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The shooter who wounded nine people in a rampage near a shopping mall in Houston this morning was wearing what looked like a Nazi uniform, local police sources told Houston’s KPRC2.
A piece on the station’s website reports:
The gunman who carried out Monday morning’s shooting that wounded nine people was wearing what appeared to be Nazi paraphernalia, two law enforcement sources told Channel 2 Investigates’ Robert Arnold.
The shooter, identified in the media but not officially as lawyer Nathan DeSai, was killed in a shootout with police responding to the scene.
Law enforcement sources said that the shooter was wearing what appeared to be an antique German uniform with Swastikas on it. …
Investigators also combed through the shooter’s condo, where they found what appeared to be Nazi paraphernalia inside, according to a law enforcement source.
Several other weapons were reportedly found in his car.
At this point, we don’t know much more than this.
Today’s shooting came only a few days after 20-year-old Arcan Cetin shot and killed five people (four female, one male) at a Macy’s makeup counter in the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington. Cetin has confessed to the killings, according to court documents, though police say they still don’t know why he did it.
But there are some clues that suggest that Cetin may have been driven, like many young, male mass killers before him, by a sense of “aggrieved entitlement” towards women. For one thing, four out of five of his victims were female, all of them shopping in the vicinity of Macy’s makeup counter. For another, he apparently had a history of harassing girls in high school.
“Cetin was described by high school friends and neighbors as a troubled person who made vulgar comments toward women.,” the Washington Post reports.
Friends and neighbors described a young man who has gotten in trouble with the law several times, with three assault charges since 2015.
Several of Cetin’s former classmates described him as a socially awkward teenager who later was given to inappropriately touching female students.
“He had some kind of issues, to say the least,” Miranda Schnecker, who knew Cetin from middle school and high school, said in an interview. “He was just very awkward, didn’t know how to connect with people — and a lot of people didn’t know how to handle that, so he wasn’t very popular.”
It was in high school, she said, when Cetin began physically harassing girls in school.
“He would touch them inappropriately when they didn’t want it,” said Schnecker, 20.
Another classmate, Rosie Aguilera, said Cetin would try to touch her and other young women at the school “as some kind of joke to him.”
As is too often the case, Cetin’s alleged harassment escalated to murder.
We are likely to learn much more about both of these killers in the days to come.
NOTE: I’m going to skip the Pledge Drive capybara for this post.
I can’t even…
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Put the new Hilary ad in your brain; read about Cetin.
Conspiracy-me wants to say that Trump’s “advice” on how to deal with women is likely to lead to more so-called aggrieved entitlement towards women.
So, you see, just as the attacks by terrorists (those are the brown-skinned mass killers) show why we need Trumpf to protect us from them, the attacks by aggrieved patriots (those are the white-skinned mass killers) demonstrate why we need Drumpf to address their grievances. Either way, say the Trumpites….
I can’t even with how Cetin is being described as “socially awkward” when it sounds like “serial sexual harasser possibly also committing sexual assault” is more accurate.
How did we get to the point where a teenage boy who gropes teenage girls counts as “socially awkward”?
:'(
@PoM
Thank you
I’m socially awkward. I get flustered easily and feel uncomfortable talking to new people face-to-face and I find talking on the phone very challenging. I’m usually rather self conscious when talking in front of people, though if I’m talking about something I’m passionate about it gets easier over time. It’s similar with people that I know personally.
What Cetin did is horrifying and it’s a disservice to people with genuine social anxiety and awkwardness to be compared to a murderer and a sexual harasser. 🙁
ETA: Ninja’d by Policy of Madness.
I’d like to echo Axecalibur’s thanks by the way. 🙂
ETA2: In the header picture, the badges on the German uniforms read “South Eastern Upper Danube” and “Eastern East Prussia”, in case anyone is interested.
But we’re supposed to be flattered when we’re harassed. It’s a compliment. How else is one supposed to meet girls? Saying it’s creepy and scary to be harassed is misandry!
