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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@Naglfar: No worries on my part, happens to everyone once in a while; besides, the link I posted about Levant’s rant was mostly to highlight the absurdity of his position (Romani supposedly number at about 5000 in Canada, a much smaller proportion of the population than even the US, so attacking them like that is rather nonsensical even by racist asshole standards). The only things most Canadians probably know about Romanis is that Esmeralda in Notre-Dame de Paris (and the Disney version) is one, and so are musical group The Gypsy Kings.
@StaceySmartyPantsTwiceRemoved: Thank you for accepting my apology. I will take personal steps to ensure it won’t happen again.
@Alan
I liked in the beginning of that video where she talks about the relationship of performance art to all kinds of performances in human experience overall. I had studied in college about how we perform gender which is a great concept for getting across to people that gender isn’t this set thing that just goes with biology (I mean people who are willing to think that is). And about the immediacy and also lingering that you mention I have been doing a lot of journaling and meditation about the question of where art ends and life begins and the boundaries between performance art and life, which I see as really not rigid. Thinking about it like that helps me create and enjoy and be free.
@ stacey
Ooh, now you’ve sent me on another mental journey. That’s a question I ponder on a daily basis. It’s an almost constant thing running in the background of my mind. Probably explains my short battery life
But yeah, the basic question: What is art? I could ramble for days on this (as my long suffering friends know all too well). Performance art especially. The whole interface of politics and art. Everything from climate change or anti nuclear protest “Die-ins” to 9/11.
And I’m a big believer that you can live your life as a work of art. Grayson Perry, Quentin Crisp etc.
You can probably relate to that.
Hang on, there’s another video you might like…
@Nagfljar : of course there’s no worry. Nobody know of every exclusion to begin with.
There was a columnist here in Canada who, after the recent assault gun ban, put out a call for banning all private ownership of handguns. He made the nice point that it’s all very nice to talk about “gun enthusiasts,” but we’d never talk about “landmine enthusiasts” or “poison gas” enthusiasts.
Of course, even such a ban went through, we wouldn’t be that much safer, due to the US’s gun fetish. Some people have calculated that almost 99% of guns used in crimes in Canada come from the States, though others make it a bit lower, and the same is true of Mexico. I still wish we’d brought that up while renegotiating NAFTA. You don’t like our cheaper prescription medications? Do something about your guns. It would never happen, but it would leave some red faces.
@Rabid Rabbit:
Life-saving drugs go one way, life-taking guns go the other. It’s the circle of life.
As for handgun enthusiasts: here in the UK, with our handgun ban, it’s still (last time I looked) legal to own properly deactivated handguns. So if you’re interested in the history and aesthetics of guns, you could collect them: you just wouldn’t be able to fire them.
@Rabid Rabbit
Ironically, I’ve heard gun groups in the US say that banning guns is pointless because they’ll come in illegally from other countries regardless (despite that the opposite, illegal guns leaving the US for other countries, happens much more often). One troll here used this argument a while ago.
@ moggie
Even here ‘antique’ firearms are exempt from the ban; so you can buy, sell, and own them without a firearms certificate.
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/27/section/58
There’s been a consultation on removing that exemption; but nothing arising from that yet.
The theory is that such weapons are either inefficient or hard to get ammo for so not likely to be an issue.
However even pre-1939 (which seems to be the arbitrary cut-off point) there were some pretty effective guns, and people do sell cartridges for them (you would need a licence to buy ammo though).
There have been a couple of incidents of criminals using antique firearms. The .455 Webley seems popular, and there was an actual murder utilising a .44 Smith & Wesson revolver.
@Nagfljar : while the argument is stupid, there’s pretty good odds that gun ownership cannot be lowered to 0% due to illegal guns and antiquities ; and there’s a much more serious argument that if it was only a problem of gun, there would be shooting in France and Germany and whatnot, countries where you can randomly find a glock in the cellar of your parents.
(and, yes, I have found a WWII glock in a cellar once)
@Ohlmann
I know it’s impossible to get 0% ownership, my point was that better gun control laws could massively reduce the number of mass shootings and other gun violence. It’s better to fix things somewhat than not at all.
@Ohlmann:
Huh? I don’t think the company existed in WWII, and didn’t make guns until the 1980s.
@Moggie
Maybe it’s used as a generic term for a pistol?
No idea. It’s the police that said me it was that, so either I didn’t paid enough attention and got the name wrong, or they were mistaken.
@Alan
I love that video. Thank you for that too. There are so many good quotes in there. Of course I love the part about Lynda Benglis especially though and how she took such control of her sexuality.
Yes I do absolutely believe in life as a work of art.
Thank you again for sharing that!
@ stacey
You could write a book about her political stuff. Probably someone has. Political ignoramus that I am though I just love her art. Her poured work is amazing.
I also like Kara Walker. Her art is staggering; but I particularly like the subtitles she gives them. They’re like mini-stories. Remind me of those C18th novels, where every chapter would have a little summary as a header. She’s such a great wordsmith.
