Tumbler Ridge: The Warning Signs We Keep Ignoring

A school shooting in rural British Columbia raises urgent questions about mental health support, firearms oversight, and whether vulnerable young people are falling through the cracks, and what the UK must learn before it happens here

Opinion/Analysis by Scarlett Red

February 11, 2026

On the afternoon of February 10, 2026, the small town of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia: A remote community of roughly 2,400 people nestled in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, was shattered by an act of violence that has since become one of the deadliest school shootings in Canadian history. Eight people were killed, and twenty-seven were wounded, before the suspect, eighteen-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside the Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.

The victims were devastatingly young: Three twelve-year-old girls, two boys aged twelve and thirteen, and a thirty-nine-year-old female teacher were found dead inside the school. Two further victims, Van Rootselaar’s own mother, aged thirty-nine, and an eleven-year-old stepbrother, had been shot dead at the family home before the suspect made their way to the school. In a community where the local councillor had once described Tumbler Ridge as “an incredibly safe community… we don’t have to worry about crime here,” the attack has left an entire nation reeling.

But as flags fly at half-mast across Canada and politicians offer condolences from Ottawa to Buckingham Palace, a harder set of questions demands our attention. What do we know about the suspect, and what warning signs were missed? Are we adequately supporting the mental health of young people, particularly those experiencing gender dysphoria, in rural and remote parts of the country? And does Canada’s firearms framework, despite being among the strictest in the developed world, still contain gaps wide enough to cost lives?

What We Know So Far

RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald identified the suspect on February 11 as Jesse Van Rootselaar, an eighteen-year-old resident of Tumbler Ridge. Van Rootselaar was born male and had begun transitioning to a female identity approximately six years earlier, at around age twelve. Police confirmed they would use female pronouns when referring to the suspect.

Van Rootselaar had dropped out of Tumbler Ridge Secondary School roughly four years ago, at around age fourteen. McDonald confirmed that police had a documented history of attending the family residence over several years, with some of those calls relating to mental health issues and others involving weapons. On at least one occasion, firearms were seized from the home under the Criminal Code. However, McDonald revealed a detail that will likely become central to the investigation and the public debate that follows: the lawful owner of those firearms subsequently petitioned to have them returned, and they were.

The weapons recovered at the school were described as a long gun and a modified handgun. Van Rootselaar had held a firearms licence, which had expired in 2024. The suspect was not registered as the owner of any firearms. Police have stated they have not located a note or any communication from the shooter and that a motive remains unknown. “It would be too early to speculate,” McDonald said.

A Mental Health System Under Strain

The revelation that police had repeatedly attended the Van Rootselaar home for mental health–related calls raises the unavoidable question: was enough being done to support this individual? The answer, based on what we know about the state of mental health services in rural Canada, is almost certainly no. Not because of any individual failing, but because of systemic inadequacies that have been well documented for years.

Research published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that Canadian transgender youth face significantly elevated rates of psychological distress, self-harm, and suicidal ideation compared to the general population. Among transgender young people aged fourteen to eighteen, sixty-five per cent had seriously considered suicide in the past year, compared with thirteen per cent in the broader British Columbia adolescent population. Only a quarter of transgender youth surveyed described their mental health as good or excellent. These figures are stark, and they point to a population that is already under acute psychological pressure.

But the challenge is compounded by geography. A growing body of Canadian research, including work by the Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre at the University of British Columbia, has identified that LGBTQ+ young people in rural areas face particular difficulties. Traditional gender norms may be more deeply entrenched in small communities. There are fewer opportunities to socialise with peers who share similar experiences. And critically, there are far fewer mental health professionals trained to provide gender-affirming or even culturally competent care.

As of 2025, the Canadian Mental Health Association reported that more than forty per cent of transgender youth had experienced discrimination at school or in the community. In rural parts of Canada, access to specialist gender-affirming health services,including not just medical intervention but basic mental health counselling, remains severely limited. A 2023 CBC investigation found that trans youth in rural areas routinely face dismissive practitioners, long wait times, and in some cases outright refusal of referrals. Clinical psychologist Amy Otteson, who has worked with transgender clients in New Brunswick for over a decade, described the consequence plainly: when patients cannot access care, “it can lead to giving up.”

