Police in Lafayette, Louisiana are evidently struggling to understand why the outspokenly misogynistic, racist and anti-Semitic John Russell “Rusty” Houser murdered two women and wounded 9 other moviegoers at a showing of “Trainwreck,” a film written by and starring Amy Schumer, a feminist comedian with a Jewish father, known for joking frankly about sex.
[For more, see my latest post on Houser: “Did right-wing attacks on “Trainwreck” inspire John Russell Houser’s shooting rampage?”]
Col. Michael D. Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, wondered aloud about Houser’s motives at a press conference:
Why did he come here? Why did he do that? … We may not find a motive.
It seems to me that Houser’s likely motive is staring them in the face.
Because it turns out that Houser was pretty well-known, at least to regular viewers of one local TV talk show in Columbus, GA, as an angry right-wing fanatic who hated women. As one former host of the show recalled,
He was anti-abortion. … Rusty had an issue with feminine rights. He was opposed to women having a say in anything.
Houser evidently appeared on the live show dozens of times as a “gadfly” whose appearances “would generate calls.”
When Houser’s career as a loudmouthed crank on local TV apparently came to an end years ago, he moved to another medium, leaving a long trail of hateful comments on assorted websites, many of them openly praising Hitler and talking ominously about the future of what he saw as a deeply “immoral” culture.”
In the comments on a news article about an 60-year-old man who’d been murdered, Houser wrote
I am sincerely sorry for the loss of this fellow in the deer processing business. Most people over 50 in certain businesses are just as their parents were,rock solid morally.
I am also sorry for what is to come for the other very few moral souls left in the entire US.
I am not sorry for the 90% immoral population which will be meeting the same fate.
Filth is rampant.That none have stood against it causes me to take rest in the worse than MAD MAX near future which approaches.
In Trainwreck, Amy Schumer plays a New York journalist “riding the cock carousel” — as the odious men I regularly write about on this website like to put it — who eventually falls in love.
It seems highly unlikely that Houser was someone “who just happened to be in this theater,” as the police superintendent put it.
It seems highly likely that a woman-hating neo-Nazi ended up in a theater showing Trainwreck on purpose.
When a religious fanatic blows themselves up at a cafe frequented by members of a rival religious sect, we have no trouble calling this terrorism.
When an outspoken white racist murders nine black churchgoers in Charleston, SC, well, some people (including virtually all of the Republican presidential hopefuls) have trouble calling it terrorism. But most people can see it for what it is.
When misogynists murder women, almost no one calls it terrorism.
Elliot Rodger, who left behind an assortment of misogynistic videos and a book-length diatribe, was a terrorist.
“Rusty” Houser — who left behind no manifesto but who was well-known for his odiously anti-woman and neo-Nazi views — was almost certainly a terrorist as well.
NOTE: According to court filings, Houser had “a history of mental health issues, i.e., manic depression and/or bi-polar disorder.” (Which are actually the same thing.) While this could certainly have had an effect on his state of mind, it says nothing about his motives. Bipolar disorder does not cause people to become misogynistic neo-Nazis who murder women.
EDIT: Added the note above, made tweaks to wording.
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@coreys079:
When a man with a long history of misogyny and violence toward women goes to a screening of a feminist, if you will, movie, showing a story of sexually liberated woman, and executes two women sitting in front of him (so with the shots to the back of their heads), and then proceeds to shoot indiscriminately into a presumably mostly female audience, it does not take a psychologist* to properly identify a motive, or at least one of the major ones.
*Although I happen to be one.
Thank you, David.
The person who thinks of other people as subhuman is accusing us of hatemongering? How does that work?
Although, technically the ferrets in a David suit that are running this site aren’t humans. So he’s got us there, I guess.
Man, I’m a big fan of the Barberini Faun, and you’re forcing me to see it haralding your trolling asshattery. Shame on you.
Where there is overlap between men and MRAs or misogynists, I don’t like men. Where there isn’t overlap, I do like men. Pretty simple.
And since you seem to have problems with nuance, maybe I shouldn’t mention that I’m gay too…
Nonhuman =/= SUBhuman :c, unless we are talking bugs because fuck those things.
To the trolls: go fuck off in a thread that’s not about a mass shooting ffs.
@coreys079
No.
If someone has beliefs that certain people are dangerous, destructive and not worthy of respect, then it’s rational for that person to harm those people. If you think that people who wear polo shirts are destroying society, hurting you personally, and are subhuman, then it actually makes sense for you to go out and try to do something about it.
Which is why it is so bizarre that, whenever something like this happens, people are so quick to make comments like yours, rather than focus on the very obvious beliefs and ideology that directly justifies violent, terroristic actions.
The hell you’re not. Go fuck yourself.
