UPDATE: The shooter has been identified as 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer. Rumors spread earlier in the day that the shooter was a a regular 4channer and active Youtuber known as “the eggman.” Obviously they were wrong.
This is beyond fucked up. In this archived thread from 4chan’s /r9k/ board, the apparent shooter at Umpqua Community College told fellow channers yesterday of his plans to shoot up a school today. He didn’t specify which school, mentioning only that it was in the “northwest.” /r9k/ is a board heavily populated by so-called “incels,” and the media is reporting that the apparent shooter regularly posted bitter complaints about his lack of success with women,
UPDATE 2: There is a lot of confusing and contradictory information out there, and the IDing of the killer has actually raised more questions than it’s resolved. An apparent Myspace page for Harper-Mercer suggests that he was obsessed both with guns and with the IRA.
There have also been reports that he was targeting Christians. According to the New York Post, a “woman who claimed to have a grandmother inside a writing class in Snyder Hall, where a portion the massacre unfolded” reported that
“The shooter was lining people up and asking if they were Christian,” she wrote. “If they said yes, then they were shot in the head. If they said no, or didn’t answer, they were shot in the legs.
So was he — as an apparent supporter of the IRA — targeting Protestants? The Daiy Beast, for its part, says the shooter “hated religion.” Chuck C. Johnson of GotNews says he’s “confirmed” that the shooter was a Muslim.
Is the Myspace page really his? Is the report from the alleged granddaughter bullshit? Was the 4chan posting yesterday actually from him, or a comment from a troll that just happened to have been posted the day before a school shooting in the northwest?
I don’t know. But I still recommend that you read the rest of this post, if only to see the comments from the other 4channers.
Screenshots below:
Here’s his first comment warning fellow channers not to go to school today if they live in the northwest.
He then said he’d post again shortly before he started to shoot. (I don’t know if he did.)
Because 4chan is a fucking cesspool, other channers offered him advice:
Another anon suggested that indiscriminate killing wasn’t the solution, seeming to imply that more targeted killing was?
Others put forth their ideas of what sorts of people might be considered appropriate targets:
More encouragement. Note the reference to Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara “incel” killer.
A few others urged the OP to NOT carry out his plans.
After reports of the shooting hit the news, anons reacted with amazement:
Amazement and enthusiasm:
In case you’re wondering, “kek” is the equivalent of “lol.”
More excitement:
There’s much more of this in the thread.
Naturally, someone claims that the shooting could have been averted if only the shooter could have found a girlfriend.
Yes that’s right: he thinks the shooter was himself a victim, presumably of the entire female gender.
There’s a lot more in the thread but honestly I can’t stomach it right now.
Note: This post has been updated numerous times.
David, from what I understand these 4chan threads eventually get buried by newer threads because there is no real search feature. Do you have a way of linking back to the original thread for future study? I’m not very internet savvy so perhaps it’s easier than I think.
The reason I ask this is because it seems that the MRA/Neo-Masculine culture was a fairly large factor in this shooter’s life. It’s important to be able to refer back to this thread in future conversations in order to help raise awareness.
The hell? Seriously?
Watching CNN right now and they just broke news the shooter is from Seattle and they believe he made YouTube videos and postings about being rejected by women and blaming women for his problems.
Basically, he is another “Elliot Rodgers” type.
@Ari Agbabian
I think the original thread has already been deleted.
Cernovich continues to be a piece of shit.
The whole “only if he had a girlfriend” thing would still mean that there was at least one person (the woman he would be miraculously dating) who was in mortal danger. And the whole mindset just skeeves the hell out of me. Literally holding a gun to women’s head to get them to comply…
The people on 4chan already decided to dehumanize people who are different from them and they’ve found a community that feeds that and also provides human needs like accomplishment or belonging. They’re completely normal psychologically and just have heavily reinforced toxic beliefs and attitudes.
@Ari, a number of sites archive all 4chan threads automatically.
@ Jezebel
Absolutely consider the impact that the US’s gun-happy culture is having here. Just mostly wanted to deal with TRP/AVFM/etc.’s inevitable “We never asked men to do THIS” thing they’ll do.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the web: http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/domestic-violence-industry/october-is-the-fifth-annual-bash-a-violent-bitch-month/
@Tracy not on /r9k/ as a I remember but back when I posted on /mu/ which is the music board there the majority people would come up and offer support to users who were suicidal. There were still posts egging these people on but overall they were outnumbered by positive messages.
/mu/ was a slightly better place that wasnt as toxic as the other boards (I place this on the fact that music is generally a much more diverse medium than pretty much any others). It still was sexist but more the creepy “I wanna have sex with X female musician” and “shes only famous cause shes a women doing X” than the truly vile “Women are lesser human beings” that other boards spew.