None of this is to suggest that gender dysphoria causes violence. It does not. The overwhelming majority of transgender people, including those who struggle with their mental health, are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. But the question worth asking is a different one: when a young person is clearly struggling, when police are called to a home repeatedly for mental health-related reasons, when that person has dropped out of school at fourteen and is living in one of the most isolated communities in the province, what support structures actually exist for them? In Tumbler Ridge, a town of fewer than 2,500 people situated more than a thousand kilometres from Vancouver, the honest answer appears to be very few.

The Firearms Question

Canada has long prided itself on its firearms regime, which is significantly more restrictive than that of the United States. Under the Firearms Act, guns must be kept unloaded and locked, purchasers are subject to extensive background checks, and since 2020, the sale and use of assault-style weapons has been banned. The federal government announced just last month that owners of prohibited firearms have until March 31, 2026, to surrender them under a much-delayed buyback programme.

And yet Canada’s rate of civilian gun ownership is higher than many realise. According to the Small Arms Survey, there are approximately 37.4 civilian firearms per 100 people in Canada, compared with 14.5 in Australia. Gun ownership is especially prevalent in rural communities; A 2015 Department of Justice report found that 37.3 per cent of small-town respondents owned a firearm, compared with just 2.8 per cent in cities of over one million.

The most troubling revelation from the RCMP press conference, however, concerns the specific chain of events in the Van Rootselaar household. Police had seized firearms from the home under the Criminal Code. A serious step, typically triggered by genuine safety concerns. Yet the lawful owner subsequently petitioned for their return, and the RCMP complied. The suspect’s own firearms licence had expired in 2024, meaning they were not legally entitled to possess firearms. The weapons used in the attack were a long gun and a modified handgun. How these weapons came to be in the possession of someone with known mental health issues, a history of police contact, and an expired licence is a question that demands answers.

Canada’s red flag laws, expanded in recent years, allow courts to issue emergency prohibition orders removing firearms from individuals deemed a safety risk. But the system relies on someone applying for such an order and on courts and police enforcing it over time. In small communities, where personal relationships run deep and mental health crises may be normalised or overlooked, the system may be structurally ill-suited to the task. The 2020 Nova Scotia inquiry, which followed the murder of twenty-two people, similarly found that police had missed critical red flags about that shooter’s behaviour.

Could This Have Been Prevented?

It is tempting, in the aftermath of such tragedy, to declare that better policies would have prevented it. The reality is more complex. No system of mental health support or firearms regulation can eliminate the possibility of violence entirely. But several aspects of this case suggest that multiple points of intervention either failed or were never attempted.

First, the mental health dimension. A young person who had dropped out of school at fourteen, who lived in an isolated community, who was transgender in a region where specialist support is scarce, and whose home police had visited repeatedly for mental health concerns, represents exactly the kind of case that should trigger sustained, proactive support. Whether such support was offered and refused, or never offered at all, is not yet known. But the broader picture is damning: in 2025, the federal government allocated $35 million to enhance transgender healthcare in underserved areas, including mobile clinics and telehealth. Whether any of those resources reached a place like Tumbler Ridge is a question that policymakers must now answer.

Second, the firearms dimension. When police seize weapons from a household because of safety concerns, particularly one with a documented history of mental health crises, the bar for returning those weapons should be extraordinarily high. That the system allowed seized firearms to be returned to a household where a teenager with serious mental health difficulties was living represents, at minimum, a failure of joined-up thinking between mental health services and firearms enforcement. Canada’s red flag provisions are meaningless if they do not lead to permanent consequences when the risk profile of a household is this clear.

Third, the community dimension. Tumbler Ridge is, by all accounts, a tight-knit community. Students described the school as having only about twenty students per year level. In such a setting, a young person’s withdrawal from school and deteriorating wellbeing would not have gone unnoticed. The question is whether anyone, teachers, neighbours, community organisations, felt equipped or empowered to act on what they saw. Rural communities often lack the formal referral pathways that exist in cities, and the stigma associated with mental health difficulties, let alone gender identity, can be a powerful silencer.

