By David Futrelle
On Wednesday evening, a 20-year old construction worker drove to the Westgate Entertainment Center, near Phoenix Arizona, a popular spot for shoppers and diners that had only just been reopened to the public after the state’s quarantine restrictions were lifted. He was armed with an AR-15 rifle.
In a live Snapchat video he told the world that “I’m going to be the shooter of Westgate 2020. This is to get back to mean society, so let’s get this done.”
Then he marched into the mall, AR-15 in one hand, cell phone in the other, ultimately gunning down three victims — none of whom, thankfully, have died — before his rifle jammed. He streamed at least some of his rampage on Snapchat, excerpts of which are going around online (I’m not going to link to them.) Police arrived quickly and arrested him, they said, without incident.
Yesterday, at the shooter’s first court apperance, Maricopa County prosecutor Edward Leiter filled us in on what he said were the shooter’s motives. The shooter, he said, had told investigators that he identified as an incel, and that his shooting rampage was an attempt to
tak[e] out his expressed anger at society, the feeling that he has been bullied, the feeling that women didn’t want him.
The shooter, he continued, “specifically said that he was targeting couples,” and indeed two of the victims were reportedly a couple.
Do we need to know any more about this creep? We don’t need to know any more. This is all textbook incel shooter shit. And it’s the second time this week I’ve had to write about a would-be mass murderer motivated by incel ideology. The first was a Toronto teenager charged with terrorism after he attacked sex workers with a machete at a massage parlor; one of his victims died.
As I do every time an incel murderer (or, in this case, would-be murderer) appears in the news, I made a depressing trek over to the Incels.co forums to see what the regulars there were saying about this wannabe Elliot Rodger.
And it was mostly predicable stuff. Depressing, but predictable.
“All hail St. Hernandez,” wrote someone calling himself universallyabhorred, “though his count was low, his heart was in the right place.”
“AnothER saint,” agreed FinnCell, capitalizing the initials of incel mass killer Elliot Rodger, almost universally beloved by the incel crowd.
Others mocked the shooter for not killing anyone in his rampage.
“[H]is count was ZERO,” complained IncelKing.
The dude was such a failure that he even failed at going ER. Now he’s gonna rot for the next 25+ years in prison because he didnt even kill himself after the attack, ovER for him.
Nystagmuscel added:
He is a retard who couldn’t even kill anyone at close range. Fuck him
The Incels.co regulars seem most bothered by the fact that the shooter didn’t finish off one woman who was caught on his video pleading for her life. (At this point in his rampage his gun may have already been jammed.)
“This is why when you go ER you must be 100% commited,” wrote werty1457. “He’s gonna get life and he didn’t even kill anyone, sad shit.”
But both the cheering squad and the complainers were overshadowed somewhat by those claiming that the gun rampage was somehow a false-flag setup designed to make incels look bad — and make it easier to round them up and put them in camps. One commenter wondered aloud if the shooting was “another crisis actors pys-ops.” Another declared that it “[c]ertainly looks like a hoax … .”
“It’s obviously fake,” wrote someone called Arthas93.
((they)) are not even putting effort in it anymore. Can almost see the ketchup packs.
Low effort, bad direction. It’s like a bollywood movie. This psyops got a C- for lack of effort.
Meanwhile, someone called chudur-budur suggested that Hernandez had been “framed,” as part of a nefarious plot to target “ugly men.”
“Now every crime is somehow related to ‘I.N.C.E.L,'” he wrote.
[G]et ready to be sent to gulag buddy boyos (assuming you are genuinely ugly virgin and not a larper).
We used to make jokes about this, but looks like it’s getting real.
“For real,” replied based_meme.
We were really joking about this shit for a couple of years. Now it’s likely to become a reality that we might get arrested for just being ugly misogynists.
In a followup comment, chudur-budur added:
They were trying to frame ugly men for a long long time, through title 9, consent circus and shit. But it was not effective or quick enough to lock us up. Now they are coming up with these incel “””attacks””” to legalize any ugly men to be detained.
While some blamed the alleged plot against incels on the Jews (see above), others suggested, as one commenter put it, that incels themselves were “being persecuted like the jews in germany.”
So on one side we’ve got incels lionizing this creep as a “saint” On the other we’ve got incels angry at him for not being more bloodthirsty. And then smack dab in the middle we have the “false flaggers,” pretending that this shooting is some sort of elaborately staged psyop aimed at them.
No one needs to stage anything. These murders and attempted murders are the inevitable result of the poisonous incel ideology, which encourages young men to stoke their already extreme anger and bitterness that they can’t have the adoration of the very particular subset of women they desire — and then tells them there’s nothing to do about their predicament but to kill themselves, preferably after killing a lot of “normies” first.
The incels lusting for more blood aren’t really much different from those crying “hoax.” Indeed, one of those talking “false flag” is using a picture of the Aurora theater shooter as his avatar. These are aspiring villains who see themselves — and want others to see them — as victims.
I feel sympathy for lonely, depressed men; I’ve been one. I feel sympathy for bullied boys; I’ve been one of them too. But I can’t feel sympathy for incels any more than I can feel sympathy for Nazis. Incel ideology takes normal loneliness — the kind that almost all of us have felt at some time — and turns it into hate, directed inward and outward at once. It’s toxic to anyone who is touched by it, whether incels themselves or the people they victimize.
I can only hope I don’t have to write another one of these posts any time soon. But tomorrow is the 6th anniversary of Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Isla Vista, California — the incels are already celebrating — and I’m not hopeful.
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@Ohlmann
Yes, technically speaking…sorta, although the proper term is ‘canister’ (AKA ‘case shot’), and such a round actually has something of an interesting history. The original case shot saw it’s use in black-powder era cannons and field artillery, and saw some marginal, continual use into the modern era.
During WW2, canister was notably used by USMC anti-tank gun crews to break up Japanese massed infantry attacks. The earliest alleged reference that cite tanks using canister ammunition was in the Korean War in the early 1950s; but their are said to be much more accounts about it’s use in the Vietnam War. The canister shell also saw recent, renewed, contemporary use during the 2003 invasion of Iraq for the M1 Abrams by the US Military, and some anecdotal use by other tanks of other nations.
Such shot is commonly used to engage enemy infantry even when in proximity to friendly armored vehicles, as the projectiles do not penetrate armor. In addition it can be used to create entry points to buildings, reduce wire obstacles and clear heavy vegetation, as well as strike low flying aircraft and helicopters.
During Vietnam such canisters also were used for clearing vegetation and wire entanglements along with it’s primary anti-personnel task.
Tanks still seem to make occasional use of the round on a situational basis but apparently it’s more common with artillery more often than not.
Imagine a giant canister full of ball bearings, or alternatively in an improvised nature; nails, scrap iron or lead, wire, and other similar metal objects you can find; and fire it out of the cannon of an artillery gun or a tank cannon: and you have a canister shot.
As you could imagine; that’s not going to be a pleasant time being on the receiving end of. Especially if your just a footmobile.