Utah State University has just announced that Anita Sarkeesian has canceled a talk she was scheduled to give at the school tomorrow after receiving a threat of a “Montreal Massacre-style attack” by someone promising ““the deadliest school shooting in American history” if the cultural critic was allowed to speak.
Here’s the official announcement:
Anita Sarkeesian has canceled her scheduled speech for tomorrow following a discussion with Utah State University police regarding an email threat that was sent to Utah State University. During the discussion, Sarkeesian asked if weapons will be permitted at the speaking venue. Sarkeesian was informed that, in accordance with the State of Utah law regarding the carrying of firearms, if a person has a valid concealed firearm permit and is carrying a weapon, they are permitted to have it at the venue.
Emphasis added. That’s right: the school received threats from someone promising to shoot people at a public event, but because of Utah’s gun laws, authorities would not be able to prohibit audience members from BRINGING GUNS to the talk.
Before learning that this was the case, Sarkeesian — after consulting with authorities — had planned to go ahead with the talk. As a spokesman for the school told the Standard Examiner, a northern Utah newspaper:
“They determined the threat seems to be consistent with ones (Sarkeesian) has received at other places around the nation. … The threat we received is not out of the norm for (this woman).”
The email threat came from someone who claimed that “feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they’ve wronged.”
The email, sent to several campus officials and posted online by the Standard Examiner, warned:
If you do not cancel [Sarkeesian’s] talk, a Montreal Massacre style attack will be carried out against the attendees, as well as students and staff at the nearby women’s center. I have at my disposal a semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols, and a collection of pipe bombs. This will be the deadliest school shooting in American history and I’m giving you a chance to stop it.
The email writer claimed that even if authorities manage to stop him from an attack at the event,
There are plenty of feminists on campus who won;t be able to defend themselves. One way or another, I’m going to make sure they die. …
Anita Sarkeesian is everything wrong with the feminist woman, and she is going to die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU. I will write my manifesto in her spilled blood, and you will all bear witness to what feminist lies and poison have done to the men of America.
All this because she made some videos discussing sexism in fucking video games.
Here’s a screenshot of the full email, from the Standard Examiner site:
I’m speechless. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
NOTE: This is a NO TROLLS, NO MRAS, NO GAMERGATERS, NO VICTIM BLAMER thread. I will delete comments and ban people who do not respect the rules.
UPDATE: Sarkeesian has provied more details on Twitter; there were multiple threats, including one that specifically referred to GamerGate
Forced to cancel my talk at USU after receiving death threats because police wouldn't take steps to prevent concealed firearms at the event.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
Requested pat downs or metal detectors after mass shooting threat but because of Utah's open carry laws police wouldn’t do firearm searches.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
Multiple specific threats made stating intent to kill me & feminists at USU. For the record one threat did claim affiliation with #gamergate
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
At this point supporting #gamergate is implicitly supporting the harassment of women in the gaming industry.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
I’m safe. I will continue my work. I will continue speaking out. The whole game industry must stand up against the harassment of women.
— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014
But it wouldn’t be a matter of the police stopping these guys from carrying guns, it would be campus employees restricting access to a specific event to those who aren’t carrying guns. Sort of like how concerts and festivals restrict access to paying customers who are not carrying jugs of wine, even though it’s legal to carry an unopened bottle of wine anywhere.
Also, how would a law like that operate in, say, the local courthouses? I suppose federal law protects airports, so why doesn’t the fact that federal matching funds and grants and loans are supporting the University protect the University from the Open Carry jackasses?
I guarantee it’s some variation on attraction women having sex with the “wrong” guys instead of him, and not giving him the sex he felt he was entitled to.
Hopefully they catch him and he’ll be getting the prison cell he’s entitled to.
@friday
You may find this useful for answering many of your questions: http://publicsafety.utah.gov/bci/FAQ.html
A lot of this is awful, especially to me, as a resident of Utah, but a couple of things stand out. The first is about how the law is especially explicit in stating that people with concealed carry permits are absolutely allowed, by law, to carry a loaded gun into a public school of any type (and Utah State University qualifies as a public school).
The second thing is a bit more insidious:
What this essentially says, to me, is that “private business owners” can post signs forbidding you to bring firearms into their establishments, and we won’t take responsibility for it and prosecute them, but you can also legally attempt to take your firearms in, anyway, and indeed, we encourage you to do so, get caught, and then bring a civil case against them.
