By David Futrelle
The Internet’s incels long ago adopted Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger, the maladjusted twentysomething who murdered six in cold blood as a kind of revenge for his “involuntary celibacy,” as a patron saint of sorts.
Now they are doing the same with Nikolas Cruz, the Florida teen who allegedly murdered 17 students and teachers at a high school in Parkland, Florida today. On Incels.Me — the web forum that Reddit’s incel population migrated to after the admins at Reddit shut their forum there down — one enthusiastic commenter got the discussion started by posting a thread titled “A hERo rises on this day of incel exclusion (Florida Valentines Day School Shooting).” (All links in this post go to archived pages.)
The capitalized “ER” in “hERo” is of course a reference to Elliot Rodger.
In the thread, assorted incels cheered as the details of the shooting came out over the course of the day, declaring their “immense respect” for their new “HERO.” And some wondered — with more than a little justification — if the shooter wasn’t one of their fellow commenters on Incels.Me.
“Respect to him if he kills over 60 normies,” a commenter called Towncel declared. “Hopefully he isn’t just using 2 pistols and actually has an assault rifle,” he added in a followup comment.
Vman, a prolific commenter with over 2500 posts on the site was already set to declare Cruz his new idol.
holy shit its on valentines day! what a fucking hero! we have a new model! PLZ BE UGLY PLZ BE UGLY. WE NEED INCEL AWARNESS
Spicycurry was a little more reserved. “Watch the news blame incels rather than the femoids who mock us and oppress us,” he groused.
lonelyistheworld has a rather different fear. “The media will probably try to cover up the fact that he’s an Incel,” he complained. “The elites know that there’s a huge problem with lonely men in the west.”
Naturally, many of the commenters hoped that most of the victims would be “femoids.”
“Hope his roastie kill count is high,” Reddit_is_for_cucks opined
Roastie contribute nothing to the society anyway, sll they do is shopping and suck chads dick and get free stuff from cucks
Incel_Dikshit concurred, expressing his hope that the shooter had “snagged some degenerate roasties and depsrate beta orbiters with him.”
“Roastie” is a favorite incel slur for (cis) women, whose labia are thought (by incels) to resemble roast beef.
Many of the commenters took great pleasure in the fact that this murder spree took place on Valentine’s Day. “LIFEFUEL,” declared one. “The best Valentines Day in history buddy boyos.”
When several commenters expressed their uneasiness at this open celebration of mass murder, they were denounced as “Jooz.” Indeed, one prolific commenter called knajjd went so far as to justify the murder of young girls because, in his view
female children can, at best, be considered a timebomb. even if you believe that children are totes innocent creatures, etc. etc. that argument makes no sense since they’ll inevitably develop into roasties.
Comments like these continue for page after page; all of those quoted so far come from the first three pages of what is currently a ten page thread.
It didn’t take long for some of the commenters to wonder if the shooter hadn’t frequented Incels.Me. Several mentioned a recent Incels.Me thread in which a lurker posted an elaborately detailed threat to shoot up his former high school and other schools in the area (including an elementary school north of his high school) on February 12 before escaping by blending in with the those fleeing from the scene.
More than a few of the details match up with what happened today. The alleged shooter today targeted his former high school. There is a middle school northwest of the high school, though it is more west than north. Some reports suggest the shooter escaped the school by blending in with fleeing students. The date of the threatened rampage was only two days different from the actual assault. The gun he reportedly used is similar to, though not the same model as, the one mentioned in the post.
You can see the screenshotted post here.
It’s certainly possible that the threat posted to Incels.Me was nothing more than a fantasy, and that the similarities between it and the events that unfolded today mere coincidence.
EDITED TO ADD: But even if Cruz wasn’t the anonymous commenter on Incels.Me, he may well have thought of himself as an iucel. The Daily Beast reports that someone calling himself Nikolas Cruz left a comment on a YouTube video a year ago declaring that ““Elliot rodger will not be forgotten.” (Meanwhile, a self-described paramilitary white supremacist group in Florida is telling The Beast that Cruz had trained with them.)
Was Cruz an incel, a white supremacist — or both, or neither? The clues to his motivation are certainly unsettling. As is the existence of a forum overloaded with so many bitter, furious young men who look upon mass murder as a kind of righteous retribution for the refusal of “roasties” to offer them sex.
NOTE TO REGULAR READERS: I was planning on returning to regular posts here shortly. I’m sorry it had to be with a story on this horrendous incident.
