But don’t you see? She’s not following the script! It’s supposed to be man displays wealth/privilege/looks, woman spreads her legs and becomes his fleshlight. How dare she follow her own desires! She’s supposed to fuck the highest bidder. Otherwise, how will living god like himself get laid?
We don’t know yet. It could have been hours before the rampage one at a time as they walked into the apartment or maybe in their sleep or he poisoned the coffee first. Details will emerge.
People keep making this a gun issue ignoring the fact that half of those murdered were by knife and half of those injured were rammed by his car. He would have killed a lot of people without access to guns.
I would suggest that everyone read it, as an aside, I would not call it a manifesto, as it was more of an autobiography.
I would suggest that from reading it, he was indulged but not overly spoiled as he was growing up. He seems to have had a happy-ish childhood, up until he was 12 and then things started to go south for him.
At no point in the biography, did he state in his own words that he was diagnosed with anything at an early age, only when he was 20 or 21 did he seem to have mention of a disagreement with a doctor over a perscription.
He seemed to be fixated on one subset of girls, and through the narrative, does not seem like he even noticed that there were other girls out there, as much as he was invisible to the sorority girls, other types of girls seemed invisible to him.
There was no just snapped in his case, he was broken for the past ten years and he was actively planning this for at least a year.
Declan
This is interesting to me. It makes me wonder if maybe his parents didn’t talk with him about his AS diagnosis, out of an attempt to make him as “normal” as possible. I seem to recall that Adam Lanza’s mother took this approach as well. She didn’t get him or herself involved with support groups that might have helped, and she chose to home school him instead of putting him in special education.
His lack of disclosure is especially poignant given that so many young people are given to discussing their entire medical history on the internet nowadays. Yahoo! Answers is full of teenagers and young adults writing posts like “I’m Asperger’s/ADHD/OCD/bipolar/celiac and depressed. HELP ME!” Sometimes it makes you wonder if there are any “normal” people left on the internet. So it’s unusual he wasn’t like this, given how dysfunctional he was.
I would say that he had a dilution of parenting. His bio mom and dad split, agreeing to joint custody and when his dad remarried, there was a further dilution of the parentage as his step mom was actively engaged with his upbringing. So to me that seems like he was functional enough, that his parents may not have spotted anything that would have been an early indicator.
As well, some of the stuff that he was going through, in junior and senior high school, was not in my opinion, out of the zone for some kids. Any warning signs, and at this point, I don’t know what I would even look for. Going forward, putting a microscope on some shy kid’s life might be the way to go, if they don’t seem to be melding in socially.
Maybe that would have been the best for this particular kid, having something to blame it on, may have given him a bit more time to adjust and make it to his thirties, if he had something external to blame it on.
Declan
It was his intention to kill people. It was his intention to stab three people. It was his intention to kill people with his car. Are you blaming the minimal knife control laws or the minimal car control laws? This monster decided to kill people. He used whatever devices he had at hand. If he had an elephant, he may have trained the elephant to kill people.
We still have really no idea why a guy like this became a spree killer. Certainly, he sounds like he was super-entitled and socially inept, but we have all known many such people, and the vast majority of them do not go on killing sprees.
I suspect the real clue is the seeming total lack of empathy for others. Why do some people have no empathy? We really have no idea - we put labels on it, but do not understand it. Is it a disease of the mind, or a moral choice? Or a bit of both?
Reading some of this guy’s stuff (well, a small amount - it is boring as all hell) it sounds very much like the guy simply lacked fundamental bits of reality, as wel, as empathy - in his own mind, he was like unto a God, and his rage came from the fact that the rest of the world did not treat him like one. Why his brain was wired that way is a mystery, at least to me. I suspect someone wired like that is going to explode eventually, no matter what the social setting.
Before I put the blame squarely on the parents, I’d need to know (a) exactly what causes people to become spree killers; and (b) what, practically, can be done to prevent it, if the concern is there.
As far as I know, nobody really knows the answer to either question.
The people he rammed with his car survived. But before your knee continues to jerk I have to say that it is still not good enough to ban guns, what this case shows once again is that if we do want to have the right to bear arms we also need to have more mental health and regulations to investigate if people from the middle and well to do classes* are indeed being helped properly with their treatment and that they are identified early as people that should not ever have access to guns.
The latest incidents are convincing me that there is an overprotection enabled by some money or wealth that interferes and prevents authorities from identifying those cases.
