Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/04/youtube-shooter-was-vegan-fitn.html
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Of course her motive hardly matters in the larger discussion about gun violence in America, because very soon there will be another mass shooter with a different motive. And another. And another.
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Her videos showed great promise.
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I’m shocked, shocked! that anyone could put this down to Muslims or immigrants or … wait. No I’m not.
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And now I’ll never get to see the hidden things!
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Yep. The comment threads on Breitbart are particularly vile today.
Taking the “MSM” to task for calling her White. Not even reading the Breitbart article which clearly refers to her as a non-Muslim (doesn’t matter still a Muslim! Because Baha’i is partly based off Islam, so thus equals Muslim).
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I think we conflate two very different things when we talk about “mental health” issues. We can talk about mental illnesses and personality disorders and say that people with those are more likely to be the victims of violence but not actually more likely to be violent. But we can also talk about people who clearly have serious emotional problems, who are isolated, who are disaffected to the point of being anti-social, who can’t tolerate feeling their own emotions. That’s not necessarily a mental illness but it sure isn’t healthy.
If we are going to insist on using a disease model to talk about mental health, we might talk about the division between generally healthy people and people with serious diseases. I’m think of some people I know: one with asthma, one with type 1 diabetes, one with type 2 diabetes, one with with MS. Right now, all of them are fairly healthy, some of them considerably healthier than me. A year ago my friend with MS was not at all healthy and it was as a direct result of MS. Whereas my friend with type 2 diabetes is probably healthier now than before they had it - they have quit smoking, they eat much healthier, get more exercise, get enough sleep.
There’s this blurring of cause and symptom that makes the whole thing very hard to talk about, especially with mental health where we can’t define a clear cut disease and separate it from the symptoms.
So guessing that this shooter (or any other shooter) had a mental illness is, I think, dangerously stigmatizing for people with mental illnesses. On the other hand, no one could possibly argue that a person who was on a relatively even emotional keel would allow having their youtube channel demonetized to lead to murder-suicide.
I’m usually sad for the shooters in mass shootings, which I think are motivated by the same kind of emotional distress that motivated suicides (and they often are literally suicides). I’m upset that they never seem to be included in the body count. When you compare the incidence of mass shootings in the US to mass shootings in pretty well anywhere else, you have to conclude that these are people (shooters and therefore also victims) who could have been saved.
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It’s also partly based off Christianity, since they believe every prophet was the true and correct prophet for their time. This must baffle the shit out of some people.
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It’s almost as if there needs to be actual research into the motives of shooters.
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May as well mess with them - why don’t they love the Founders? Middle East folks were classed as white since the first census.
"Under the U.S. Census definition and U.S. federal agency, individuals with ancestry from North Africa are considered white. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations also explicitly define white as “original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.”
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There was some debate about this in the Breitbart forums, actually. Caucasian doesn’t necessarily mean White, and Persian is considered white.
Of course, these folks then say that all this stuff is a bit misleading. (Why misleading? One is left to guess that it’s because they believe middle eastern people suck, and white people don’t.)
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such speculation itself is problematic and tends to assume things about the mentally ill that are untrue.
So in other words, it’s just like all the wild assumptions and slander of gun owners.
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While that’s true, it’s also true that a lot of workplace violence has firing as a triggering event. If youtube was her primary source of income, then getting her channels demonetized would have about the same impact as being fired. Except that she had no feedback as to why her channel got demonetized while there’s usually some explanation for a firing or a layoff.
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Man, the whole Ad-apocalypse has hit a lot of youtubers hard. People who had quit their jobs to do their thing full time are struggling or being propped up by Patreon support. I think nearly all if not all of the people I regularly watch have branched out for support from other means. And these people are generally hardly controversial.
Also, FWIW if you were curious, CA has some of the tightest gun laws in the nation, and includes not only an AWB (where compliant guns can’t have a removable magazine with out a tool and limited to 10 round magazines), but limit handguns to a 10 round magazine.
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Huh, she’s not a white supremacist, a jihadi, an Islamic terrorist, or an angry young white man who wants to kill his classmates. Funny thing is, I can see a common variable between her and all of those people who don’t fit into convenient categories of mental illness or political motivation, and it’s the easy-to-obtain device used specifically for killing. Maybe we should do something about those devices, eh?
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" slander of gun owners"
Which is pretty much not a thing. Gun owners are about the most protected class in the US.
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Personally, I would only slander the gun owners who shoot others. I have known many who only shoot deer.
Has anybody asked why this person had guns? Or do we only ask when the shooter is a young man?
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Attempted-murder/suicide thus far, right?
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That’s fair, and I’m not trying to diminish how stressful an event this may have been for her. A person on a relatively even emotional keel won’t be driven to murder-suicide by anything, that takes some build-up.
I’m sure there are places where gun owners feel they have to hide their status as gun owners in order to get or keep a job. I’m sure there are places where people who are in favour of gun control feel the same. America is unfortunately a place where: a lot of things are politicized; politics are very acrimonious; and your employer can fire you for not liking your politics.
But I object to the idea that gun owners face a level of stigma similar to the level of stigma faced by people with mental illnesses.
I also think that gun owners people who argue on behalf of gun owners on internet forums (edited thanks to @srin) often seem to take calls for gun control as personal attacks on their responsibility with their guns. There’s a difference between recognizing the inherent riskiness of a thing itself and going after people who own or use it. No one takes restrictions on explosives as an attack on people who use explosives.
I just checked my facts and indeed you are correct. I thought she’d killed three other people, but as of this morning:
a 32-year-old woman was in serious condition, a 27-year-old woman was in fair condition and a 36-year-old man was in critical condition.
(CNN)
Hooray for fewer people being dead!
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I’m pretty sure I can tell you why one human fires a gun at another human.
I’m not sure we need to do any research on why it’s so easy to access a gun in those moments, but I am also sure we do not need to change the subject so quickly to the next possibly related thing that won’t upset gun owners.
Why people want to kill one another is not uniquely American. Why we shoot one another IS.
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