Did I just get accused of being polite?
Um, I don’t see why comparing other countries is dishonest? I deliberately compared to the US to countries of comparable wealth.
That said, banning AR-15s or implementing universal background checks won’t get rid of the issue in and of itself. The problem is that we have a whole gun culture. But we can’t begin to even think about changing that gun culture until our leaders get on board and until we stop allowing people to stockpile weapons of war.
There isn’t an easy overnight fix but it’s really gross to take advantage of that fact to prevent any fix from ever happening at all. That is what the NRA and the gun fondler crowd are doing.
@ joaquin
I’m no mathematician, but I think you’re making an error of logic here.
The reason the homicide rate didn’t change much was because the Port Arthur Massacre didn’t actually boost the figures that much in the first place.
‘Only’ 35 people were killed. The thing is, that was enough for people to say ‘never again’. So the rate stayed as it was before, but the key thing is, it didn’t get a chance to increase through further mass shootings.
Same here after Dunblane.
Now you could speculate that these events were anomalies, and there wouldn’t have been any further mass shootings anyway. But neither Australia or the UK seemed to have wanted to put that to the test.
Some states have more gun control laws, other states have fewer.
Those states with more gun control laws tend to have lower rates of homicide per capita than those which have fewer. In cases where this is not true (Detroit being the perennial example), it has been shown that guns are smuggled in from out-of-state.
There’s a correlation between lax gun control and an increased murder rate. It’s just raw numbers, my duck.
If you’d like to reply with “correlation is not causation” you had best bring some ample work to back it up, ’cause science is all about correlation these days.
Or there might have been a massive spike in murders that was made much smaller due to an absence of guns. For one.
A good hint that you’re arguing for a biased perspective is an inability to imagine contrary alternatives.
@ joaquin
Consider two lines on a graph. One shows gun homicides, the other non gun homicides. You ban guns. The gun line goes down. But what we do *not* see is a corresponding increase in the non gun line. Which demonstrates that people *aren’t* seeking alternative ways of killing once guns are taken away.
That makes sense when you consider that most homicides are impulsive. People use whatever weapon is to hand. The problem when that’s a gun is that it’s easier to kill a lot of people.
@ joaquin
Sorry, not meaning to harangue you, but I’ll just add this general point.
It’s very common for people to make the argument that wanabee killers will just find alternatives to guns. Hopefully we’ve now disproved that.
But people also seem unwilling to accept that guns are uniquely effective as a killing tool. They argue that alternative weapons are just as lethal. However I’ll just pose this question; if that’s true, why doesn’t the army just run over people in trucks?
Or one person, frankly. A lot of incidents that would be homicides if guns were involved turn into assault or attempted homicide without them.
It should also be noted that suicides go up in households with guns.
Alan
You are somehow admiting that mass shooting dont raise the homicide rate.
What the hell man? Sure, no more mass shootings but in the end, ir was only a “feel good” measure, like most gun control laws, at the “small” price of leaving law abiding citizens defenseless.
Scildfreja:
You mentioned Detroit (i could add Chicago, for that matter) and you correctly point out that guns come from an outside source.
Now well, i ask you (and everyone that uses that argument):
If you cannot isolate a CITY. How are you going to isolate one of the largest countries in the world???
Last time i checked there were 11 million people living in the USA without proper permits.
How many of you know a person who had/has access to illicit substances?
Do you understand my point? Gun control wont do CRAP!!!
And yes! I noticed the correlación between lax gun control and murder rates, my Swan. It’s not like guns were SPECIFICALLY designed with that in mind (duh)
@ joaquin
I’m admitting no such thing. I’m pointing out that the UK and Australia took immediate steps to remedy the issue before it had a chance to raise the homicide rate.
Why in so obsessed with this?
Simple, as i stated in my first post, having a gun is not required to kill a large number of people.
A crafty enough person can make a bomb, or cause mass arson, mass poisoning or ram a truck into a crowd.
Problem is:
I can’t protect myself or my home using home made explosives or incendiaries, at least not without causing HORRIBLE collateral damage.
That is why guns are important:
They allow for DEFENSIVE and OFFENSIVE use.
The end.
Alan
How many mass shootings were the Australians having?
Is there any clue that might suggest that Port Arthur was just the beggining?
He’s not; that only applied to Australia. The rest of your argument is therefore invalid.
America is pretty isolated already: a huge ocean to the west, another huge ocean to the east, and friends to the north and south.