Johanna Roberts: Thanks for mentioning the #StopGamerGate2014 hashtag. I hope it keeps trending. It’s way past time for something like this to surface.
Only semi-related, but I’d like to see more coverage of GamerGate’s conspiracy theories like Silverstring Media and how modern feminism is like a cult and based on cultural Marxism and such. I strongly suspect that it’s a goldmine for WTFery, and it’s harder to dismiss as “just a fringe element that doesn’t represent what GG is really about” when it’s openly part of their platform.
People are confusing open carry with concealed carry. A license is required for concealed carry. In 2004 the law was changed so they cannot deny entry to a person with a concealed carry license. They are the ones who are supposed to protect us from the school shooters by turning a massacre into a gunfight. Utter madness.
Ninjas!!!
Over on neogaf, someone posted a screenshot of how concerned for Anita Sarkeesian the posters at the 8chan Gamergate board are…
The callousness really freaks me out.
@Tessa
Jesus H., if it wasn’t clear that they’re judging us by their own truly horrific perceptions of the value of life, people, and the world before . . .
Guess what? Somebody (calling himself “Moot” even) is trying to expand GamerGate to other media, starting with comics: http://community.comicbookresources.com/showthread.php?17784-We-need-a-movement-like-gamergate-in-comics&s=e908c238fdf0b8feb2697cb8ec93f7c7
Sure enough, he calls “social justice warriors” a “cancer” and makes a positive reference to right-wing actor Adam Baldwin. Fortunately, the saner members of the Comic Book Resources forum are calling him out.
This confirms my suspicion that GamerGate is just the first step in a right-wing attempt to take over the entire media.
Okay, I stand corrected. The result, unfortunately, is the same. And to think 20 years or so ago I was actually considering joining the NRA…
This all is just beyond my understanding. This kind of harassment and threats just because of several videos criticizing some aspects of video games? Some aspects. I just can`t.
I know that there are and have been people who advocate even total ban of the video games, did they receive similar threats?
Wait…. they actually… what kind of fucking horrible human being would kill someone on their own side to make the other side look bad? That is horrifying beyond belief.
It’s disgusting that their only concern if someone is murdered is that it will be bad PR for gamergate. I hope they all get wasp infestations in their homes.
This may be off-topic and not the right thread for this, but I just can’t stand not trying to put these thoughts out there somewhere, anywhere, anymore, so I am going to give it a go.
Even though the extreme factions in GamerGate are utterly horrifying, can I just say that the so-called “moderate” and “reasonable” factions are the ones that scare me almost more. Almost anyone with any degree of sanity can get on the boat when we argue from a point of “harassment and death threats are bad,” which is why I think the GGers tend to gain some traction on comment threads by pretending to support this position. On the other hand, from what I’ve seen, the more “moderate” argument they’re pretending to is that they just want games journalists to address things like game mechanics and playability. I think we need to start hitting these pretend moderates where it hurts, as well. In my opinion, no one (even these asshats) wants a review of, for instance, an RPG, that doesn’t address story elements of the game. Even dumbass FPSes like CoD and Halo have a semblance of “story.” The “moderate” elements are truly calling for story to only be addressed from a traditional male asshole point of view. They don’t care if reviewers discuss “story” a little bit. They only care if they critique the story from any “non-alpha-male” perspective. They truly almost bother me more than the horrific people making threats, only because the subtle misogyny in their message is getting lost beneath the furor of “you doxx, we doxx.”
If a Muslim faction said anything like this in America they’d have the ATF booting down their doors in a heartbeat! It’s domestic terrorism.
Why do these MRA/Gamergate fucks get a free pass?
SJWs are extreme? I haven’t seen any feminists threatening events with guns and pipe bombs. I don’t think SJWs are the extreme ones in this situation.
I have to say, I was disappointed when I saw that Anita had canceled her talk…until I saw the reason why. Someone is threatening a public event with guns and pipe bombs, yet they can’t prevent people from carrying guns into the event? That is all kinds of messed up. I hate that she had give this entitled asshat what he wants, but Anita’s safety and the safety of those attending are way more important than making a point. She is incredibly brave for standing up to this harassment. I don’t know if I would be strong enough to give a talk where someone had specifically threatened to kill me.
Sweet Invisible Pink Unicorn. This is fucked. They literally do not think of the people they hate as human. They are convinced that “SJWs” are the cause of the world’s problems, and they do not think of them as human.
