A 22 year old man named Elliot Rodgers apparently stabbed his three roommates, shot three college women, and wounded seven others in a mass murder and subsequent gun battles with the police. He appears to have concluded the episode by taking his own life.
Prior to the shootings, he posted appalling Youtube videos with rants that were filled with misogyny and envy against “lesser men.” In particular, his complaints centered around his virginity, his inability to attract women, and his complaints about the men who did seem to attract women.
The efforts to paint this as the outcome of a societal trend and, alternately, as an isolated event unique to the murderer and, additionally, to critique the media as insufficiently attentive to one’s preferred narrative will, I suspect, be a spectacle. It features sex, violence, and money, so there will be no lack of media attention.
I’ve noted to date:
-Discussions about how this is about our lack of gun control.
-Objection to calling him mentally ill because: a) it is disparaging to the mentally ill; and/or b) doing so minimizes the ability to critique this crime as a product of other objectionable societal trends (e.g. misogyny, permissive gun laws).
-Discussions about how this is the result of misogyny and a pervasive attitude of entitlement by men to sexual access to women.
-Pornography and video games are to blame.
-Women are to blame. (I won’t go into details about this argument — coming from a site that adds weight to the complaints about misogyny)
-Race and religion. If this man were black or Muslim, the media narrative wouldn’t be about a crazy loner.
-Whether he suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome and whether those with Asperger’s are prone to violence.
The frame that seemed to fall in place for me was of a guy who was misogynistic on an even deeper level than merely hating women. Rather, his disregard of women as objects and baubles was deep enough that much of his anger wasn’t for the women in particular, but for the “lesser men” who were with those women. As if the women themselves were a means of keeping score as to how he ranked against the other men and that they weren’t keeping score fairly. (But, disclaimer, that was based on the little bit of his rants that I read about — I didn’t much have the stomach to wade through all of it.)
I’m sure I am missing any number of potential narratives to “explain” this crime. But I’ll be watching with interest the efforts we take to explain this to ourselves.
he was involved with the “men’s rights movement” and “pickup artist” communities. those sorts of attitudes — that women owe him sex because he’s “nice”; seething rage at women who don’t give him sex and at men who are more successful with women — are common in those groups.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/05/24/1301671/-Elliot-Roger-Gunman-in-California-Mass-Shooting-was-influenced-by-the-Men-s-Rights-Movement
Saw a comment over at the old manboobz (now “we hunted the mammoth” I think) where the commenter gave a sort of taxonomy of the men’s rights groups and said that this guy was more of an “incel” — involuntarily celibate, a faction that is no less misogynistic of the “pick up artists” but who hate the PUAs because of their self-proclaimed success at picking up women. This feeds into the “women like assholes” narrative of the incels.
One of the drawbacks of the internet is the ease with which it allows angry people to congregate and amplify each other. If you hate women, maybe sitting for hours talking to woman haters about how much women suck isn’t the healthiest thing for you, or society. In the past, maybe he tells a friend how much he perceives women to suck, and the friend says relax, get a hobby, go about your business, and maybe when you least expect it you’ll find what you seek. Instead, he googled “women suck” or “why do these women keep not singling me out for easy sex?” and found a ready community of whiny douchebags to wallow in self-defeating misery with.
Amen
Internet chat rooms not only congregate similar people and amplify each others’ eccentricities in an echo chamber, they are anonymous. Research shows that anonymity allows people to jettison restraints ordinarily in effect with face to face relationships. Not only is everyone alike, they are alike in more extreme ways, so a vulnerable person not only starts to think that there are a lot of people “like me”, but that they are alike in very dark ways. People aren’t just irritated or bothered by others. They hate others, and they write it down and get it confirmed by other “haters”. Not a good scene.
I understand why people look to fit events like this into broader narratives — we have to figure out where something “fits” in order to process it cognitively and emotionally. Since we live in a complex and interconnected world, events like this will inevitably touch on many such narratives. But the ways in which we search, infer, and intuit even in cases like this — when the perpetrator of the violence has explicitly stated his reasoning — strike me as signs of deflection and denial.
And yes, I acknowledge that humans are prone to being blind to some their own motivations. But our readiness to dismiss what’s right in front of us is sometimes appalling.
I don’t know that it’s dismissive to ask “why this guy, why this time?” There are plenty of people with unhealthy attitudes toward women – and that should be addressed – but those people don’t go the extra step of murdering a bunch of men and women and injuring others.
