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.
Joaquin, I was neither agreeing with you nor supporting your position.
The one time in my life to date that I’ve had a gun pointed at me, having a loaded handgun on my person would have been, at best, as helpful as having no gun at all. Not having a loaded firearm in my home makes me safer, statistically, than having one.
Hardly. It didn’t stop the 15 year old earlier this year in Kentucky. Didn’t stop the 14 year old (14, jesus christ) in S. Carolina in 2016.
Also, what Shadowplay said.
I literally just told you in my previous comment.
Oh god please not the light on the hill crap. Surely USians have enough to deal with right now?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I feel much safer having a dog in the house who barks whenever anyone comes up to the house than I would with a gun. I’ve never to my knowledge lived in a home that contained a gun before. I’ve never been the victim of violence in all my 37 years on the planet so far. The notion that you need a gun to feel safe is something that has always struck me as just bizarre.
People are so concerned with protecting their guns they forget who is looking up from the end of the barrel . Someone’s Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Child , partner, friend etc
Is it really worth the price to not as least regulate more?
Another way to have a very safe home: apartment; not ground floor; good sturdy door with peephole and maybe chain; sturdy lock; and no abusive partner. Not opening the door for strangers is an obvious thing as well, and being careful when departing or arriving that the hallway is empty so no-one barges in, or forces you to let them in from the outside.
Surely if preventing law-abiding citizens from obtaining firearms only makes them easier targets for gun-toting criminals, we would see an INCREASE in mass shootings in countries after they imposed gun control, not a decrease? Surely places like Canada and the UK and Australia should have higher rates of mass shootings and gun crime than the USA under this premise. After all, the citizens are sitting ducks, right?
I’ve been reading the back and forth about gun ownership, the US of A, and Australia’s gun control experiment with great interest and a certain amount of smug satisfaction seeing as I am Australian. But then I thought, what are the damn figures? And I couldn’t find a single, simple representation of the numbers, so I did it myself. For those interested, here are the two tables I put together that, I hope, allow for an easy look at the relative death rates by firearm for Australia and the USA for 2016 (the most recent year available – 2017 data won’t be available for a few months). In the process of putting this data together, I couldn’t help noticing a much more troubling issue, which I think should be front and centre of everyone’s consciousness when thinking about gun control – the extremely high rates of male suicides from firearms. It is 1.44 in Australia and a whopping 12.35 in the USA (that’s rate per 100,000 of the male population – sorry, the data is only presented in binary terms for gender, urgh, hope that changes soon.) That compares with rates of 0.76 and 7.1 respectively for the total population. Men are killing themselves in disproportionately high numbers by firearm. How many lives could be saved if guns were just a LITTLE BIT restricted? This is the true men’s rights battle front. I don’t need to tell readers of this blog exactly how much MRAs do to combat this dire situation.
I’ve tried to embed but I’m not quite sure if the pictures will come out properly in this blog, so here’s a link to my blog “Site Title” (um, yeah, I haven’t named it since I don’t really post anything on it, until now) in case the embedding doesn’t work:
2016 ABS and CDC Data on firearm deaths
?w=656
?w=656
***NOTES***
Before anyone decides to jump up and down on my figures, know that I am not a statistician. I am not trained in statistics beyond senior secondary school level. I completely accept I may have flubbed something, but before piling on you should look at the actual sources yourself – I have provided simple links for access in my blog post – since I spent several careful hours collecting and presenting this data. I have done my best to put forth just the numbers and not format or present it in a way that skews perceptions.
There are myriad issues involved in any comparison between the USA and Australia. Our populations alone are vastly different in size and composition. We share some values, legal and moral, but our present societies arose from very different beginnings. Australia has no constitutional right to bear arms, no enshrined freedom of speech, and no federal bill of rights. These are things that, for many if not most Americans, would make us seem like a truly backwards and frightening society. But we feel free and safe. Freedom of speech isn’t enshrined, but it is hotly and passionately defended when we feel it is impinged on. When there are shootings, they mostly involve crime groups and very rarely is anyone caught in the crossfire.
