Once again, horror has unfolded in an American school, as two people were killed and multiple others injured in a mass shooting Monday morning at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital.

As of this writing, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes has confirmed that a student and a teacher were killed. Six students were injured—two in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, while four have sustained non-life-threatening wounds.

According to CNN, this marks the 83rd school shooting of 2024, surpassing 2023 for the most school shootings in a single year since tracking began in 2008.

Details remain limited, but here is what is known: Before 11 a.m. on Monday, police responded to reports of an active shooter at the school. Officers discovered a teenager dead inside. Madison police have not released information about the teen’s age or gender but confirmed the individual was a student at the school. A handgun was recovered at the scene. The shooting occurred in an isolated area, and, apart from the teacher, those killed and injured belonged to the same age group. One of the victims was pronounced dead at the scene, along with the shooter, who was also found deceased at the school.

In May, a separate incident occurred at Mount Horeb Middle School, located 25 miles west of Madison, where a 14-year-old student brought a Ruger .177-caliber pellet rifle to school. The student allegedly pointed the weapon at officers and was killed after being instructed to drop it.

While the Madison Police Department and major news outlets have yet to confirm the shooter’s identity, information posted online points to 15-year-old Samantha Rupnow, a student at Abundant Life.

According to reports circulating online, primarily from X user and Reduxx.info reporter @Slatzism, Rupnow allegedly published a manifesto titled “War Against Humanity.” Key details of the manifesto include:

• Rupnow describes a toxic and abusive relationship with her parents, referring to them as “scum.”
• She claims her family did not love or want her, stating she felt like the “wrong child” in her family.
• She reveals that she had long considered suicide but decided a school shooting was “better for evolution rather than just one stupid boring suicide.”
• She expresses admiration for Pekka Eric Auvinen, the perpetrator of the Jokela High School massacre in Finland on November 7, 2007; Arda Küçükyetim, a Turkish neo-Nazi who stabbed five people—leaving two critically injured—in Eskişehir, Turkey, in August of this year; and Vladislav Roslyakov, who carried out the Kerch Polytechnic College massacre in Crimea on October 17, 2018, killing 20 people and wounding 67 others before taking his own life.
• She offers praise for Küçükyetim, stating that he was an inspiration to her. She calls him “an ultimate saint.” Küçükyetim was a member of fascist online forum caller Terrorgram where followers were told that by “committing an attack in furtherance of white supremacist accelerationism,” they would become saints.
• She claims to have acquired weapons for the attack through “lies, manipulation, and my father’s stupidity.”

In a published photo, Rupnow is seen wearing a KMFDM t-shirt in a selfie, a detail that echoes the Columbine High School massacre. Following Columbine, it was revealed that shooter Eric Harris had posted lyrics from KMFDM songs—such as “Son of a Gun,” “Stray Bullet,” and “Waste”—on his website. Notably, the date of the Columbine massacre, April 20, coincided with both the release of KMFDM’s album Adios and the birthday of Adolf Hitler.

Rupnow’s case paints a chilling portrait of a deeply pessimistic, racist and fascistic worldview. That a 15-year-old could develop such a catastrophic outlook speaks more to the society around her than to her troubled mind alone.

The tragedy at Abundant Life Christian School is not an isolated incident but a reflection of a social order unraveling under the weight of its contradictions. From classrooms to war zones, the American ruling class oversees the same systemic forces of capitalist inequality and violence at home and abroad.

With the full backing of the Democratic Party, Israel’s assault on Gaza since October 2023 has claimed at least 44,580 lives. Indirect deaths from disease, hunger, and lack of medicine likely push that number beyond 186,000. The UN reports that 70 percent of those killed are women and children, and Gaza now holds the grim distinction of having the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.

The violence abroad and the dysfunction within American society are inseparable. The brutality of American imperialism is mirrored in its domestic policies, with devastating social consequences. The widening canyon of inequality is exemplified by the fact that Elon Musk controls $400 billion, while millions of Americans sink further into debt just to put food on the table. Billions are funneled into the NATO-Russia war in Ukraine, where fascist forces have been actively promoted, pushing the world to the brink of a new nuclear world war.

Meanwhile over a million Americans have died during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, victims of a profit-driven system that prioritizes corporate interests over public health.

President-elect Trump and other fascist figures continue their efforts to establish a dictatorship, peddling lies, fostering chauvinism and promoting social backwardness. These horrors are not isolated phenomena but products of the same capitalist system that prioritizes wealth and power over human life.

How can youth not be affected by a society so profoundly sick—a world where violence, inequality, and despair are the norm?

Like clockwork, in the wake of Monday’s tragedy, politicians across Wisconsin and the United States issued the usual condolences and reflexive boilerplate language.

In a released statement, President Joe Biden said: “From Newtown to Uvalde, Parkland to Madison, to so many other shootings that don’t receive attention—it is unacceptable that we are unable to protect our children from this scourge of gun violence. We cannot continue to accept it as normal. Every child deserves to feel safe in their classroom. Students across our country should be learning how to read and write—not having to learn how to duck and cover.”

Such words ring hollow coming from Biden as he oversees a genocide in which Palestinian children are killed daily, and his administration funnels billions of dollars in weapons and aid to kill and maim in Ukraine.

The same capitalist system that fuels endless wars abroad, enriches billionaires like Elon Musk, and allows millions to live in poverty and despair is responsible for the social decay manifesting in school shootings, rising fascism and the erosion of democratic rights.

At the same time, despite these conditions, the turn toward dejection and misanthropy remains the exception among the masses of the working class and youth. The same conditions fueling these horrors are also fueling a new resurgence of revolutionary upheaval—and therefore, hope.

Only through the establishment of a socialist society where the wealth of the world is democratically controlled and allocated to meet human needs—not the gorging enrichment of the few—can the conditions that breed such tragedies be eliminated.