [the coach]… nothing is the same… they don’t see me.”

The loss of her team became the loss of herself. The loneliness metastasized into obsession. She feared she would be forgotten, erased. In her broken logic, the only way to be remembered was to commit an act so terrible it could not be ignored.

🧠 Two Manifestos, One Theme

Put side by side, the contrast is striking:

• Westman’s manifesto: ideological, tactical, venomous. Hate poured outward, painted on weapons, declared in slogans.

• Hale’s manifesto: nostalgic, personal, mournful. Sadness turned inward until it exploded outward.

And yet both paths ended at the same place: children dead on the floor of their schools, families ripped apart forever.

Both shooters were consumed by self-loathing—Westman cloaking it in ideology, Hale in nostalgia. Both sought permanence, visibility, infamy. And both found it through violence.

⚖ The Hard Truth

To humanize these killers is not to excuse them. There is no forgiveness here. But if we refuse to look at what really drove them—rejection, despair, isolation—then we miss the lesson. These weren’t monsters from birth. They were human beings who chose monstrous acts when their despair curdled into hate.

If we want to prevent the next tragedy, we must understand this: loneliness is a breeding ground for violence. Self-loathing, left unchecked, doesn’t always stay inward—it can spill outward, staining the innocent.

🩸 The Reckoning

Both shooters tried to script their legacies. Both wanted to be remembered. What they left behind, instead, are testaments to the emptiness of their choices. Westman’s manifesto reads like a hate tract from a broken mind. Hale’s diary reads like the saddest high school yearbook, scrawled with bitterness at being forgotten.

Neither found meaning. Neither found peace. Both left only carnage.

And so we are left with this truth: Despair unaddressed is despair weaponized.

If we are serious about protecting the innocent, we must confront despair as honestly as we confront ideology. Because as these two manifestos show—different as they are—the results can be the same.

Dead children. Shattered families. A nation asking, once again, how to stop the next one.