ETA: However, I guess I can see why asking that question would be frustrating to those who want the unhealthy attitude toward women addressed. Looking for the additional ingredient, if there was one, distracts from the issue of the unhealthy attitudes and allows people who don’t want to address that issue to focus on the additional ingredient (if there was one) as “the real problem.”
Hostile anti-social attitudes (misogynist, racist, anti-semetic or whatever) are unfortunately present in many members of society. But however repugnant their beliefs, very, very few of these people go on murderous rampages. Other people are described as having none of those attitudes, they are usually called “quiet loners” who at some point “snap” and go on a killing spree.
So while the hateful attitudes are disgusting and corrosive, I’m not sure that they relate to the killing. The question to me isn’t about the repugnant belief, it’s rather; what makes a person cross the fatal line and start killing people? And what, as a society, do we do about it? Do we try to identify and treat or sequester them? Do we try to prevent them from acquiring weapons? Or do we continue as we have, decrying the hate, weeping for the victims, paying lip service to a need for change, but doing nothing of any substance?
Jay
Jay, doing something means upsetting someone who feels entitled, so I guess that means having the courage to make mistakes in the area of public policy. With entrenched and politicized groups, who can or wants to make decisions that might make a difference? Whose ox do we want to gore, even when the research suggests that it has to be done? That means endless videos of presidential presence with weeping constituents and demonstrations to “put an end to violence” that go nowhere.
Practical case in point: After the Connecticut slaughter, even the NRA called for more mental health providers, and folks asked for mental health people to come forward with suggestions. After a year, the American Psychological Assn. published a report with recommendations (http://www.apa.org/pubs/info/reports/gun-violence-prevention.aspx). That was the kiss of death. When something is actually on paper, then people can bury it and wait until the next slaughter of innocents.
This tragedy, along with the hundreds of others like it, tend to reveal the embarrassing fact that there is a lot we don’t know about how people work and how to intervene. For sure, the solution is not easy. The psychiatrist who was treating this man will, no doubt, be blamed and vilified, but he was doing the best he could. Like the plumber who observed that the more solutions that exist on the shelves which claim to fix a plumbing problem, the less we actually know how to fix it. The list of purported causes associated with this man’s behavior sound really good to some people, but these are pet theories, and none have been shown to be the answer. Again, it’s like the causes for the fall of the Roman Empire. In a recent presentation at the University of Chicago, a well-known archaeologist listed dozens of purported causes, which means that it’s really complicated and we don’t really know for sure. What we know for sure is that there are a lot of suffering people who perpetrate these events, leaving a lot of people to suffer and grieve.
First, Stuart, do you have a link to the presentation. I’m kind a Roman history geek
Secondly, the news article I saw stated the kid stopped seeing the dr when he was 18, because he hated him too.
timb116: The presentation is by Clifford Ando, a faculty member at the U. of C., and it’s entitled “The fall of the Roman Empire in east and west”. This is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vSGPHByAZc&list=PLmXaxHgt2ww8u6j2uOlnGRQTWLrk8FPkt&index=7
In case you are thirsting for some excellent presentations, and want to re-experience the privilege of being at the Oriental Institute, you can go to this more general site which features the Youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/JamesHenryBreasted
timb116: Your comment about the connection between the shooter and the therapist is interesting and significant. We hear about people being treated by a bunch of therapists, which is at the outset, unethical. Maybe he had a series of therapists with whom he had some major disagreement. We will probably never know the story, but treating this guy was likely very difficult, probably because he didn’t want treatment. It’s pretty difficult to challenge a person’s world view when his whole world hinges on that perception and doesn’t attribute his suffering to it. He can simply refuse treatment and go home. Human beings have certain limitations.
Thanks, Stuart
“the effort to form narratives”
I’ve never encountered decent or trustworthy people who engage in such behaviors. That’s the stock-in-trade of the agendists.
Instead of working to make guns illegal, further worsening the problems caused by meddling, the social meddlers should recognize that keeping prostitution illegal likely contributed to the deaths of six people.
$150 and a half hour with a skilled tradeswoman likely would have rounded off a few of this guy’s edges.
There are people like this guy all over the world, yet in only one country do we regularly see things acted out in this way. Hmmm, I wonder what’s different.
Meanwhile, my son’s high school football teammate — a quarterback with multiple scholarship offers (including Indiana State) — just got out of the hospital after becoming a Not the Intended Target, shot while riding his bike.
