A few Augusts ago, the day after a hurricane passed through the area, I drove through lush, green Tallahassee, past Florida State University. I had been interviewing local students and residents, mostly at Florida A&M University, the historically Black college nearby. Local classes were cancelled because of the storm, and as I rolled by FSU buildings saw 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, this time at FSU on April 17, 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 that student's point, the alleged gunman is a quintessentially American school shooter: a radicalized, young white male who, classmates told 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 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 it is 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, had been 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 reported has since been 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 in the state haunted yesterday’s violence. 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 school grounds. “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.
Meanwhile, Trump, who was president during Parkland, responded, “It’s a horrible thing. It’s horrible that things like this take place,” adding, “The gun doesn’t do the shooting, the people do.” Insert here that Onion headline about this being the only country where this regularly happens, I guess.
While I was on that reporting trip in 2023, three people were shot and killed in Jacksonville. At a protest on that trip, Florida organizers argued that the issues they were confronting were all connected: suppression of campus protests and overzealous policing; the arrests of students protesting Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-diversity equity and inclusion (-DEI) pushes in higher education, five of whom faced felony charges (later dropped); the state’s efforts to disenfranchise Black voters and erase Black history and LGBTQ+ people. That summer, the NAACP issued a travel warning to the state for those populations.
Back then, Florida students and organizers asked me to tell readers that what was happening in Florida was coming for America — it was only a matter of time. With Trump’s reelection, we’ve seen the adoption of so many of the policies piloted in states like Florida, including the dismantling of DEI programs and legislation targeting trans youth, some having been orchestrated by right-wingers like conservative education activist Christopher Rufo, creator of the anti-critical race theory panic.
Instead of meeting the moment — or even identifying these problems as the threats they are — we’ve got the New York Times hosting Rufo on its tentpole daily podcast, and Democrats begging for a “left Joe Rogan” to regain young white men voters rather than actually protecting the marginalized communities in their base.
I think of those idyllic campus porches at FSU, crowded with kids celebrating, then think of the footage of the abductions of Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil, both of whom expressed support for Palestine as students, and now remain in custody. I think of police rushing to FSU’s campus to stop a shooter allegedly trained by cops to shoot, then think of 20-year-old Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a US citizen who, CNN reported, was detained for entering Florida from Georgia while commuting to his job in Tallahassee. (Gomez was released Thursday night after a night in jail.)
FSU student Reid Seybold knew Phoenix Ikner from a school club where they discussed politics — a club Ikner was ultimately asked to leave, Seybold told CNN: “He had continually made enough people uncomfortable where certain people had stopped coming.” The shooter, Seybold claimed, would make comments “beyond conservatism” and “about the ravages of multiculturalism and communism and how it’s ruining America.” Seybold, who was the club’s president, told NBC News, “He espoused so much white supremacist rhetoric and far-right rhetoric.”
Seybold was on campus working on a class project when the shooting began, and had to enter lockdown in the classroom. “I was texting everybody I loved, letting know that I loved them. I was getting ready to die, which was harrowing,” he told NBC. “I don’t know why he would have done something like this. I don’t know where it would have come from, but I’d sure like to find out.”
Another former classmate, Lucas Luzietti, was unsurprised when he learned Ikner was the shooter, “given things he had said publicly,” reported USA Today. Luzietti told the outlet that the gunman espoused “right-wing conspiracy theories and hateful ideas,” claiming “I got into arguments with him in class over how gross the things he said were.”
Luzietti told USA Today further: “I remember thinking this man should not have access to firearms. [But] what are you supposed to do? His mother was a cop and Florida doesn’t have very strong red flag laws.”