They’ve coded several of their targets so they don’t even have to acknowledge their names. They are talking about killing a living human being as being a bad PR move. They are discussing strategy on the “other side” as if GG critics would be willing to kill a living human being to make themselves look good.
How do you even get so fucked up that any of this sounds even vaguely plausible? I mean, what the hell messes up your view of other people so badly that you can’t relate to the humanity of others? I have a lot of disgust for the GG movement but I’ve never in my angriest moments actually wished physical harm or death on any of them, because they’re still people godsdammit.
I just… I’m almost in tears here, and I. Don’t. Cry. This is just reprehensible.
This all infuriates me. It takes a lot to make me angry, but I’m angry. So very angry.
I don’t know whether the school shooting threat was sincere or not. But if not, he absolutely knew what he was doing. Elliot Roger is too close in the rear-view mirror for people NOT to take this kind of threat seriously, and this guy knows it. He has no problem with threatening to kill not just one person, but many people — students, peers, people who can’t have possibly had a hand in allegedly ruining his life — and it’s all somehow a grand, brave act.
Dude. Even if your life WAS ruined by teh eeeeebil feminists, there is no way that your one ruined life would be worth ending dozens of theirs. Not even in the coldest, most calculated, most devoid-of-compassion view of human life.
I hate that nobody either knows how, or is gutsy enough, to stop this. I hate that I haven’t been brave enough to talk about this on my own social media feeds. I hate that, in trying to work up the courage to say something about it, my only hope is that I may not be prominent enough to be worth attacking. I hate that I’ve considered writing about it as G*merG*te to try and evade hashtag-camping 8channers. I hate that I’ve felt a need to hide behind my male anti-gg friends, knowing that they will only get argued with and called manginas, and won’t get chased from their homes. Whereas, if I write a post that, by some fluke, goes viral, I will be.
None of this is okay. None of this is funny. This is not “bored kids on the internet”. And as much as I dislike using alarmist buzzwords, it really is becoming terrorism, scaring people into compliance through threatening or enacting real crimes against them.
Can authorities please start taking this seriously?
I can’t even describe how horrifying this is. Why on earth would you need a gun in your dorm? In a lecture? Utah is now on my official list of places I am NEVER going.
The conservative US mentality on gun control is so strange. It’s like:
“We need guns to keep us safe!”
“From who?”
“Bad people with guns!”
“What if no one had any guns?”
“Someone still might have a gun, so we need to make it easier for everyone to have guns so we can protect ourselves, and we need to be able to hide those guns and carry them literally anywhere. One day we will have enough guns to keep ourselves safe from the other people with guns. But not yet. We’re still not there. The solution is more guns and bigger guns to keep us all safe from guns.”
I also don`t understand how this works in Utah – someone sends an explicit threat to kill people, and they not only don`t find and arrest this person, they even don`t allow the University to forbid bringing guns to the threatened event?
In my country, there have been several cases when someone sends an anonymous bombing threat, and the police always takes it serious – people are evacuated, the place gets searched, and, even if it`s apparently false threat* they will do their best to search the place and to find the person.
* There have been some cases when a pupil anonymously calls and tells that there`s a bomb in the school on a day when an exam is scheduled. Still the police didn`t leave it for chance.
Holy shit, Daeran, “They can’t be redeemed so they must be destroyed” is exactly the kind of mentality that led to someone thinking it was okay to threaten a mass shooting in response to a feminist making a public appearance.
And if you’re a sockpuppet expecting to hear Mammotheers cheer you on in wishing GGers dead I think you’re going to be very disappointed. We don’t roll that way here.
I disagree. The biggest fear these guys have is being humiliated. Right now, they are able to hide behind the anonymity of the internet, which makes them less vulnerable to this fear. These guys need to be prosecuted for harassment and, in some cases, terrorism. All we need is for one of them to be dragged through the mud on mainstream media for them to realize that this is serious. They continue to believe that they won’t be found because they are essentially anonymous online, which is why we see escalating threats. They think they can get away with it and situations like this show that they can.
Arrest them. Lock them up for a long time. Allow the news media to cover it and shame them for their deplorable behavior, but don’t threaten violence. Responding to violence (or threats of violence) with more violence is not going to solve anything. It will only create more problems as more and more extreme actions are taken by each side.
So… this person is obviously a terrorist in every sense of the word, right? Are there any official statements from the police etc. how they plan to handle this? I mean this threat is so fucking specific, no one can argue that this guy obviously didn’t mean it.
@ej: exactly.
Way to let the terrorists win, Utah.