So, did the “good guy with a gun” cost him his scholarship?
‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
You know, Doug, it’s really hard to take you and your brethren seriously as opponents of gun violence.
For every one misuse of a gun by a citizen, America sees 1,000 abuses of force by the police, and headlines such as this are now common in America:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2643344/Horror-SWAT-team-throw-stun-grenade-toddlers-CRIB-drugs-raid-leaving-coma-severe-burns.html
Your government is an avowed and active enemy of Freedom and peaceful society, but you won’t say a thing in fundamental criticism of it, because as a Hobbesian, you’ll accept a malicious government rather than risk no government, at all.
You simply stand in opposition to citizen possession of force and citizen violence. You’ll permit unbounded force and rampant and unsanctioned violence in your country as long as you approve of the people holding the force and committing the violence, as you think you come out better, in the long run, with your folks pulling the trigger.
You’ll understand if I dissent.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/05/30/article-2643344-1E52023800000578-215_306x495.jpg
“Freedom”, quick, leave the country while you can still own that arsenal and go someplace where they will value you, like, uh, well somewhere. I’m sure that you can find others who share your point of view.
And, “Freedom”, I think you’ve got Doug figured out. Most attorneys just love malicious government but are spoilsports at opposing citizen violence. Darned lawyers!
I hear Somalia is nice this time of year.
[sigh] what’s a misanthrope masquerading as a libertarian to do?
Great place to use those weapons to defend your property rights, your right to life and other rights. Of course lots of people there love those guns, too. Surviving without that agenda-ridden infrastructure, like police, might be problematic without proper bribes.
The Onion scores
“tens of millions of individuals who reside in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations.”
The new conservative take on gun violence, that’s it’s just like tornadoes, is infuriating. Murder rampages just fall from the sky apparently
Perhaps if the liberals had a consistent anti-violence platform, their criticisms would be easier to take seriously. At present, the liberals extol and use rampant violence, as long as the violence answers to them.
While rejecting the premise of your argument (which wasn’t hard, since there was nary a fact to be offered), I will note your penchant for random violence on everyone versus organized violence organized on a subset of humanity is a) irrational, b) actually cuts the freedom of people whom like their kids and relatives not to get shot randomly, and c) is the silliest thing placed on the internet today.
Hell, just because I like circles to become complete, I look forward to the rhetorical garbage of your next comment trumping the rhetorical garbage of this one. You’re building your own Hoosier Hill
You didn’t reject any premise, as you don’t have sufficient education to identify a premise. You merely sloppily rejected the conclusion, and foamed about some irrelevance as a dodge.
Do you understand any of this?
I think I do. You are just making this up, but as is your wont, when you run out of something intelligent to say, you insult people.
“At present, the liberals extol and use rampant violence”
Prove it. Describe the “rampant violence.”
After that, describe the “liberals” who support it.
Show your work by linking to something other than the Lew Rockwell show. I’ll wait.
Never ask “Freedom” for evidence to support his assertions. It only interrupts his oddly blissful but tortured evidence-free existence.
“Prove it. Describe the “rampant violence.”
O.K. Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, Vietnam, Korea, WWI, WWII, Haiti, Kosovo, etc.
Next, every major city. Just about all are Democratically controlled, and just about all have violent police departments. No Democratically controlled city has a policy of non-violence or any hint of a non-violent platform or agenda. No Democratically controlled city has any sort of commitment to limiting police violence or to prosecuting and firing violent police officers.
No Democratically controlled city has pulled guns away from its cops, adopted a strong anti-war plank, or acted in any way differently than the Republicans concerning state violence.
“After that, describe the “liberals” who support it.”
O.K. Obama, Pelosi, Reid, W.J. Clinton, Wilson, LBJ, FDR, Truman, and every other Democrat you can find except Kucinich.
The hard part is finding a Democrat who doesn’t support state violence against the citizens. Jimmy Carter seemed like a decent guy.
I notice you haven’t denounced state violence or said a single word about limiting state violence. You just want to have a discussion about the process of talking about state violence as a means of diverting the conversation, and that’s just subterfuge.
“No Democratically controlled city has…”
Edit
“No Democratically controlled city, Democratically controlled state government or Democratic President has…”
And Drone Strike Barry has brought state violence to Grand Theft Auto levels.
During those times you find yourself waiting, go ahead and read/listen to Lew Rockwell. If you object to any argument you find there, try to hash it out in something more respectable than mere name-calling.