Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

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

xps i listened to about an hour of Adam Lanza's audio vlog when it was discovered. It was some of the bleakest, most disturbing shit i've ever heard and left me in a serious funk for days, maybe weeks. about 80% of it was basically otm, which only made it harder to swallow.

i had no idea that vlog existed (I am now reading transcripts) and, uh, I find it troubling to say the least. I was unaware of this particular strain of misanthropic philosophy

because i'm not doing good self-care tonight i read some transcripts. idk. where i'm at lately is that i feel like people put too much stock in what killers say. trying to analyze the psychopathic mind or whatever. and it just looks like a fucking spiral to me, some fucked up miserable autistic quite possibly queer kid trying to rationalize feeling miserable. i don't see any real insight. why would you _expect_ insight, why would you think someone who did something like that would be... a reliable source on _anything_, themselves included?

and people, like, want to intellectualize the issue or "solve" or "fix" people and just don't fucking give this kid a gun, you know? don't give this kid a gun, don't teach this kid how to shoot a gun. i know, i'm preaching to the choir, but it's breathtaking to me how fucked up this whole thing is, giving this kid a gun, giving brenda spencer a gun, it's just breathtakingly stupid and toxic behavior. people like lanza and spencer and whoever else, whoever else, i just don't view them as _interesting_ or _unique_ or as having ideas worthy of _consideration_. emotions. means. those are the relevant factors. i don't give a shit how killers rationalize their acts.

People keep talking about anger and alienation. I think so far only J0rdan and frogbs have uttered the word I think is most appropriate: nihilism.

Anger might be justified. Alienation implies a feeling that one might belong somewhere, just not here.

I look at the news and I see nihilism. Normal humans ask questions like WHY. Why do they do this, how did they get this way, what can we do about it, how do we prevent it.

All those questions are worth asking and exploring, but ultimately miss the point of nihilism.

Sanity asks "why?"

Nihilism answers, "why not?"

yes, this is nihilism in a nutshell:

~Life is the imposition of value.
~Cultural values are the masochistic imposition of suffering through the deprivation of their fulfillment.
~Feral values are the innate imposition of suffering through the deprivation of their fulfillment. ~Suffering tends to serve as a life-affirming experience.
~The less you suffer, the clearer you see that value is a disease.
~Death eradicates value and thus is the solution to life.

(from the Lanza youtube videos)

these ideas are neither new nor novel, but there do seem to be a wide number of adherents to these ideas on the internet. like any other otherwise benign concepts and ideologies, those seeking out acceptance for these beliefs will be able to find other like-minded kranks out there somewhere. He had some back and forth with some other guy who wound up molesting his daughters and posting videos of them consenting.

a lot of this shit seems IDW-adjacent.

but you cannot obliterate ideologies and philosophy, no matter how abhorrent you may find it. the only solution is prevent people from getting weapons.

I use "nihilism" as all-purpose descriptor in my local Dem chats and it's caught on :)

adam lanza was a fucking idiot in addition to a mass murderer.

everyone knows that desires can never really be fulfilled. lasting contentment is not our lot in life. desire is the root of suffering but it is also what binds us to existence.

the buddha said that one way out of this trap is to disentangle consciousness from desire by cultivating mindfulness. he didnt' think death was a real way out, not only due to his belief in reincarnation, but more profoundly because escape is different than transcendence. in any sense, compassion can relieve us a bit of the burdens of the self and its yearnings.

if you don't buy this, there are other things you can believe. schopenhauer came close to lanza's idea that life is inherently bad and the will should be negated. he didn't kill himself, but killing yourself is a legitimate response to this conviction, i guess.

christians, jews, muslims, sikhs, marxist humanists, psychoanalysts, existentialists, poets and others have their own ideas of how one can find meaning and even joy in life even though life is filled with pain. fucking hamlet was able to reconcile himself to the tragic nature of existence by the end of act 5. perhaps struggling with these questions, this deep mystery, is itself a fulfilling way to spend one's time, even if one never reaches a state of something like faith.

adam lanza prevented 28 children from ever exploring these questions for themselves. FUCK. HIM. there is NO justification for that. he had no way of knowing that they would have reached the same dead ends he did.

i am not impressed by his fucking sophistry.

the solution to life

You know the Calvin & Hobbes where Hobbes says, "Wouldn't it be easier to make the map conform to the yard"?

Sorry if that's flippant, this is def not the thread for that. But I guess it's my way of saying i don't want to engage in the kind of analysis Kate is talking about.

