We Hunted The Mammoth
A new report from the US Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center examines five years of data on mass attacks in public places in the US from 2016-2020. The report, which looked at 173 separate incidents, found that mass attacks are an almost exclusively male sport: 96% of the attackers were male. And a significant number of them were motivated by misogyny.
So you’ve probably heard the news: Conspiracy theorist and professional yeller Alex Jones has been ordered to pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages to a family who lost a child in the Sandy Hook school massacre, which Jones had been calling a “hoax.” Jones is likely going to have to pay a much greater amount in punitive damages.
This … thing … has been making the rounds on Reddit. Originally posted in r/confessions, it was quickly deleted, but lives on as a screenshot elsewhere on the site. An unusual query from some dude who should probably never be allowed to have sex, it really is the worst thing I’ve read this horrible week.
Every new bit of news out of Uvalde makes me angrier and more depressed.
You may have reacted to the news of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting with anger, or sadness, or frustration, or some mixture thereof. Dilbert creator and freelance persuasion guru Scott Adams responded by asking himself “what’s in it for me?”
By David Futrelle
On Monday, I wrote about the gleeful reaction some commenters on the Incels.me forum had to news that one of the victims in Sunday’s mass shooting in Toronto was a ten-year-old girl.
By David Futrelle
Andrew Anglin, professional Nazi troll and founder of The Daily Stormer, generally does not have a lot of nice things to say about women, not even white ones. This is a guy who once described women as “disgusting sex perverts” whose “entire existence … revolves around sexual derangement.” This is a guy who hailed Vladimir Putin’s move to decriminalize “slapping hoes [and] bitches,” declaring that “[j]ust as it is axiomatic that Jews belong in the oven, so is it that women deserve to be slapped.”
By David Futrelle
Even a cursory look at the research on mass shootings suggests an obvious conclusion: the number of deaths in mass shootings seems pretty directly correlated to how easy it is to get hold of guns, in particular the assault rifles that have become the weapon of choice for mass killers. Countries that make it hard to get guns have drastically fewer mass shootings than the gun-friendly United States. Countries that have restricted gun ownership have seen the number of mass shootings fall.
By David Futrelle
In the wake of every mass shooting, we hear the inevitable cries from NRA types not to “politicize” the tragedy by pointing out the obvious fact that stricter gun laws would make such tragedies less likely in the future. We watch the trolls and shitlords of the alt-right flood the internet with disinformation and conspiracy theories. These reactions are now as predictable as the reappearance of the sun on the horizon every morning.
By David Futrelle
Australians learned a bit more today about the motivations of Michael James Holt, a wannabe mass killer who appeared in a New South Wales court for a sentencing hearing after pleading guilty to an assortment of weapons charges. Holt, a Hitler-loving white supremacist obsessed with guns, admitted to planning a mass shooting at an Australian mall.
