Kyoto Animation fire: Arson attack at Japan anime studio kills 33
A sad day for Kyoto, for Japan, and for anime fans worldwide. The alleged arsonist has been caught. Right now, in the fog of (war), he appears to have no direct links to the studio.
I saw this last night before I went to bed and they had the toll at 13 people. 6 hours later it’s 33. Ugh. What a senseless tragedy.
I was confused in reading the article. Why the hell would you head for the roof during a fire? Why wouldn’t you run for the other exits?
Perhaps the nutjob started fires at the exits. This doesn’t appear to be a fire started in a single place.
If the proper emergency exits are unaccessible (for example if the arsonist purposefully set fires by the exits), some may go to the roof to escape the smoke and for a ladder rescue. It’s only a 3 story building. Plus, people are panicky is crisis situations. What might seem obvious when one is sitting safely at home/work is nowhere near as obvious when the shit is hitting the fan.
An earlier account I read said that he had spread accelerant of some kind on the first floor, started the fire, then went to the 2nd floor and spread more accelerant before he fled the building.
You’re assuming the ground-level exits were an option. In many fires, this isn’t the case. I’ve seen a few house fires in the news recently where the occupants were on the second floor, handing children out the window to rescuers - because they couldn’t reach the exits.
A GoFundMe was started to help the company and victims recover. In a day’s time, they’ve raised about $1.4M.
So sad; so senseless.
So vastly less money (and vastly less news coverage) than an old church where nobody was hurt.
We’re Americans. We don’t need no ferrin’ news. CNN sends me notifications whenever Taylor Swift does something (really, how can I turn off celebrity notifications?). BBC sends me real news notifications, like this. Home-grown, non-muslim nutjob in Kyoto kills over 30 at an anime studio…only anime fans will care in the US. No major US news outlet caters to that segment.
:rolleyes:
I’m not an anime fan, but this saddens me. A nutjob sets a fire that kills over 30 people. You don’t have to like anime to care.
NBC news (the channel I watched that night) gave the story around a minute or less, maybe 20 minutes into the broadcast. I’m usually the one doing eye-rolls at calling news coverage racist, but that sure as hell stood out to me–why did a mass murder get such perfunctory attention?
No, you have to have empathy and humanity to care. But as noted, no US news coverage. It’s still on BBC’s front page, and not on CNN. The US (in general) expects the world to care and know about what happens here, but not vice versa.
I saw this covered on CBS This Morning.
Another victim has died, raising the toll to 34. I haven’t been able to find a list of the dead, though one article said that 20 of the victims were female, and most died of carbon monoxide poisoning in stairwells.
I saw one of their feature films in the theater a few months ago. It was an unusual and beautiful movie called A Silent Voice. This is what I tweeted about it.
I’ve been fearing that Naoko Yamada is a victim. I hope not. It’s so sad and senseless.
Because this particular mass murderer didn’t use a gun to commit his crime. He callously refused to fit the mainstream media/liberal playbook that guns are inherently evil and are only used for evil purposes. They can’t get any mileage out of a crime like this – their narrative is that everybody would be jolly and wonderful and live happily ever after if only we had more gun control than we already do. Even most of the nuttiest anti-gun nuts realize that the public would mock them if they called for “fire control.” So they simply ignore the crime as much as they can.