We have had massacres and bombings, true, but nothing on the scale of a mass shooting since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996 when 35 people died (which, at the time, was the SINGLE DEADLIEST mass shooting anywhere in the world, but has since been more than eclipsed in magnitude by several events in the USA). We felt unsafe when that happened. When John Howard brokered the National Firearms Agreement, which restricted the sales of assault and semi-automatic firearms (note these are not BANS, they are restrictions whereby potential owners must demonstrate they have a good reason for owning such a weapon, and home defense is not one of the permissible reasons), we all breathed a HUGE sigh of relief. Well, almost all of us. Howard was lucky that it was early in his first term of government when he brought in those changes, because he did it in the teeth of strong opposition from powerful lobby groups AND his coalition partners, the Nationals. And he was a conservative politician – he’d be equivalent in political stance to Ronald Reagan. Yet he helped us feel safer by controlling gun sales. We could have gone the other way – people were certainly touting the “Good Guys With Guns” line and wanting to enable more gun ownership. But we didn’t go down that road. And while the interpretation of the figures regarding changes in rates of gun deaths from 1996 to now is problematic, there is no denying that the rates are lower than they were.* Is that due to the NFA? Problematic. Have we avoided further mass shootings? It seems so, for now.
Do I, personally, breathe easier knowing that my nieces and nephew are not at all likely to encounter a mass shooter in their schools? Fucking oath, yes!
So, make of these figures and my comments what you will…
(*I tried to get direct comparison stats from the 1996 reports, but I couldn’t get anything the crossmatch. There are baseline figures available all over the web though, if you’re interested and have a spare six hours try googling it.)
@ lucrece
Wow, that’s a lot of work you’ve put in there; cheers.
That also seems to be the case here. The last figures I could find for gun deaths in the UK (2016) indicated there were 51 of them. 19 were homicides, 2 were ‘accidents’, and the rest were suicides. That seemed to be mainly depressed farmers; but they were all men.
The idea that guns for suicide are almost exclusively a male issue arose in a notorious murder case here; R -v- Jeremy Bamber. He was accused of killing his family. His defence was that his sister did it as part of a murder/suicide. But the Crown’s case was that women don’t use guns to kill themselves, so it must have been him.
And the method of guns is thought to be a big part of why women attempt suicide more often but men are more likely to complete a suicide. People like to argue that those who are determined to commit suicide will find a way. To an extent that’s true, but it’s common for those who attempt suicide to later have a change of heart later on. So, keeping guns out of your home is the best way to prevent a suicide in your household.
Thanks, Lucrece!
Con the topic of suicide:
Yes i have read those statistics and i consider them valid.
Of course that may be due that a fireams is the most quick and painless method of suicide, i mean the other alternativas seem way too gruesome, which may discourage many.
Back to Australia:
Yes, homicide rate went from 1.6 to 1.0
Am i supposed to be impressed?
Sacrificing your freedoms for a whooping 0.6 ???
Brb having to protect your home with a stick…
I don’t understand
If you hate American values so much why don’t move to Canadá? Or Australia? Or Western Europe?
But no, you have to ruin everything that makes América Special.
Aaaaannnd we have a winner, ladies and gentlemen!!!
Banning guns won’t summon a Legión of Angels that will take them away, nor they will prevent the wrong people from having access to them.
Glad you understand!
Men have the right to commit suicide. Men have the right not to. I can’t see how this could be spun to be a men’s rights issue at all.
It isn’t even close to being a men’s issue- what are MRAs to do with a male’s tendency to use violence to solve problems? Shame them for acting like men? I’d really like to know
Further, it only takes one gun, of any kind to kill oneself so unless you are advocating banning all guns, there isn’t anything MRAs can do is whine about this issue, which is all they do about it as far as I can see.
What are you trying to say here? Suicide prevention is wrong? Many people don’t get the help they need with their mental health until after a failed suicide attempt, so yeah, discouraging people from having an easy way to commit suicide hanging out around the house is a good thing. Since seeking mental health treatment is so stigmatized for men, it absolutely is a men’s issue.
