Elon Musk Compares Handling of Nashville Shooter's Manifesto to Unabomber

Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday attempted to contrast the handling of the Nashville school shooter's manifesto to that of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

On March 27, a 28-year-old armed with numerous guns entered the Covenant School in Nashville and opened fire, ultimately killing three 9-year-old students and three adult faculty members before being gunned down by responding officers. Police initially identified the shooter as Audrey Hale, with later reports indicating that Hale identified as transgender.

Reports indicated that Hale was a former student at the Christian elementary school and had been planning to target the school for some time. Police said that something resembling a "manifesto" was found alongside the planning documents, describing it as "rambling" and having no particular references to political or social matters as motivations. Other reports have characterized the writings as more of a journal and said that they indicate no obvious motive.

To date, Hale's manifesto has not been released publically, as is standard practice for such writings for law enforcement and the media. Nevertheless, the situation has been taken up as a cause by various right-wing figures, who believe that the document confirms that Hale was motivated by a hatred of Christians.

On Tuesday, Musk responded to such a call by a user on Twitter, part of his ongoing trend towards communicating and boosting right-wing talking points. In the response, Musk asked why Hale's writing could not be released, given that the Unabomber's manifesto was published in two major newspapers in 1995.

"Where is the manifesto?" Musk wrote. "The Unabomber got his published."

Newsweek reached out to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation via email for comment.

Ted Kaczynski, better known as "the Unabomber," was a domestic terrorist active from 1978 to 1995 who killed 23 people by sending bombs in the mail. Kaczynski's manifesto, which espoused his anti-industrialist anarchist worldview, was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post shortly before he was captured.

Despite Musk's comparison between the handling of Hale and Kaczynski's writings, the two situations were markedly different. At the time when the two major newspapers received the Unabomber's manifesto, he remained at large and threatened to continue targeting people if it was not published.

Then-Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh pushed for the papers to publish the writings, a breach of their typical standards, out of concern for public safety and in the hope that doing so might lead to a tip. The latter hunch prevailed, as Kaczynski's brother recognized his writing style and informed investigators, leading to his eventual capture.

Given that Hale was killed by police responding to the Covenant School shooting, there is no threat of continued violence nor the potential benefit of identifying a suspect, as there was in the case of the Unabomber. Other instances of mass shooter manifestos circulating publically, including those by the 2019 El Paso and 2014 Isla Vista shooters, happened because the writings were shared online beforehand, and not found among personal effects after the fact.