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
And I just killed the last quarter-inch of my rum bottle. Go drunk, you’re home.
BecauseScience: Some that open carry go WAY too far with it, simply because they can, dagnabbit. This kind of crap annoys me to no end, because… really, what purpose is there to go to Walmart with an assault rifle slung across your back, except to be a complete nuisance.
However, I open carry a handgun designed for concealed carry and most people don’t even notice that I have it. I certainly don’t go around advertising it and all anyone can really see is the grip sticking out of my waistband. But, I carry it with me everywhere I go, whether it’s a store, restaurant, salon, etc. It’s pretty common where I live to have several armed people anywhere you go.
If you watch the videos of trained police officers firing wildly into a crowd when they were aiming at the shooter you will get an idea of what adrenalin does to your ability to shoot straight and you will also get an idea of how bad an idea it is to encourage people to shoot the shooter. Which is precisely what these changes to law are about. Vigilantes.
It would prevent them from being able to shut down this event and others like it by threatening to shoot up the place, though, which makes it worth doing in itself.
So in other words, terrorism works.
I think a lot of us learned that back in 2001.
An imperfect solution is not immediately worthless. Depriving a potential spree shooter of a crowd of people to shoot into is a GOOD THING. Even if he does go and shoot people elsewhere, there will be fewer targets, and more places for the targets to go. It will also be easier for law enforcement to isolate the shooter.
Eliot Rodgers wanted to get inside a sorority house and kill everyone there. He was denied. Yes, he killed a lot of people, and that is a fucking tragedy, but that doesn’t mean that the sorority was wrong to lock their doors, or that it didn’t save lives.
I read this really incredible article recently about mass shooters, and the FBI Threat Assessment unit, which basically takes reports on people who may be considering doing something like a mass shooting, and then attempts to intervene before anything bad happens. As I recall, the goal isn’t to arrest them or commit them, but to provide support to people who feel their only option is to go out in a blaze of glory.
So there are things that can be done for people who really are planning on doing a mass shooting.
More likely, these specific threats are from blowhards who get their kicks by causing women to be afraid. I doubt anyone really intended to kill people at this speech. (By the way: that does not mean anyone was wrong to treat the threats as credible and cancel the event. The stakes are too high.) And we can ABSOLUTELY do something to prevent that. The police can find them and prosecute the shit out of them, so that others realize that it’s not just fun and games anymore. They can prosecute the shit out of these specific threateners, and prosecute the shit out of threateners on Twitter. People will get the message. These people are cowardly shitheads who think they’re invincible because they figured out how to use an anonymizing proxy. The police really ought to prove them wrong.
I remember a lot of people thought they could have been the good guy with a gun that stopped the Aurora movie theater massacre. Absurd. Holmes through a smoke bomb into a crowded theater. How could a bystander shoot the perpetrator and only the perpetrator in a dark, smoky, crowded theater? More people would have died.
One of the aspects of being armed in public (the good guy with a gun stopping the bad guy with a gun) that always disturbs me is this: the bad guy knows exactly when and where he* is going to pull out his gun and start shooting. If you have a gun in a holster, safety engaged, watching the ventriloquist on stage or whatever, you have milliseconds in which to respond. Unless you’re walking around like Repairman Jack, on a hair trigger, you will most likely not be able to respond in a timely manner.
Nova’s scenario – waiting behind a locked door, knowing someone is wandering about like a lion seeking who he may devour, ready to respond but not react – makes far more sense than bringing your Glock to the Piggly Wiggly.
*Let’s face it – how often is a mass shooter a she?
Yup. Australia was fairly run of the mill about guns right up until the Port Arthur massacre. Now no one except gun club members, farmers and law enforcement are allowed to have guns, and they’re very tightly controlled.
The USAnians obsession with guns looks downright peculiar from here.
The Giffords shooting did have a good guy with a gun trying to stop the bad guy with a gun – and he ended up shooting the wrong person. Oops.
The misconception comes with starting the hypotheticals with mass shootings; the shooter shoots some people but others have time to react. If the shooter has a specific target, after the shots are fired there isn’t much bystanders can do.
As I like to say: Colt made men equal, but the more murderous among us are more equal than the rest.
Canadian here, and it looks the same to most of us too. Cannot imagine why I’d ever wear a gun to Starbucks, or why anyone would.
Other than that I have nothing to say, because I’m so angry about all of this I’m incapable of anything other than frothranting. I don’t get this, I don’t get it at all. I really hope this person gets found out and faces legal consequences.
Not quite, actually. There was an armed guy who was in a nearby store when the shooting started and he ran to the scene, but decided it would be a bad idea to draw his gun, because he didn’t want to be mistaken for the shooter. The shooter ended up being subdued by unarmed civilians at the scene when his gun jammed.
The people rushing Breivik didn’t have the same luck and were gunned down.
Just in case this hasn’t been coming across clearly, part of the issue I have with this discussion is that a society in which everyone is armed to the teeth in anticipation of possibly being attacked by another armed person and this is considered normal is so far from ideal that I’m not sure why it isn’t obvious to everyone how undesirable a society that is/would be to live in.
I don’t know if having everyone armed wouldn’t just make matters worse. As a previous poster mentioned mass killers do what they do on the assumption they are on a suicide mission. If some wannabe hero pulled out a gun, got into a gunfight with the mass murderer and accidentally killed more people by firing wildly at them and missing him but not everyone I can’t see that as a positive, not even if the wanna be hero’s sixth bullet hit it’s target.
And in a crowded auditorium that could totally happen!
Cassandra: But, at what cost? If the shooter cant get weapons into the event, so he goes into another public space to kill people, lives are still lost. And every life, even the lives of assmaggots that would do something like this, is sacred. I don’t know how to allow events to be held unimpeded, while managing public safety, when threats like this are made.