Are you saying men are just violent and there’s nothing that we as a culture can do about that? And since violence is wrong, shaming violence is actually something we should do. We should also teach boys growing up to not us violence in the first place.
We all know MRAs don’t do anything. The point is, if they did actually care about men’s issues or activism, they would be opposing gun culture and violence instead of glorifying it. And yes, we can reduce access to guns and reduce suicide without banning all guns period. No one is saying gun control will solve all murder and suicide forever. We’re talking harm reduction here and anything we can do is good. I’m so fucking sick of this bullshit about how unless gun control will bring the firearm death rates to zero there’s no point. Just stop.
@Hexum
“Acting like men”? Sounds like the “boys will be boys” excuse we hear for any kind of poor or anti-social behaviour from males of all ages. I don’t have time to do a literature review on this one, but are there ANY scientifically valid, peer-reviewed studies that demonstrate violence is the default male behaviour, absent any social influences, such as a pervasive culture of toxic masculinity? Changing the culture of violence is very definitely the province of anyone interested in men’s rights because a culture of violence harms men at least as much as it harms women.
As for “having the right” to die by suicide, well, okay. I guess we all have the right to die when and how we choose. In my home state of Victoria we recently passed a landmark voluntary assisted dying bill, which grants terminally ill patients access to painless, medically-assisted death, under VERY strict conditions. But mental illness on its own isn’t an applicable condition under that law, and I tend to agree with that. My concern is that we ALSO all have the right to effective treatment for any mental or physical illnesses we may suffer either temporarily or chronically. Everyone – regardless of gender – has the right to effective medical care. Would we think that a person with a broken arm is making an appropriate decision in killing themself? I doubt it. What’s different about a broken brain? It can usually be healed with skilled medical intervention and appropriate social supports. For people like me, whose brains are chronically ‘broken’, ongoing treatment and support is needed, but I can tell you now there have been times when I was so distressed, if a gun had been nearby, I would have been much more of a danger to myself. That’s not to say I didn’t consider alternatives – I did, but they were more difficult to accomplish in the moment and, as such, I had a chance to get help.*
Male suicides are higher across the board, regardless of method, but gun-related suicides are (iirc) the largest number of all categories of self-inflicted harm for men. With reduced access to guns, how many men would be successful in their attempts? I believe it would be many fewer, but again, see previous comment on not having time to search the literature (I’m trying to complete a Masters degree and I’ve used up all my “free” time for the week on those tables! Totes worth it though).
In summary, male suicide is definitely a men’s rights issue. We can’t just brush it off by thinking “oh well, that’s just how men behave – violently”. That’s not fair; that’s not equitable. Let men exist without the pressures placed on them by a culture that says “real men don’t cry”; “real men don’t talk about their problems”, and let’s see what happens, eh? And along the way we may just find that there are fewer assaults by men against other men, against women, and against all other genders. Sounds nice to me.
*if this discussion has brought up any difficult feelings for you, call Lifeline (if in Australia) on 13 11 14
I’m not sure of the best numbers in other countries – a little help would be grand!
WWTH
Maybe it’s because many people think that the cost FAR outweights the benefits.
Now i understand why you think like that.
To someone that did not experienced violence in 37 years, all this talk about armed defense will sound preposterous.
And nice try on the topic of suicide and guns.
You talk as if the gun will mind control you and induce you to suicide.
Maybe we should put the blame on toxic masculinity, hatred and other problems instead of an inanimated object.
Just a thought
@Alan and WWTH
You’re most welcome. I enjoyed the exercise and it made for a good brain-break from Guttman charts, inclusive literacy and numeracy, and the influence of standardised testing on pedagogical interventions.
Joquin just keeps getting more wrong
Being shot is not painless and not always quick. It’s also extremely unpleasant for the person who finds the gunshot suicide. My aunt’s husband shot himself in the head. So I would know.
