I think a lot of people in the south feel as if they have nothing else, especially the poorer you are, the whiter and prouder you tend to be. That doesn’t always translate into white supremacy, but it can and does.
It was terrorism, but my point is that there is a network of these guys which makes them more than lone wolves. I guarantee he’s hooked into that network.
This is a weird narrative. People with mental disorders and diseases don’t spontaneously combust. They have issues that resolve themselves in different ways and more often result in homelessness and destitution before just about anything else. That’s not even how it works in the criminal justice system. In order to lose culpability, you have to either be so deluded by your mental disease that you don’t understand what is actually happening in the world around you, or you have to cease understanding the difference between right and wrong. This is rare, even in offending psychopaths, who often understand that their actions are wrong, but lack the empathy to develop a strong innate aversion to committing a crime.
Herbert Mullin was a paranoid schizophrenic who was famously found to be less culpable for some of his murders because he sincerely believed California would be consumed by an earthquake unless he killed. This was a very sincere and to him, real belief brought about by a recognized symptom of mental illness. Even then, his actions were premeditated. There isn’t a general “crazy” that makes people commit mass murder. No psychologist or mental-health professional on the planet would tell you that. Nowhere in the DSM is there an entry for “mass-murder disorder,” and for good reason. The jury is not out on this one: some people are genuinely intent on killing people for personal gratification. Personality disorders are rare, but they don’t cause people to suddenly turn into murderous zombies. Now as to the question of whether any of us really have free will- that’s a different issue, but not inherently connected to mental illness.
Oh I am sure. He didn’t get those ideas on his own. But I hold out that it could have easily already been mentally unstable and planned this all by himself rather than goaded on by the group.
Perhaps this is unnecessary reiteration of my above explanation, but what does this even fucking mean? This is such an imprecise concept as to be effectively meaningless.
That’s the thing, these networks, set up long before the internet, encourage individual action. They manage to do it in such a way so that the core organizations have plausible deniability when one of these “lone wolves” go off. It’s not a mistake that it’s often alienated white teens and young men from poor backgrounds. Many of them are quite vulnerable to this kind of indoctrination from a distance. Of course, now they have the internet to further reinforce their warp world view.
I suggest looking very carefully at this kids parents. This didn’t come from nowhere.
Fox News deserves some blame, too. They incite hate and violence.
But again, I don’t think this guy is mentally ill. At least not like the man you’re discussing. White supremacy is not some far out, weird idea. It’s a real ideology that still exists and is found up and down our system. It’s a completely coherent world view that until recently was the mainstream way of life for many, if not most, white Americans.
His parents might have nothing to do with it… he might have dug up all this on his own.
I think it’s also not a mistake that so many (white) people are so quick to jump to the “Oh he must be ill!” narrative when it comes to white killers, and almost never do so when it comes to non-white killers. White people see other white people as individuals first, and as “white” oh, 22nd?
White supremacist indoctrination has many, many levels.
People immediately trot out “mental illness” for white terrorists and shooters only because they know their own culture is responsible for these mass murders, and desperately seek any sort of way to deflect responsibility or acknowledgement of growing up in a sick, racist society.
And it’s very apparently that culture IS to blame, especially when you see the media is already taking steps to garner sympathy for the murderer.
I couldn’t care less about such pettiness as assigning blame. I’m saying the parents may have created this monster and should be looked in to since they may still represent a danger.
“one of the most deadly church shootings in U.S. history”
Just one of? I did some quick googling to find other countries with church shootings, and nothing came up. Vigils at churches after a shooting elsewhere yes.
I’m sure someone would be able to provide links to some, and to be fair news on this shooting is dominating the results right now, but for pity’s sakes. Is it even possible for the white supremacists and others to take a step back and think, “Hm, maybe what we’re doing is really heinous and impossible to justify…”
I know, I was contrasting him with Mullin. Usually people with limited culpability in their violent crimes have very complicated histories and a psych profile to match. As in, you can point to specific symptoms of a specific mental disorder that apply to the crimes in question.
Exactly. But guys like this allow most white people off the hook. Because they’d never think they’d go and shoot up a church full of black people, right, so they can’t be white supremacists at all. Guys like this get called mentallly ill so that “good white people” don’t have to deal with the implications of what he’s done and how it’s connected to American history and American society. Also, it helps that he’s a hick from the south, because only people in the south could possibly be racist, right?
His parents don’t live in a fucking vacuum. We live in a racist culture and Fox News ACTIVELY breeds racism and hate.
Wait… sympathy for him? You mean the mental illness stuff, right? Or is there something else I haven’t seen yet?
There’s already articles out about how he “had black friends on facebook”, or “was quiet and soft-spoken”.
He probably was a lone wolf, unless he had ties to some thing like the KKK or the Aryan Nation. And even then they will probably say he acted alone. Which is probably the case.
The lone nut is the hardest thing to stop. Unlike someone with in a terrorist network where you can intercept plans and plots and monitor people you know to be involved, the lone nut usually just has it all in his head - possibly scratched out in a note pad somewhere.
ETA:
He could be both. There a lot of people with raw hate, but they don’t act on their fantasies.