Lessons for the United Kingdom

For readers in Britain, it may be tempting to view Tumbler Ridge as a distinctly North American tragedy. The kind of thing that happens “over there” but could not happen here. That complacency would be a serious mistake. The United Kingdom is not immune to the same confluence of factors that produced this atrocity: isolated young people with deteriorating mental health, firearms and/or knives in rural households, and institutional failures to connect the dots. We know this because it has already happened on our own soil.

In August 2021, twenty-two-year-old Jake Davison shot and killed five people in Keyham, Plymouth, including his own mother and a three-year-old girl, before taking his own life.

The parallels with Tumbler Ridge are quite unsettling: Davison had a documented history of mental health difficulties stretching back to childhood, including depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and chronic anger. His mother had repeatedly sought help from authorities and had even referred him to the Government’s Prevent counter-terrorism programme in 2016 over concerns about his fixation with firearms. Police had seized his shotgun and licence in December 2020 following an assault allegation, yet the weapons were returned in July 2021, just five weeks before the killings, after Davison completed a brief anger management course without any further psychological evaluation. In the subsequent inquest, the IOPC found that the decision to return his firearms was based on incomplete checks, and a police staff member faced gross misconduct proceedings.

The structural lesson is identical in both cases: when firearms are seized from individuals flagged for mental health or behavioural concerns, returning them should require far more than a bureaucratic petition or the completion of a short intervention programme. In the wake of Plymouth, the Home Office introduced updated statutory guidance requiring that all firearms applicants provide medical information and that their GP expressly confirm whether they have any relevant conditions, including mental health issues. Police were also directed to carry out social media checks and interviews with relatives. In August 2025, the Labour government further tightened the Firearms Rules. These are welcome steps, but they primarily address the licensing process at the point of application or renewal. The harder question: what happens when weapons are seized mid-licence and the holder seeks their return, remains inadequately addressed.

Scotland faces its own particular version of this challenge. Firearms ownership is disproportionately concentrated in rural areas: in the Highlands, Western Isles, and Orkney and Shetland, there is approximately one licensed firearms holder for every thirty-two people, compared with far lower rates in urban Scotland. The Scottish Affairs Committee’s 2023 inquiry into firearms licensing regulations noted that while Police Scotland operates one of the most efficient licensing systems in the UK, the committee was “concerned by the reports we heard about the impacts of fatal shootings which take place in rural communities in Scotland.” The committee specifically recommended that the UK and Scottish Governments work together to ensure mental health resources, including counselling, are accessible in remote rural communities when tragedies involving firearms occur. Whether those recommendations have been meaningfully implemented is a question that Tumbler Ridge makes freshly urgent.

The mental health dimension is equally pressing. Since the publication of the Cass Review in 2024, the NHS in England has fundamentally restructured its approach to gender services for young people, closing the specialist gender clinic model and replacing it with holistic care embedded within children’s hospital settings, with multidisciplinary teams including expertise in autism, neurodevelopment, and mental health. Puberty blockers are now available only within clinical research settings. These changes were driven by legitimate concerns about the evidence base for early medical intervention. However, the practical consequence for many young people has been a widening gap between need and provision. Waiting times for NHS gender identity services already exceeded five years before the restructuring; the transition to a new model risks making access even more difficult, particularly for those outside major urban centres.

According to the LGBT Foundation, forty-five per cent of trans young people aged eleven to nineteen in the UK have attempted to take their own lives. The 2024 Lancet Public Health study of GP Patient Survey data found that transgender and non-binary patients in England reported the highest probabilities of self-reported mental health conditions of any gender group, with non-binary transgender patients reaching 47.2 per cent. Unmet mental health needs were similarly elevated. The Mermaids charity reported in January 2025 that over half of young people who spoke to their GP about being trans had a record of anxiety, depression, or self-harm, and one in five had a history of self-harm specifically. These are not niche statistics; they describe a population in crisis.

In rural Scotland and across the rest of the UK, the picture is compounded by geography in ways that mirror Tumbler Ridge precisely. A young person experiencing gender dysphoria in Dumfries, in the Borders, or in the Highlands faces a fundamentally different reality from one in Glasgow or London. There may be no local practitioners trained in gender-related mental health. The nearest specialist service may be hours away. The social environment may be less accepting, and if that young person also lives in a household where firearms are present, as is far more common in rural areas, the intersection of untreated mental distress and access to lethal weapons creates exactly the kind of risk that both Tumbler Ridge and Plymouth should have taught us to take seriously.