Cities, on the other hand, are connected to one another by a massive network of highways, blocking which would grind commercial activity to a halt and blast the economy.
The rest of your address to Scildfreja seems like the old gun-worshipper’s canard of “Outlawing guns will make sure only outlaws have guns”, with the implication “Why bother?” This is stupid, similar to saying “Outlawing murder will make sure only outlaws murder” with the implication “Why bother outlawing murder?”
I’ll be brief in reply. Mostly because I won’t need a whole lot of words.
I will break it down into premises for you!
– Canada has the world’s longest undefended border, with the United States
– Canada has much tougher gun regulations than the United States.
– Canada has a much lower rate of homicides than the United States.
Can you guess the appropriate conclusion for these premises? I can guarantee that the conclusion is not “Gun control wont do CRAP!!!”.
You are making a mistake in your reasoning, my egg. You assume that all o the homicides are done by people who really really wanna murder someone, and are willing to put planning and forethought into doing it. That’s not true. In many cases they’re just angry and happen to have a gun on them. Or it’s an accident of some sort. Or they’re frightened and intimidated, and have a gun on hand.
Taking their guns away doesn’t mean they’ll go get one illegally, in most cases. We know this because we can see it’s true in other countries. Most of them will get into fistfights instead of gunfights, and they’ll survive.
I’ve written down what I think your reply to this will be, and have a reply waiting for that. Let’s see if I guessed right.
@ joaquin
Well it appears they decided to draw the line at one.
But to address your point, here in the UK we actually had a mass shooting (Hungerford), where we adopted your approach of assuming it was a unique aberration. So we only introduced limited additional gun control.
However we then had a second (Dunblane) and 16 children died unnecessarily because we’d decided to ‘wait and see’.
Hey, Joaquin,
You’re either lying about Australia’s overall homicide rate not going down or you’ve uncritically swallowed someone else’s lies. Which is it?
http://theconversation.com/three-charts-on-australias-declining-homicide-rates-79654
Whether that is due to gun control is up for debate, but it’s not true that it didn’t change. Because the rates were never super high to begin with, it’s easy to make a chart look like it hasn’t changed. But it did change. If gun control makes a nation less safe, it would increase.
You can drive between Youngstown, Ohio and Detroit or between Houston and Chicago without encountering any kind of border security between cities or states. That’s not the same as crossing an international border. Does that mean guns would never get across the border? No. But not as easily.
You sure you aren’t really an American? Or maybe a Russian troll farm employee? Because you sure are fond of American right wing talking points and racist dog whistles. Chicago has the 8th highest murder rate and Detroit the 4th highest. So homicide is an issue there for sure, but why did you bring up Chicago instead of the top three cities. Which are St. Louis, Baltimore and New Orleans? Could it be because our first black president is associated with Chicago? That’s sure why Republicans love to talk about crime in Chicago. https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/
I’ve noticed also that cities associated with liberalism like San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland and Madison are not on there. Seattle is on there but only in 53rd place. NYC, another city with stricter gun control laws is 51st. There are a whole lot of red state cities on that list too. Many cities in Texas are on there.
On the same day as the Sandy Hook mass shooting, a man went into an elementary school in China and attempted to kill a large number of people. China has strong gun control. The man was armed with a knife. Guess how many people he managed to kill. You don’t even have to guess. You can Google it. I’ll wait.
You don’t have to be crafty to pick up a gun. Lots of shooters aren’t crafty and won’t successfully make a bomb or poison lots of people. The last mass poisoning I can even think of in the US was the Tylenol murders. And guess what? Pharmaceutical companies put seals on the bottles so you could tell if they’ve been tampered with. The federal government implemented stricter rules to prevent it from happening again and guess what? It didn’t!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tylenol_murders
Nice own goal. You just illustrated that responding to a mass murder by changing the law does actually work. Thanks!
Scenario A: over the course of a month, thirty people are murdered by thirty other people under a variety of circumstances.
Scenario B: During that same month, one person murders thirty people all at once.
Many of us are more viscerally disturbed by Scenario B, and want to make it less likely.
There’s also the perimeter to area ratio: much higher for a smaller thing like a city, than for a larger thing like a country, let alone a country the size of the US. This limits the diffusion rate, and it also means that, other things (e.g. population density and resources per capita) being equal, there will be more resources per kilometer of border. Thus more to spend on border control, in particular.
WWTH:
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/gun-control-australia-updated/
Well played, but as you may see, the rates were quite unstable, so i’m still not convinced that it did actually solved anything.
