Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

yeah, we've come a long way from Columbine, where Klebold/Harris were pretty much turned into "McCartney/Lennon" by the American media, esp with the endless slew of op-eds about their 'motives' and MARILYN MANSON. nowadays fewer people could even tell you the names of more recent school shooters (though sadly that's also a byproduct of how many there've been).

xxp it looks like Ogles' youngest kid is the only one who has any fucking idea what Xmas is all about

what if the shooter is at large and you have to catch them, can you tell the name then? this happened in denver last week. he was caught tho. he was dead.

notoriety certainly drives ppl to mass shoot. mass murder is also one of the most nihilistic things you can do, and unfortunately our country is one that facilitates that nihilism via access to weapons. there's also something specifically nihilistic about targeting young children, it's like pushing the line even further

i also think we've reached a new phase now where people "feel" like mass shooters (alone, angry, disaffected, depressed, hopeless) and so they decide to become them

all this is worth considering, i just think there is something more than just "guns + anger" in play with school shootings, because Americans are angry almost every fucking where and while shootings at coffee shops and fast food places do happen, you'd expect to see way more of them in locations where people are regularly showing up very pissed off.

Why people pick one target vs. another often seems to be driven by individual experiences (like, they have a particular beef with that place or someone in it). But also sometimes not, the Las Vegas shooting — which we still basically know zero about, motivation-wise — being the most horrific example.

"guns + anger"

+ toxic masculinity

xp J0rdan otm. That is the hyperreal aspect I was getting at

re: the motivations of mass killers, I found this blogpost interesting, on the youtube channel of Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza where he outlined his worldview

https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-ghost-of-adam-lanza.html

the channel seems like it was only discovered a couple of years ago, kind of surprised I haven't seen more coverage/commentary about it, but maybe it's that increasing reluctance to give spree killers notoriety that people were discussing above

ppl been angry a long time. guns + alienation + anger

high/middle schools both are and represent a pretty profound mix of things: authority & discipline, constant forms of evaluation & ranking, coming-of-age and becoming "yourself," socialization / alienation & ostracism, competition, adolescence & humiliation. they can be torturous places to feel "alone, angry, disaffected, depressed, hopeless." I think there's something about the universality of the experience of them and how they are these life milestones filled with intense memories and (what feel like) turning points.

I don't really have any coherent thoughts about elementary schools though, I'm tempted to reach for metaphysical reasons too

yeah I agree with that, my toughest times emotionally were definitely in middle school and maybe the first 1-2 years of high school. for me that was certainly the time where rejection hurt the most.

reading about this Adam Lanza guy, all I can think is he sounds very much like the deathdrone dude ILX had a long thread about several years ago, another guy who was an absolutely terrible person but also intelligent and well-spoken to some degree.

this really does piss me off about the right-wing response to all this, obviously they won't do a thing about guns and will speak about how instead we need to focus on "mental health" (while voting against mental health funding every chance they get obviously), which misses the point entirely. I don't think a "mental health screening" would catch very many of these guys. I don't think they're clinically insane or the sort of people you can just shrug your shoulders at and say "what can you do, they're nuts". there are real reasons this happens and I do think America promotes a very nihilistic culture - a culture in which, for example, a profane idiot grifter like Donald Trump can become president - which, in addition to the massive amount of guns, makes this sort of thing occur. but nobody seems to really want to have that conversation.

gotta stay off twitter. Lots of ghoulish speculation going on.

the thing about the mental health canard is even if it were true (which it isn't), you'd basically have to solve mental health to stop violence like this w/ their plan. instead of, y'know, idk, not making death machines so easy to acquire.

i don't even think most people should be legally allowed to drive

Jeez this photo is heartbreaking

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2023/03/27/20/69173379-11907711-A_terrified_child_presses_her_hand_against_the_glass_of_a_school-m-99_1679945105428.jpg

No mental health screening would have caught the Vegas guy, who was by all appearances just an average maybe occasionally surly middle-aged solitary type. His motives (probably just empty inside, had a singular focus on a fantasy of killing people in this specific, vv distanced manner) weren’t ones that manifested themselves in warning signs unless you were really really analyzing him. The mass murder version of BTK, basically.

gotta stay off twitter

A good time to take the whole week off of there

oh god yeah this is gonna be a shitshow

it's already there. right-wing scumbags are already circulating the same image of a trans woman holding a gun that they've circulated in the past and claiming it's the shooter. just a fucking cesspool.

this seems to have been a female born shooter who now used he/him, so this might get very ugly indeed.

so this is one person who fits this description versus hundreds of others who were mostly cisgender males. shouldn't matter either way. this shooting tells us nothing about trans people, just as elliott rodger doesn't tell us what men are like in general.

i personally think the ideologies of these killers are incidental. they might have manifestos or whatever and regard what they are doing as political acts. but that's not the real motive, it's just the story they attach to their narcissistic rage.

