I was reading an article on CNNwhere Brianna Wu states that she has received 108 death threats.
It seems that just about every person that is semi-famous* and semi-controversial complains about receiving death threats from strangers and how rattling this is. The response of the receiver of these threats seem to be anything from not-a-second-thought to outright panic and moving to a remote location in Idaho.
So my question is how worrying should death threats be today in a fairly law-governing society?
Lets keep it simple for now and limit this to the United States in the last 30 years.
Is there any documentation to show that anyone who has received death threats from strangers has gone on to be murdered (or even attempted to be murdered) by a stranger?
A few rules:
Strangers means not family, friends, or people known by the victim. A famous person being killed by their crossed lover doesn’t count. Also things like union bosses being killed by hitmen hired by a company don’t count because I would consider the union boss and the company executives as known to each other and already have a very contentious relationship.
Random acts of violence don’t count. If the local high school football coach receives a death threat for losing the state championship and then gets robbed and murdered two years later by a random street punk, that doesn’t’ count.
Politicians don’t count. The reason this doesn’t count is because there is already a Wikipedia pagewith all the answers on it. These do happen and it is not just Presidents.
So, in other words, my imaginary situation is like this: Francine McTruth takes a controversial stand (or becomes famous for any reason) and receives death threats in mail/email/texts/tweets. Freddy Wayne Wierdo sees her on the local news and says to himself “I’m gonna kill that bitch.” He lets her know in a rambling two page email. Three days later Francine McTruth is gunned down near her home, and Freddy Wayne Wierdo is eventually tried and convicted of her murder. Does this ever happen?
*This apparently includes the designer of Flappy Bird.
As an aside, obviously one of the best examples of my question is MLK Jr.
This is why I put a 30 year limit on the question because I wanted to exclude the whole civil rights era.
I see that whole situation as bit of a special case because white perpetrators of violence against black leaders may have thought that they could get away with their crimes if they had a white jury. Therefor they may have had less inhibition to commit such a crime. In other words, it was definitely less of a law-abiding society in certain areas.
Gabby Giffords would seem an obvious answer, though she survived her attack. She had received a number of death threats prior to the 2011 Tucson shooting.
Eric Williams killed two Texas district attorneys and threatened other officials, but was caught before he killed anyone else. Prosecutors and public defenders are frequently the target of death threats, and do get attacked from time to time.
ETA: Giffords is a politician. Whoops. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t count, though; they’re the most obvious people taking controversial stands and by far the easiest to locate.
It is really scary in this day and age when everything is online. Anyone can find you. Sure there’s only one crazy enough to do it in x thousands of people, but now x thousands of people are crazy enough and mean enough to post your personal address and all of your info online because they don’t like what you say.
What about the stalking victims: John Lennon, Teresa Saldana, Rebecca Schaeffer, etc.? Schaeffer’s stalker, for one, seems to have crossed the line from “I must be with you” to “You deserve to die.”
Abortion practitioners clearly knew they had been targeted. David Gunn was pictured on “wanted” posters put up by Operation Rescue, and Gunn’s replacement, John Britton, had received death threats and begun wearing a homemade bulletproof vest. George Tiller was wearing a bullet-proof vest when he was fatally shot in the head. George Slepian’s wife had sent copies of death threats against him to the police hours before he was shot.
But I guess that is somewhat part of my question. Is it any scarier?
Because it is easier than ever to contact people, this makes the threshold for sending death threats very low. Consequently lots of people get them today who wouldn’t in the past. But is there any reason to believe that anyone is more likely to murdered now than before?
I honestly don’t know. I do know that there is a level of accessibility there never was before. This goes both ways. I’ve read that this is the first era in which megastars feel comfortable interacting with their fans: they get on twitter, or facebook, or whatever, and talk directly to their fans. They don’t have screaming fans trying to tear their clothes off or whatever.
On the other hand, Anita Sarkeesian has gotten rape threats for saying that maybe women weren’t being treated right in popular culture.
They published her address, her personal identifying information, and that of her friends and family. She’s had to cancel speaking announcements because people threaten to kill others. And then there was Gamergate - which I even hate calling it that because I am a gamer and I didn’t participate in that. They tore Zoe Quinn to pieces, again publishing personal identifying information, because apparently they thought she had slept with someone to get better reviews for her game (no news on whether the guys she supposedly slept with got rape threats). She had to move!
I firmly believe it is easier to get these things out to a wider audience than it ever has been before. In yesteryear, maybe I could get the address, but it was hard for me to find all these other people who agreed with me, and then I couldn’t malign the person on 27 places on the Internet.
I think stalking and doxing (releasing personal info) are worse than ever before. Whether it leads to murder…while that is important, I don’t see that as being the #1 issue we have to deal with. We have to deal with why people en masse think it’s OK to issue death threats and rape threats as a result of saying something on the Internet.
I don’t know anything about the OP’s Q as stated. But I do know some fairly nearby stuff:
But in the mid 2000s the firm I used to own made software for police intelligence tracking. Which was also sold to private security companies that protect the uber-rich. Dealing with those firms was eye-opening for me.
Pretty much every household name you can think of receives a continuous flux of emails, postal mails, and faxes from nutters. Some are ranting, others are begging for assistance. Some have essentially a one-way pen-pan relationship with their chosen big name personage, writing often with news of their latest activities & nuttiness.
Most are pitiful, but a few are scary. Professional monitors watch these folks’ communications closely looking for signs their tone is changing and becoming more threatening. Meanwhile they’ll have done some standard PI-type work to ensure they know where the nutter lives and if he/she has the practical ability to act on their impulses. Some who live in the right part of the country versus their target are watched very closely.
Those who get way out on the threatening scale end up talking with the FBI. Some are prosecuted and jailed, others are just really, really dissuaded from pursuing their obsession further. Sometimes it even works.
How successful an ordinary schmo might be in getting the FBI to investigate their incoming death threats is an interesting question. I bet the answer is “not very”.
Bjork had an acid bomb sent to her by a random insane stalker who taped himself making it and then shooting himself. It was intercepted before it reached her. I don’t know if he preceded it with threats. Excerpts of his video are up on Youtube.
I agree with you on this last point. I don’t post controversial stuff online (other than my own trivial opinions that might annoy someone but not enough to start a “fan base”) but the whole ugly thing with gamergate, Sarkeesian and Wu I found extremely disturbing. There is some speculation that the attackers felt safe enough to mouth off behind their screens, but I still don’t understand why anyone would think that’s acceptable behavior. Do we have that many mentally unbalanced people in our society? There are lots of people I disagree with, even strongly on some issues, but it never occurs to me to make such vicious and vividly detailed threats.
And these people don’t get that they are going to ruin the Internet for us. They are going to make us all have to post under our real names. No more anonymity. Lots of comment forums already have this. It’s like it’s a competition to see who can trash talk the most…but the depth of the anger behind it is kind of terrifying. As angry as I have ever been, I have never been so angry I thought posting “I will find you and rape you in front of your family” was acceptable. There are human beings behind the screen, no matter how much people say “It’s just a message board” or “It’s just online”. That’s a BS line anyway, considering how much of our lives are increasingly online.
So the summary seems to be that unless you are a politician or an abortion practitioner, we are unaware of any death threats that preceded a murder or an attempted murder.
You may be murdered, or you may receive death threats, but so far no connection between the two.
LSLGuy had a very interesting post that may help to explain part of this. Many rich people may be monitoring any death threats they receive and are working with private security, police departments, or the FBI to prevent these incidences before they occur.