1.8. Not 1.6. In 20 years that’s by my math about 193 people. You don’t think the lives of 193 people matter? And how were freedoms sacrificed? The people of Australia as far as I can tell seem glad they don’t have a mass shooting problem. The country is still a Democracy and it’s not a crime filled hellscape. How exactly are their freedoms sacrificed?
What does this even mean? What is special about the US? Don’t give me platitudes or buzzwords. Give me specific and quantifiable things. What is the US number one at? What rights do we have that are unique? I’m curious.
@Joaquin
Meh, don’t care really. I said the interpretation was problematic, and so is the comparison.
Dunno where that number comes from, but from my reading the homicide rate was closer to 2.5 in 1996, so it’s entirely possible you’ve pulled it out of your butt.
Anyway, as I said, I feel totally free and, importantly, safe. Why don’t you come over here and find out what it’s like for yourself? What have you got to lose? I promise we won’t fingerprint you at the border (like the US) or demand to know your social media account details prior to granting you a visa (like the US) and you can stand on any street corner and speak your mind (like the US). In Australia, I could stand on the steps of parliament and call the prime minister an orgulous douche canoe and I’d get at least one bystander applauding me, quite a few giggling, some telling me to fuck off, and the majority ignoring me. Could I do the same in the US about Trump and not risk physical harm from the MAGAs? Possibly in some areas, but I wouldn’t be game to try. Whereas in Australia, I could mouth off about the PM anywhere and feel totally safe. That’s freedom. You should try it.
Unfortunately, you don’t. Nor will you. Your fear won’t let you.
@Joaquin,
I notice that you ignore all of the strong arguments against your position, and instead choose to attack only the weak ones. If you’re at all interested in getting to the truth of things, you have to stop that.
You said that gun control wouldn’t work, because criminals who want guns will get them anyways. I pointed out that most homicides aren’t premeditated in that way.
You said that gun control would be ineffective, because they could get guns from neighbouring areas/countries with fewer regulations. I showed that, no, in general that doesn’t happen, and that gun control works even when neighbouring regions are unregulated.
You said that homicide rates didn’t change or went up after Australia enacted gun controls. The talented Lucrece demonstrated very solidly that no, they did not.
You then said that the change of 0.6 wasn’t worth the trade, while not acknowledging that you were wrong. The skilled Weirwoodtreehugger pointed out that you were wrong and that a small number in a statistical analysis can still be a meaningful number of lives. Lucrece sharply added that even that number might be conservative.
And now you have abandoned all of these positions and have taken up new ones: if it’s so good, why don’t you move to Canada or elsewhere? As if the answer weren’t apparent. Moving is expensive. Finding jobs is hard. Immigration is often unsuccessful. Leaving behind family and friends is painful.
You know all that. “Why don’t you move” is the most painfully trite non-challenge.
You have no positions left. Read the wind, my duck! Every position you’ve held in this conversation has been shredded, and your only reply is to find new positions instead of defending the ones you have. Because they are indefensible.
You deserve better from yourself.
@ joaquin
The irony here is I’m quite interested in guns, also self defence, so I read papers like this.
https://news.yale.edu/2016/10/27/gunshot-wound-head-not-death-sentence
on the relation of guns and suicide, and the fact that men more often kill themselves in their suicides attempts due to guns. It’s been talked about quite a bit, and as far as I understand the consensus position it’s that it really is related to gun availability and patriarchal gender roles. MRAs talk about the male suicide rate, but when it comes to solutions the only things they have to say are virtually indistinguishable from the threats of incels – it happens because women are terrible. Feminists are far more realistic about it, and offer actual solutions.
I’m far from an expert on it though and don’t have the data to hand. So I am listening. And thank you to all for the conversation, this one is very good!
Something more to consider regarding guns and suicide and comparative suicide rates (you’ll have to dig out the figures for yourselves, I’m baking) :
Women veterans successfully commit suicide at rates 12 times those of civilian women, and are virtually at par with male veteran suicide rates. Most woman veterans own guns. Most woman veteran suicides are by gun.
@ shadowplay
Wow, I never knew that (although I’ll probably later pretend I did)
But that’s really fascinating, thank you.