The UK has, since the Dunblane massacre of 1996, rightly prided itself on having among the strictest firearms laws in the world. The handgun ban introduced in its aftermath was a landmark of evidence-based policymaking. But strict laws are only as effective as their enforcement, and enforcement depends on institutions sharing information and acting on warning signs. The Scottish Affairs Committee noted that in smaller communities, the referee system for firearms applications can be undermined by social pressure: people feel obliged to give positive references for neighbours and acquaintances even when they have reservations.

Police Scotland has published mental health leaflets for firearms holders, encouraging them to seek help and reassuring them that not every mental health difficulty will result in the loss of their certificate. These are sensible measures. But they assume that the person in crisis is the licence holder themselves. In Tumbler Ridge, as in Plymouth, the danger came from someone living in the same household as the firearms. Someone whose own mental health crisis was well documented but who was not the legal owner.

This points to a gap in the UK framework that has not been adequately closed. When police assess whether to grant or renew a firearms licence, or whether to return seized weapons, the assessment should encompass not just the applicant but the full household. If other members of that household have documented mental health crises, a history of violence, or have been the subject of police welfare calls, this should weigh heavily, and in some cases decisively, against the return of firearms.

This principle is acknowledged in updated Home Office guidance, which allows police to interview partners and conduct household checks. But the discretion remains with individual licensing officers, and the incentive structure tends towards returning weapons unless there is an active, current reason not to. The lesson from both Plymouth and Tumbler Ridge is that the bar must be set higher.

What Must Come Next

As Prime Minister Mark Carney told the House of Commons, “We will get through this. We will learn from this.” Whether Canada actually learns from Tumbler Ridge will depend on whether the conversation that follows is honest enough to address what went wrong, without being hijacked by those seeking to weaponise this tragedy for narrow ideological purposes.

The fact that the suspect was transgender will inevitably become a focal point for certain commentators eager to draw a causal line between gender identity and violence. This impulse should be firmly resisted. There is no credible evidence linking gender dysphoria to mass violence. What there is overwhelming evidence for, however, is that transgender young people, in Canada, in the UK, and across the developed world, face acute mental health challenges, that these challenges are dramatically worsened by social isolation and lack of support, and that rural communities are systematically underserved by the mental health infrastructure that might catch someone before they fall through the cracks.

If there is a lesson in the horror of February 10, it is not that transgender people are dangerous. It is that we continue to fail vulnerable young people, particularly those who are isolated, marginalised, or struggling with their identity in communities that lack the resources to help them. It is that our firearms laws, however well-intentioned, contain gaps that cost lives when they intersect with mental health crises. And it is that the warning signs were there: police calls, weapons seizures, school dropout, a teenager in crisis, and the system did not connect the dots.

For the United Kingdom, the parallels are too close for comfort. Plymouth showed us in 2021 that our own systems can fail in precisely the same ways. The Cass Review and the restructuring of NHS gender services have consumed enormous political energy, but neither has solved the basic problem of ensuring that a young person in a remote community who is struggling with their gender identity and their mental health can actually access meaningful support before they reach breaking point. Meanwhile, in the Highlands and Islands and across rural Britain, firearms remain embedded in the fabric of daily life, and the mechanisms for ensuring they do not end up in the wrong hands rely on a patchwork of guidance, discretion, and referees who may feel unable to speak freely.

Eight people are dead in Tumbler Ridge. Five of them were children. The town’s schools are closed, and mental health professionals have been dispatched to a community centre to support a grieving population. These are necessary responses. But they are also insufficient.

The time for reactive compassion is running out. What is needed in Canada, in the United Kingdom, and wherever the same lethal combination of untreated distress and accessible firearms persists, is structural change: meaningful investment in rural mental health, household-level scrutiny in firearms licensing, mandatory information-sharing between mental health services and police, and a willingness to confront the uncomfortable truth that the most dangerous gaps are the ones between our institutions.

This article was written on February 11, 2026, while the investigation into the Tumbler Ridge shooting remains ongoing. Key facts, including the motive and full circumstances, have not yet been established by police. The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the official position of any organisation.