Someone earlier said they think his issue was an extreme amount of self-hate, and my first impulse was to dismiss that idea. But in re-thinking it, it’s probably true that he loathed himself a lot. His hatred for others might have been his ego’s way of making sense of the feelings he felt towards himself.
It appears that he remained on the sidelines. He never approached women or attempted to make friends. Superficially, he expected them to initiate because he felt entitled due to his supreme awesomeness. But in considering this deeper, this sounds like an ego-sparing maneuver to me. Put forth as little effort as possible and you never have to endure outright rejection; passivity removes you from any responsibility and allows you to fault other people when things don’t go “right”.
If he’d had a girlfriend, I imagine he would have had nothing but contempt for her. “She’s just with me because of my car and money.” “She’s just with me because I conned her into thinking I’m a alpha male jerk.” There would be no winning with him.
I have never, ever jumped on any conspiracy theory bullshit. I don’t believe 9-11 was an inside job, I don’t believe in anti-vax, I don’t believe in crises actors for Sandy Hook or Adam Lanza, I don’t believe fluoride in the water is government mind control.
I have not read the manifesto. I watched the video. Something seems funny. I don’t believe him for a minute. I am guessing that maybe he wanted to do something like this for some unknown reason, but never wanted his real motive to come out. I understand that I have no evidence for this, and therefore this opinion is pretty useless. Wanted to share anyway.
Meh. Plenty of Muslims were killed in 911, but that doesn’t mean they were not the victims of Islamic extremism. Misogyny can cause people to hate men as well.
That was exactly the case here. He hated men specifically because they got women and he didn’t.
Why, he hadn’t committed any crimes and people’s medical history is private and is not given to the authorities without court orders.
Hell, the doctors who treated him aren’t even allowed to tell his parents about his treatment without his permission.
As near as I can tell, every step that was legally permissible was taken regarding him.
Perhaps a few decades ago he could have been institutionalized against his will, but not now, and overall, I think it’s a good thing that he couldn’t be.
Whew, that’s a relief. For a second there I thought this country might have a problem with gun violence.
That is the point. If we do want to have guns we also have to understand that family will not be there always, IIRC there was also a father in Texas that did take good care of a son with mental problems, but when the father died there was no mechanism in place to check if the situation was really under control. The son later found a way to the stash of guns the father had and he killed many on a church.
And you are describing part of the problem indeed, I part ways with you regarding the no institution part, IMHO part of the problem here is that some or a lot of money is being used to artificially keep kids with problems under wraps. Authorities or most of the people are then not able to find about the problems a kid has, it is a recipe for more of the same in the future.
I don’t think calling his particular brand of insanity “misogyny” quite captures it.
From his writings, it appears he thought he was, basically, a god. He was pissed at women most of all for not treating him like one and bestowing sex upon him, but he was also angry at men for not treating him as one, either. Also at reality in general. He was particularly pissed that he did not win the lottery.
His “manifesto” goes on for pages about how it was his destiny to win the lottery, and how cruel an injustice it was that he did not.
Sorry to Godwinize, but when Hitler was an adolescent (in calendar years: psychologically he remained one until April 1945), he and a friend bought a lottery ticket, and convinced themselves they could only win. When they lost, it was a defining moment for Hitler: society was a fraud, and he’d been cheated.
I have no doubt the MRA’s will go on the defensive over this, and well they should; in the face of ideologues who’ll attempt to make hay. Karen Straughan is my personal favorite for puncturing these broad-brush claims. Whenever a psycho asshole latches onto whatever the zeitgeist offers, I’m reminded of when my parents made much of the Mad magazines found in Aurthur Bremmer’s apartment when he shot George Wallace.
However, I stand by my point: mass killings of women that lack sexual violence is a new phenomenon. Maybe we need a new term, since mysogyny does include sexually-motivated violence. Maybe “gynocide,” even if Andrea Dworkin used it in her claptrap.
I think Hitler is an OK comparison, although the one to leap to my mind was Caligula. This is what a guy who thinks he’s a god looks like when he doesn’t have an army to force people to play along.
The misogyny IMHO is something of a red herring; he was utterly self absorbed and insanely self entitled about everything, not just sex. Even if he’d been given all the sex he wanted, he’d probably have still been pissed at the world for not just handing him everything else he wanted along with it. And at the world not building statues to him in awe while it’s doing so.
Are they? What about Jack the Ripper and the like?
Caligula - I like it.
I agree if he’d been getting sex, it would have made little difference (except for this: his first victim would most likely have been his unfortunate partner).