Jesus tittiefucking Christ! How many more women have to die before:
1. We as a nation …as a world…recognize the fundamental problems with “men’s rights?”
2. We establish crimes against women as hate crimes?
3. We learn what terrorism means?
….but go ahead and tell me how white men are the most underprivileged, oppressed people on the planet….
-throws things-
Who wants to bet that gstally didn’t even read the article and just dropped in to whine about how much he thinks that feminists hate men? I’m happy to see that he included, “I’m not an MRA, but…” *checks off troll bingo square*
Also, Tony, thanks for the updates.
*Calling out misogyny in one man= Hating all men.
*Gets called “sub-humans” but we are the hatemongers.
:Sips tea: Mighty fine Troll Logic you got there.
I’ll bet money that certain someones are going to blame this murderer’s actions on a woman in his life. Whether it be his mother, his wife (or ex-wife), random teenage girls who wouldn’t sexually service him, etc.
And to Senor Troll up there, I suppose those of us who call out the tragedy of Dylan Roof shooting up a black church are just white hating black supremecists. Ugh. I mean, if you’re gonna troll, at least make sense, ok?
Yeah, objecting to the murder of nine people and pointing out that the murderer, who went to the screening of a feminist rom-com written by a feminist Jewish woman and shot two women in the back of the head before firing into the audience and killing seven more people, had a long history of saying misogynist and anti-Semitic things is total misandry. (Not that gstally actually knows that because he probably didn’t even read the article and just did a drive-by.)
It’s funny how, when white dudes commit murder, suddenly motives become completely unknowable. It’s like if I told people “I need to buy eggs” and then went to the store and everyone was like “I guess we’ll never know why she went to the store.”
@Katz,
Either that, or the motive is clearly either mental illness or his ex-wife/ex-girlfriend/girl he once had a crush on who turned him down.
What must it be like in this police department?
“We have the bank robbers’ gambling receipts in front of us. He owed the mafia a lot of cash. Got laid off recently, too … foreclosure, whole 9 yards.”
“But … it makes no sense. Why rob a bank? This is clearly the action of a sick man!”
But then, I understand even a known anti-abortionist bomber planting bombs at abortion clinics in order to terrify women out of having abortions and terrify doctors and nursing staff out of providing abortions isn’t actually labelled as terrorism, either. Just a “lone wolf”.
Odd how so many of these lone wolves tend to be white, male human beings who hold some pretty nasty views about the place of women in society, isn’t it?
“And we’ll never know why he did it,” the man said, standing over the bodies of the fallen women a look of confusion on his face as the shooter lay wearing a shirt that read ‘I hate women’ and ‘death to feminists’ carved into his gun, “It will be the mystery of the ages.” His friends agreed.
The mystery was never solved. /really bad story
Wait? This is real life? Well FUCK.
Yeah, this “we’ll never know…” shit is precisely what one can expect from a bunch of know-nothings. Whenever an explanation is proffered that hits the mark (or damn close to it), they can be relied on to stick their fingers in their ears and go “LA LA LA LA WE’LL NEVER KNOW LA LA LA LA LA…”
As someone who was in university at the time of the Montréal Massacre, though, and working at the uni’s women’s centre, it didn’t take me a minute to make the connection between fourteen dead women and the shooter’s blatant misogyny. But yes, there were a lot of we’ll-never-know know-nothings trying to make “reasoned” commentary in the media back then, too.
So Houser shot up the theater as a protest against rom-coms with feminists in them; film criticism in action. Was he so disappointed that American Sniper didn’t sweep this year’s Oscars that he had to take it out on the rom-coms?
I think what’s most worrying to me about this particular crime is this: there’s evidence the shooter didn’t originally intend to kill himself.
After reading the following articles, which contain information about the process of the crime, and the actions taken by this gunman (things like changing the number plate of his car, acquiring a supply of wigs and glasses, attempting to escape via a side door) it seems likely he was hoping to be able to escape and get away with the crime, and possibly even repeat it elsewhere.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/25/lafayette-gunman-was-slow-and-methodical-says-bobby-jindal
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-07-25/lafayette-shooting-gunman-named-as-john-houser/6647596
This is evidence of planning. It’s evidence of an intent to escape. It’s evidence of planned, thought-out behaviour. It’s evidence against the theory this guy was acting out as a result of a mental illness (particularly the bit about the presence of police officers altering his behaviour). He wasn’t in the grip of a compulsion. He was doing something he’d planned and thought through.
This is absolutely horrible. I really hope the best for the victims and their families, and that this won’t ever happen again.
Also there got to be some way we can get the media to stop portraying straight white male terrorists as fucking misunderstood saints, this just can’t be allowed to go on like this
And sadly, Houser’s hateful act of misogynistic violence took the lives of two women:
and
He was firing “methodically” one article said. One of the women he shot 4 times…I will be interested to know the sexes and races of his wounded victims.