I took an interest because there are similarities between Lanza's condition and mine. I NEEDED to see where the break occurs and i found it. I just have more love in me, thank god.

it's easy to get sucked into the allure of outward projection of intense internal negativity. as a teen, I loathed myself, mostly because I was a very lonely person because I was cripplingly shy and had no idea how to interact with people, but I didn't want to actually do anything to fix it. it was very easy to find a whipping boy and make other people the villains.

i once wrote a livejournal post (at 24!) saying I felt like spending Valentine's Day atop a tower shooting happy couples (never mind the fact that I hate violence and have never held or wanted to hold a gun - the contradiction never registered). really gross stuff. despite being someone whose beliefs ran entirely contrary to that, it was easy to fantasize about getting 'revenge' on people who had wronged me.

but for most, like me, it never progresses beyond disturbing fantasy, not least because I would guess most people who think in such toxic ways don't have access to firearms, and for many, like me, their life materially changes as they get older to where they no longer feel that way.

but some don't escape the 'us vs them' dichotomy and if, in their own mind, things progress to a point where they no longer feel any joy in life or feel that things will improve, and don't feel a need to go through the motions anymore - if they don't already have access to them, they could seek out weapons to externalize their rage as violently as possible.

this is why it doesn't matter what the motivation is, because it's the access to weapons that allows this to happen. even if you kowtowed to the "iT's mEnTaL hEaLtH, nOt GuNs" lie and physically gave counseling to every single person in the entire country, it isn't as if counseling is fixing a fucking transmission on a car. Bad habits return. Sometimes therapy doesn't work - it doesn't for everyone. Sometimes someone who has been stable for years has a traumatic event that re-opens the wounds. Sometimes you're dealing with a sociopath who doesn't actually feel remorse and can't be reached that way. And fuck, most times with shootings, you're dealing with an extreme-right wing agitator who has been programmed through extreme conservative media for years. How the fuck will therapy stop THEM? no matter what care you gave people, you'd STILL have these shootings because anybody can easily get guns. maybe the shootings would decrease, but there's no way to quantify that.

(besides, this is a stupid reason to want to give everybody counseling - it should be made available for all because IT HELPS PEOPLE FUNCTION AND ENJOY LIFE, not to merely stop people from shooting people).

hearing actual libs lean into "mentally ill folks shouldn't be allowed to own guns" as a partial solution enrages me because it plays into stupid conservative arguments. "Mental illness" (ugh) is a Mickey Mouse term to describe a wide spectrum of disorders, it isn't something you can physically SEE, it requires diagnosis, and also, many of us who suffer from any form of it belong to marginalized groups that are threatened daily by hate groups. Why should THEY not be able to possess weapons to defend themselves if some qAnon motherfucker is allowed to walk into a pizzeria with a semi-automatic weapon, or armed Three Percenters show up to threaten transgender students who are merely protesting a school board meeting? I mean, fuck, guns shouldn't exist, but if we're going to allow actual culture terrorists to own the motherfucking things, why the fuck should we stop someone who is the target of their violence from defending themselves because they take Zoloft?

How about stripping guns from the privileged, those who have actual power and use guns to maintain that power, the same people who belong to these hate groups?

we make it easy for people who are feeling violent thoughts to progress to acting on them because of how easy it is to acquire weapons. that's the whole thing. the answer is obvious, it always has been - civilians should not own handguns. we see how countries without handguns operate - and how this isn't a thing over there.

Look its definitely true that the ease of getting a firearm is the biggest contributor to this but I often wonder if there's also something uniquely American that's driving so many more people to do this. it's not like you just can't get guns in other countries. I think about how, literally the day after this happened, you still saw politicians interviewed with that stupid fucking AR-15 pin, celebrating the very gun that's being used to murder random civilians in this country. I think about Lauren Boebert (whose own district had a mass shooting not that long ago) filming herself doing cartwheels down the hall of the Capitol 2 days ago. at least during the Dubya era they tried to put on a caring face. now they're just straight up saying "can't do anything about it, sorry, stop bothering me". Not just saying they don't care but straight up rubbing it in your face. Yes they are uniquely evil but also - millions and millions of Americans are voting for these people. They put TRUMP signs on their lawns year round. They spend their days arguing with strangers online and getting mad about things they can't even define. What exactly should we expect from a country that just doesn't take anything seriously?

I'll just never make peace with the fact that millions of people in this steaming cesspit of a country have decided 100% that dead kids are an acceptable price to pay so Nervous Nestor can cosplay a fucking soldier to pick up his footlong at Subway.