Yes! provided they are, you know… ENFORCED!.
I’d support gun control if only someone would promise that the bad guys will get dissarmed, instead of turning us (law abiding citizens) into free game, you know, the kind of thing that happened in every South American country dumb enought to believe gun control was the answer.
I don’t know you or your experiences with guns, but let me tell you this:
Having a gun pointed at my head was easily the most terrifiying experience of my life, you cannot outrun a bullet, and putting distance is useless.
A wise man said “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a GOOD guy with a gun”.
Criminals will keep their guns, Law abiding citizens should do the same.
And no, i have nothing against Obama, and i actually believe he earned his place in history, problem is, i strongly disagree with his policies. If only he hadn’t put so much effort in persecuting Lawful gun owners.
And no, sadly i’m not American, i wish i were, considering that my country copied much of it’s Constitution from yours, sadly we screwed it up somewhere and ended being a Banana Republic.
I would not live in the USA because i have nothing useful to contribute.
It’s sad that people like you hate everything your country was founded upon, i mean you have Canada, or Western Europe if you want progressive policies so much. No guns, no free speech, no problem, right?
Why the obsession with destroying the last stronghold of individual liberty in the world?
Robert Walker-Smith
Exactly my point!!!
It’s all about psychological impact, it’s not like i don’t care about massive loss of life, but we cannot act on feelings alone.
We can’t throw Constitutional rights away just because you are angry.
would you agree to punish a whole ethnic group for the actions of a few extremists? would you deny them refugee status?
Both sides of the political spectrum have this problem.
Meanwhile i will search for viable propposals on this.
Thanks!
We don’t feel defenseless here (in Australia). We feel safe. I can send my son to school without fear. There are kids at his school who are troubled and sometimes violent, but they can’t access guns. So I don’t need to worry that I’ll get the kind of phone call parents in the US get.
I can go to a shopping centre, a cinema, a concert, a pedestrian mall, a political protest (etc.) and the thought of being shot or seeing someone else shot never enters my mind.
(Aust. is not perfect by any stretch whatsoever, but this is one thing I would never change)
@WWTH,
It crossed my mind that it was a bit odd for a non-USian to mention the 2nd amendment in such obviously familiar terms.
Another example: Reading this story, most (western world) non-USAians’ reaction is going to be “What the hell kind of country is it where a shooting at a school has peopel having to determine whether it was an accident or not???” https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/03/07/one-alabama-student-dead-another-injured-after-shooting-at-high-school.html
Mish:
I don’t know how old your son is, but asuming your use of the word “school” i supose that he is underage, which means his violent buddies cannot legally own a gun, so it’s a moot point.
How can you feel safe and being unarmed at the same time?
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/06/australia-hasnt-had-a-mass-shooting-since-1996/
Sounds great!
I can’t help but notice that many in the gun control team are also blatantly pro-criminal. Hmmm…
As to why i speak of the 2A in such a familiar way? Well, Argentina copied muchos of it’s Constitution from the American INE, in fact, our Constitutional Law courses analyze many SCOTUS landmark cases including my all time favourite: District of Columbia v. Heller
American values are superior to any other values, too bad many don’t appreciate this.
Thanks!
@ joaquin
That’s not actually correct. What the 1996 agreement did was require applicants for firearms licences to demonstrate a ‘good reason’ for owning one. That could be things like vermin control, sports shooting etc. The agreement explicitly states that ‘personal protection’ could not be submitted as a good reason.
However that does not prohibit the use of firearms in self-defense. If you were attacked and you happened to have a firearm to hand, you could use it in self-defense, subject to the usual tests regarding reasonable force. Use of a firearm, or any other potentially lethal weapon, could amount to reasonable force if the threat was severe enough.
That’s exactly the same law as in the UK.
As to your general point about the efficacy of gun control in Australia, here’s a nice paper.
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365
Annndddd … idiot confirmed.
Unless there’s some unwritten law somewhere, enfoced by angels of pure fire, that “his violent buddies” can only use a gun legally owned by themselves.
When in practice, most of the highschool shooters have been either ex-highschoolers or, more importantly in this case, using Mommy or Daddy’s gun.
However, I’m sure as a reasonable supporter of the second amendment you’ll be happy to agree felony charges against the parents of any shooter as accessory to murder, right?
W R O N G
The username (along with the Argentinianness and the trollishness) looks familiar. Another fellow named Joaquin (or JoaquinRL1) was banned in November 2016.