I agree, I don’t think their individual psychoses matter nearly as much as their easy access to ridiculously lethal weapons.

Yes. And yet, I am bracing myself for an unbelievably noxious news cycle that overflows with bad faith and bad takes about the role that this killer's gender identity had in their pathology.

Obviously not excusing or justifying shooting, but just saying -

“I’ve looked back in my annuals and I do remember her as a former student,” the former headmaster said. “She was just one of our young ladies. ... She was just a typical co-ed. A typical student.”

If you are indeed trans, gee I can't imagine why being treated as "just one of our young ladies.. a typical co-ed" might breed some resentment against the institution. Seriously I haven't heard the word "co-ed" to describe an individual come out of someone's mouth in I don't know how long. :(

yeah, i am sure this was painful for the shooter but i doubt it had much to do with their decision to kill random children twenty years later.

There will be a lot of ugliness about it for sure. People on the right get positively giddy on the occasions when random violence comes from anyone but cis white men. When early info came out about the DC sniper suspects, I remember some NRO type excitedly speculating that they might be Black, gay AND Muslim.

it's so idiotic.

i think the fact that this shooter dressed like the columbine kids, with the backwards hat and tactical vest, is more telling than the fact that they were trans. they hopped on a trend, the worst trend ever.

the usual suspects are already blaming this on "hormone therapy" and Elon Musk is gleefully amplifying all of it, this is gonna be ugly

i don't know if it's helpful to speculate about how ugly it's going to get or how transphobic maniacs online will frame this. the identity of the shooter is not the issue, the background of the shooter's life is not the issue, access to guns is the issue

yeah you could all do me a favor and log out of twitter

It’s almost as if the haters….ugh, never mind

I mean yeah no question. For all the shootings we have in a given year I wonder how many didn't happen because the shooter thought better of it. I hate the talking point that homicidal maniacs are just gonna find guns and kill people anyway. You don't know that. Throw enough roadblocks in their face and maybe they'll hit a point where they reconsider. I don't get the impression these people are just naturally hellbent on violence. It seems like something they're actually grappling with a lot. I dunno it's such a fucked up situation in this country. Like every parent today I'm grappling with the idea that every day I drop my kids off there's a nonzero chance that my kids get ripped to pieces by a gun so powerful that they won't even use it in warzones. And that in two months time nobody will even remember because there will be an even worse one.

like yes obviously we're not gonna expect our political system to do a damn thing about it because it's designed specifically not to. the NRA won the war and the piles of bodies and thousands of terrified communities and broken families are just collateral damage. but for God's sake can we at least get a moratorium on these lawmakers talking about their guns all the damn time. can you heartless bastards stop it with the Christmas cards where your 13 year old is holding a rifle, the campaign ads where you're shooting trash cans with your opponent's face on them, the "let's make the AR-15 the official gun of the USA!" bullshit?? especially when you turn around and say "nah it's not a gun problem it's a mental health problem??" you made your entire public persona "Me and my whole family can kill anyone we want in an instant and we're really excited for the opportunity to do so!!" Gee who would think this might be a sign of a country knee-deep in the throes of pure nihilism!??

No they can’t. Grow a pair.

Sorry. Really. Can’t stand it either.

I actually associate Christmas a bit with this type of thing since it is a time when they feel that they are “among friends” so can double-down even more on their rhetoric.

I mean these days they have freed themselves from their bondage and can talk freely about it on the media, in public and in government, but there is still that old-fashioned nostalgia for these hallowed old traditions which make them so much better than the rootless cosmopolitans etc.

Don't know why these people think they're going to gain any notoriety. There are so many shootings these days, there's no way I can remember any names.

the media has also been a bit better lately about not turning the shooters into objects of lurid mystery.

For instance I barely know anything about the Uvalde shooter

May their names be erased

I just watched a little edited bodycam footage on BBC... man, those Nashville Metro police could not have acted more differently than those Uvalde losers. They just grabbed their rifles and charged in, right towards where they heard gunfire. No milling about in hallways

I saw part of it but couldn't watch, the cubbies and fingerpaint artwork on the wall were too much

😣

wow all my legislators are going viral. A few weeks ago it was my state senator's Instagram habit being parodied on SNL. Now my congressman gets Guardian coverage for his advocacy of doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about gun deaths: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/28/tim-burchett-republican-nashville-shooting

“It’s a horrible, horrible situation, and we’re not going to fix it,” Burchett said. “Criminals are gonna be criminals."

I mean hey why have laws at all amirite

Wow, that guy covers al the bases:
In 2022, after voting against Democratic legislation to fund police departments, Burchett attributed a “violent crime spike” to “liberal soft-on-crime policies and the radical Defund the Police movement”.

Criminals gonna crime.

just leaving this here— made me weep.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-damage-to-human-body