With respect to mass shootings, it says something that Wikipedia has a page entirely dedicated to the multiple postings of the Onion article ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens, which lists the fifteen times that this article has been posted, pretty much verbatim, in response to a mass shooting in the last six years. (The first one being the Isla Vista shootings so celebrated by incels, six years ago tomorrow. And yes, not naming the person responsible was very deliberate on my part.)
@Paireon, Kätzenjammer:
There are some valid reasons to criticize the Canadian ban (to a large extent it bans names rather than capabilities, so it will need updating in the future). Sadly, though, it’s kind of the case that any such ban will have people immediately attempting to work around it.
I’m sure Alan has stories about people finding loopholes in laws pretty much immediately after the law got passed, if not sooner. And I’m not even referring to deliberate loopholes. (A number of previous attempts at gun control laws in the U.S. were very obviously deliberately written in an attempt to keep foreign guns out of the U.S. while not blocking domestic manufacturers to the same degree.)
@Ohlmann, Paireon, Stacey, et al:
Having hobbies and things to do is always a good thing, as long as your ‘hobby’ isn’t just ranting on the internet.
Me, I’ve still got a novel to finish cleaning up and editing at some point. And that’s on top of all the other stories I have in my head that I haven’t even started writing yet… but at some point I want to take this one and get it actually done.
@ jenora
The main firearms loophole I can think of here is that shotgun certificates used to allow you to buy as many shotguns as you liked without having to get each one individually approved. That was unlike firearms; which each had to be recorded separately on the licence.
A shotgun is defined as any smoothbore gun with a barrel length of at least 24 inches.
So a few people did buy tanks with fully operational guns.
(You couldn’t buy the ammunition for them though as shotgun shells only count if they have at least five pellets)
@Ohlman
I’m not condoning the conditions in Maricopa County’s jails, I think it’s terrible and inhumane. I was being slightly humorous about the perpetrator getting his just desserts.
There certainly should be sustained efforts to rehabilitate offenders, although I think until society delves deeper into the causes of offending, then offending will continue. It’s a complex matter, and sadly people prefer to just write people off as ‘incorrigible criminals’.
@Naglfer
That’s the guy! I couldn’t remember his name. Utter arsehole form what I’ve heard on Small Town Murder, the Jimmies are most sarcastic about Arpaio and his corruption. He seems just the sort of person Trump would congratulate. Vile man.
@Alan
I used to work with someone who whined constantly about the handgun legislation. Something to do with his dad and uncle being judges in shooting competitions and enthusiastic competitors. If I remember correctly, the incident that resulted in the legislation was carried out with legally own handguns. I could never get him to understand that children not being murdered was rather more important that an expensive hobby. For someone who worked in a fish factory in Grimsby, he was a bit of a middle class snob.
Did someone try to make shotgun shells for tanks ?
That being said, I never heard of anyone using a bought tank to bring carnage, while I did hear of someone making a makeshift tank out of a bulldozer and going on a rampage.
@nanny oggs bosom
It was. You may recall there was some disquiet afterwards as to how he’d got a licence when he was a suspected paedophile. In fact it was believed his motivation for the massacre was that he had been blacklisted and that had caused his business to collapse.
I was a keen pistol shooter. We did discuss whether a less restrictive amendment to the law would have served the same purpose. Keeping guns at ranges etc (You couldn’t really get a pistol licence unless you were a member of a club anyway). But in the end it was less about the practical element and more about the optics. It seemed distasteful to worry about what was merely a hobby compared to the deaths of children.
@Nany Oggs Bosom
Trump did not just congratulate Arpaio, he gave the man as presidential pardon.
@Alan:
*laughs* Yeah, that sounds about right. Attempting to define ‘reasonable’ boundaries in law can get fractal rather quickly as people start finding things that the people who wrote the law obviously didn’t think of.
@Ohlmann:
I suspect that may have to do with the fact that tanks are ridiculously expensive, and anybody who owned one privately would likely be more worried about actually damaging it than they would about damaging a bulldozer.
@Nanny Oggs Bosom, Allandrel:
Not just pardoned Arpaio; pardoned him for, among other things, threatening to kill the judge who was overseeing the trial against him for various corruption charges. Yeah, he was pretty Trump-like: all the horrible things he did were perfectly justified, they deserved it anyway, and anybody pointing out the horribleness was conspiring against him.
@ jenora
Why choose when you can have both!
https://tanks-alot.co.uk/product/centurion-avre/
Speaking of tanks, have we talked about Stompie, the Soviet T-34 tank permanently parked in South London? You can read about it here. It’s currently sporting a fetching coat of pale blue paint, with “thank-you NHS” slogans.
Slightly OT: I know we’re not allowed to wish violence on anyone, but we can at least indulge in schadenfreude when appropriate, can’t we? Because my immediate reaction to this headline, before even reading the article, was “Good.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/26/serial-rapist-breaks-back-in-corfu-cliff-fall-on-run-from-police
The fact that it’s his own fault just makes the schadenfreude cake all the more delicious.