As DeniseEliza mentioned, maybe less lives would be lost, maybe it would be easier for potential victims to get away. But, maybe not, depending on the location. Maybe law enforcement wouldn’t be able to respond as quicklu, because they’re occupied with the event, that more lives are lost. There are just too many variables.
I do agree that threats need to be taken a hell of a lot more seriously than they are. With all of the threats that have been made throughout gamergate, has even a single arrest been made? Has it even made the news, outside of industry blogs?
Robert: In reality, the vast majority of the gun carrying public would be a huge liability in any kind of crisis or combat situation. Even though I have some training and experience, I would do my best to put myself in a reactive position, backed into a shady spot, and defend it. I would not try to be a hero and go after the shooter. Too much margin for error in a situation that allows for none. This Hollywood notion of nailing the big scary bad guy is best left in Hollywood, because its not even close to reality amd never will be.
Tracy: I’ve taken my gun into Starbucks because I carry it everywhere, unless firearms are specifically not permitted, like work. It’s not like I make sure to stop by the house to get it, so I’m sure to be armed when I know I’m going to get a coffee. I’m always armed. And I’m always armed for a reason that makes sense to me.
Another Canuck over here, boggling at the gun laws in the USA. There have been innumerable mass shootings due to the high availability of guns, and I have heard of not one that was stopped by ‘a good guy with a gun’ who was not a law enforcement officer. I’ll grant you that there may indeed be a handful of cases where this happened, but I would bet that the ratio of stopped shooting sprees to the amount of shooting sprees facilitated by the accessibility of firearms is staggeringly low. It should be clear to all and sundry that arming people with MORE weapons seems to be counter-productive to stopping gun violence, shouldn’t it? I don’t understand the logic of making it easy to carry around a gun.
And then of course, there’s the blatant racism to consider. A black man with a b-b gun in a toy section in Walmart is shot in the back, Michael Brown and Trayon Martin are shot while completely unarmed, etc, etc, etc. You’re only allowed to openly carry a firearm if you’re white, whatever the rules on the books say.
Funny how the vast majority of spree killers are white males, hmm? It’s almost as if they’re raised in a system where they’re encouraged to nurture violent tendencies and told that the rest of the world is made to cater to them, and that if they have a problem it’s everyone else’s fault.
Any other demographic would be noted and freaked out about if they were responsible for this shit, but white men are the default human. They aren’t some kind of homogenized demographic that can be widely painted with the same brush! There is a wide variety of temperments and personality traits in (white male) humans, unlike women or blacks or muslims, which are all monolithic demographics composed mainly of scheming villains, the bad apples are not representative of any sort of underlying issues. Not at all.
@ Nova
I don’t know why you’re ignoring the context in which this discussion is taking place, which is that a public event was cancelled purely because there was no way to stop someone who made explicit threats from taking guns into it, but you should really stop doing that. If concealed carry is something that’s important to you, I guess that’s why you want to talk about it, but please stop and think about whether or not this is the time and the place to talk about how useless you think attempting to limit the places where people can take guns to is.
@ Thread in general
Just thought I’d post this comment about the Montreal Massacre from Dworkin, because it’s pretty damn relevant to what’s going on here in a macro sense.
This, to me, is the most important part.
QFT
@Nova
I wonder if your opinion would be different if it were a bunch of black people holding a civil rights rally, and some white people threatened to shoot it up. Because, you know, that was a thing that happened during the 60s on a regular basis, and some black leaders and bystanders were actually killed as a result. Is it your position that those black organizers should have just sat down and shut up? That it would have been preferable if the KKK had silenced them with threats, because even the tiniest, most remote possibility that someone might be killed (even the shooters!) makes it no longer worth the risk?
Apparently, concealed carry is more sacred than either life OR speech to you.
I don’t know, my ALICE training explicitly said don’t do this. The sherriff said when they did their active shooter training the people who tried to defend a spot ended up getting “killed” every single time while people who ran around everywhere survived.
I will say this:
Open carry is an act of aggression, no matter what the gun owner’s intentions. It’s an implicit threat to every single person you encounter.
The problem is that a state law makes it impossible for anyone to impose a restriction on gun access to an area (“Public spaces”), which makes anyone who threatens to bring a gun and shoot someone at an event a person you can only deter by watching them intently while they’re at your event and then, the moment they make a movement to open fire, tackle them to the ground because if you intercept them at any point before that, or demand they don’t bring weapons, you are violating a state law and (if you’re a police officer) opening yourself to a federal charge of enforcement overreach, while if you’re a civilian, you have no say in the application of those laws because state legislature has decided to mandate the decision for you.
That is a problem. That is not a good situation. That is a bad situation. That is a problematic end result.
If your only recourse when threatened is to meekly shut everything down, go somewhere else, never speak up again and never attempt any kind of action that can minimize the threats you receive, well, then, erh, congratulations, I guess we’ve all proven terrorism still works.
Seriously. I cannot even into the argument that a university cannot mandate a “No guns” policy at their public lectures, especially so when the people who are going to be holding those lectures have several times been threatened with gun-related violence.
It just seems like such a basic thing to me. We ban smoking in public areas to avoid second hand smoke, because your decision to smoke shouldn’t infringe on my decision not to smoke, and vice versa. Fucking likewise, your decision to gun should not infringe on my (I think reasonable) decision not to be gunned.
Canadian here. I like living in this country knowing that however scary a situation might be, my chances of being held at gun point are pretty damn low. Also like knowing that – even in spite of what Marc LePine did – if Anita wanted to give a talk here, she probably wouldn’t have had to cancel.