That being said I kinda bought into a delusion that it was somehow better than the other boards and after they tried to doxx a teenage music reviewer(and seemed to be headed for a GG esque scenario) and the response to a person objecting to doxxing him was “were 4chan its what we do” I left 4chan for good.
I do think decent people do reside there and can get out of there but for every person like me there is a person like my younger brother. He never left, later went on to 8chan, and was made into a crueler person by his time on the boards.
@justlikeheaven would I be right in saying if you go in a toxic person, you’re more likely to stay because things you already believe are being reinforced? And what, in your experience, were the good bits that overshone the not-so-good to downright disgusting bits?
Sorry to hear about your brother.
@scarletpipstrelle
Also on the site right now.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/sexual-politics/m-g-t-o-w/no-mgtows-dont-hate-women/
…Do these people have no sense of self awareness… or irony… or basic fucking decency.
Well luckily the article did provide for us “feminists and white knights” this adorable video of puppies
very very sad. I don’t even know. What is so rotten with humanity that we have to kill each other all the time. I’m beginning to understand why people check out from the news and the world. It’s too much. It’s too hard. And nothing we try to do seems to change anything.
Everyone knows this will keep happening. But as a whole, we don’t want to stop it. We care more about killing people than saving people. Our country has made its choice. Freedom to kill is more important than freedom to live.
When will we decide otherwise?
Maybe we never will.
Sorry I mistyped: I meant also on the web. A voice for men and 4chan are not connected. Too bad there’s no way to edit.
Oh wait, my post was as I meant it. I just meant, how ironic that AVFM is celebrating October in that way while now this happens. What a zeitgeist the MRAers promote.
@Tracy I saw alot of goodness and positivity coming from “feels threads” where alot of people would talk about and discuss there problems and relating them to the music they were listening to. There was also some people who were actively pro feminist on the board and I remember on one thread where after someone mocked Anita Sarkeesian there was a surprising amount of people who responded by saying “Shes right you know” and other similar comments(though this largely could have been people just trolling).
I would say a /r9k/, /v/, /pol/ and 4chan as a whole reinforce people negative and toxic views on things with /r9k/ and /pol/ especially having a ton of people goading each other down darker and darker paths. Its a board that openly encourages misanthropy.
…I think this was a sexually motivated crime the more data comes out. Huffpo is reporting that ” The hospital said on Twitter that the victims were all female and between the ages of 18 and 34, and quoted a doctor who said that an “army” of doctors and nurses had volunteered to help.”
He went in and targeted women in what the Red Pill assholes consider the bangable range.
@Tracy
Though I also will say at the very least even the most progressive boards encourage ironic racism/sexism/homophobia and encourage a callous use of slurs.
And CNN is saying he had a youtube channel with a following and had a huge hatred towards women – they’re acknowledging it this time.
/r9k/ attitude towards women is utterly despicable. I once saw a thread with the title “have any of you tried groping women share your experiences”. Needless to say I never clicked on it but that just shows how this place is just an utter cesspool.
@justlikeheaven and hey, @Hank too, why not
It sounds like overall the place is a celebration of toxicity, but with a few sprinkles here and there of decent stuff. I can see why you (@justlikeheaven) left. If someone put a place of shit in front of me and said ‘there’s some chocolate in there too, you just have to know where to look’, I wouldn’t eat it. It sounds, basically, like a collection of wannabe Tyler Durdens who completely missed the point of Fight Club.
@Hank
As a 4chan ex-pat I have to strongly disagree with you there. They single most common response on most boards usually involves someone calling another person a “f****t”
@Johanna – Huffpo is the only source I’ve seen that has made that claim. CNN says the identities of the victims will not be released immediately. While I wouldn’t be surprised if that is the case, we won’t know for certain until the victims’ identities are released.
Thank you for the puppies. I needed puppies.
So we’ve already got “must be Muslim or trans”, who wants to take bets on how long it’ll be before the mentally ill stereotypes and accusations come out? Or the gun arguments?
I just can’t with humanity. It’s 4chan, of course they encouraged him, yes, that’s the PROBLEM! We fucking all know they lack anything resembling accountability, and yet, when shit like this happens, people get all “we’re not all like that” (in this thread even!), but okay, you aren’t? Prove it. Hit report on those posts, call out the people encouraging these guys, encourage the people who do call them out, don’t just wait until shit happens to go “but I’m not like that”.
Yes, 4chan is the cesspit of the internet, but when your cesspit starts spreading cholera you don’t just go “eh, it’s full of human shit, of course it is” and shrug your fucking shoulders!
ARGLEFUCKINGBARGLE WHAT THE FUCK 4CHAN?!?
Seriously, Mason will never see the outside of a prison cell, and he wasn’t even charged with murder, “just” conspiracy. Yet advice what guns to use, knowingly couched in “in this hypothetical”, is let to get buried in the archives of the internet without so much as the ability to ban them from the very board they used to encourage this?
I fucking can’t.