I wonder if Lars/Glen, our resident wannabe PUA troll has read and comprehended this. Maybe if I say the magic phrases “I am single and childless” and “I love Game of Thrones” he’ll come and apologize for acting like we’re silly for seeing harassment as a red flag?
Because if he was a misogynistic asshat who sexually assualts/harasses girls but was a popular jock who got dates, then he’d be an alpha or a Chad Thundercock. He wasn’t socially awkward because he didn’t treat female classmates like human beings. He was socially awkward because he did while unpopular. Boys are not expected to just treat girls like people or anything. They’re just expected to objectify us in cool or uncool ways.
Ugh. I’m just so sick of both mass shootings and the objectification of women being seen as normal. It makes me extra ragey when the two converge.
Dare I even ask what the manosphere reaction these shootings is?
What Monzach and PoM said.
If I had to hazard a guess? Probably something like, “This wouldn’t have been an issue if those girls hadn’t all rejected him.”
As if I weren’t worried enough already about some perpetually-pissed-off, violent asshole going full Call of Duty at my workplace. (I don’t work at a makeup counter, or at a mall, but I do work at a thrift store.) My company already has a policy in place to deal with situations like these–in fact, I’ve even gone through a bit of training about what to do in the event of a random shooting. I think the underlying assumption was “disgruntled ex-employee as shooter” rather than “random member of public as shooter”, but the advice we got (run like hell, or hide if you can’t) might be helpful all the same.
*remembers general layout of workplace sales floor*
*remembers that many of workplace’s sales-floor staff members are female and/or POC*
*winces*
*smacks forehead*
I should’ve written that the co-workers I mentioned were women and/or POC. Got an adjective mixed up with a collective noun. Sorry.
Not sure about the manosphere but the right-wing reaction has been, “I’m sure glad that mall is a gun-free zone! Sure kept that gun out of there!” Oh, and, “The media won’t call it terrorism even though this Muslim* Turkish guy terrorized our women!”
*I have no idea if he’s actually Muslim. That’s just some of the crap I’m hearing from Republicans I know.
Re: Cetin, I heard from a friend who lives in the area (and changed his mind at the last moment about shopping at that mall, right before it all went down!), that his (Cetin’s, not my friend’s) ex-girlfriend used to work at that mall, in that store, and that he was seen casing the joint before he came back in armed and shooting. I’m going to guess she used to work at the cosmetic counter where most of the victims were shot. (She, luckily, was not there, as she’d moved away.)
Also, Cetin was a real mixed bag of weirdness. I am socially awkward, and I do NONE of the shit he did. That is all.
I hadn’t even HEARD about these. Maybe the BBC is getting tired of Americans shooting each other up. WTF???
Hello.
I agree with Monzach and the other speakers about “socially awkward”. And i would like to add that as a socially awkward person, it is the opposite of what the students in the article say : i tend to avoid as often as possible physical contact with unknown persons, so groping or even touching is out of question. Overcrowded public transportations quickly become a small hell on earth.
Lack of respect is not social awkwardness.
Have a nice day.
nth-ing all of the above; lack of respect =!= social awkwardness
My youngest (Asperger’s, ADHD and severe language delay and disorder) is trying to deal with social awkwardness and struggling with maybe-depression (as a young adult now). They have occasionally wondered out loud what exactly it is about them that makes them come off as unattractive, and what they should try to do about it. They sure as hell would never even dream of physically (or even verbally) imposing themselves on anybody, much less of having a sense of entitlement that they want to take out on others.
I do wish I had resources of any kind I could point them towards, though (I love Captain Awkward myself, but Youngest doesn’t do too well with innumerable screenfuls-o’-text).
@ PoM,
Can’t it be both? Sure, many serial rapists are socially adept, especially those who rely on alcohol and social connections. But there’s no reason someone with social anxiety can’t also be a habitual harasser.
So far no comments yet about armchair diagnoses for mental illness and other ableist stuff.
To anyone about to do it: DON’T.