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Haven't seen a thread yet on the gay bar shooting last weekend so I figured I would start it.
Sticking to facts in this post, opinion will go in reply.
The shooter killed 5 and injured 25
The shooter is a 22 year old, Anderson Lee Aldrich
The shooter previously was charged after he threatened his mother with homemade explosives and kidnapped her, but the charges were dropped
The shooter is the grandson of a prominent local Republican
The shooter was stopped by a drag queen combat veteran, who used his high heels to stomp him
Now for the opinion:
I believe that speech is powerful. Words are a means we use to convince other minds of beliefs about the world. Minds act upon those beliefs.
At present, there is a powerful right wing-meme that many people, some LGBT and some not, mostly democrats, are attempting to sexually confuse children for nefarious purposes. This is often described as "grooming" in order to equivocate with sexual abuse children.
Insofar as the reasonable man's reaction to a co-ordinated effort to sexually abuse children is not "I should vote about this and if I get outvoted, I should allow my children to be sexually abused", the actions of the shooter are completely predictable.
You should take care to think about the consequences of the speech you use. If someone were to be persuaded by your argument, what would that cause them to do?
You aren't reponsible for every nutcase or moron on your team. But you are responsible for the logical consequence of your ideas. I know of no society that believes they should be having free and open debates and votes about whether teachers should be permitted to sexually abuse children. If you really believe this, you should act the same as if they proposed legalizing Cannabalism. There is no debate with barbarians, only the sword.
Violent nutjobs have gone after whoever they hated most - not infrequently, gays among others - since long before groomer discourse was a thing. You trying to hang this on anyone who ever complained about Drag Queen Story Hour is honestly kind of repulsive. As is trying to spin something out of "His grandfather is a Republican."
Let's assume Aldrich was persuaded by LibsOfTikTok that we must stop the gays from grooming our children by any means necessary. It's still very unlikely that this otherwise stable and non-violent individual was just going to live a peaceful life until Twitter and grandpa told him about the "groomers."
I expect to see "If you say (fairly mainstream thing) you are Literally Killing People" on Twitter, but you offering it unironically here is crap argumentation.
And you're not engaging with anything near a steelman of the argument he made. Painting relatively benign opponents as fascist white supremacists is not particularly productive, nor is it particularly controversial in these spaces that this kind of speech is dangerous. People don't like Arthur Chu talking about putting bullets in tumorous nazi Republican flesh or whatever that quote was. Seems fair to me that PM doesn't appreciate being called a groomer pedophile out to rape your kids, no?
Bad things happen. Bad people do bad things. We will always have bad people doing bad things. Therefore, why bother?
I hear this logic hasn't worked so well with defunding the police, and that actually, there are people who respond to incentives and the environment they live in. Seems pretty reasonable to me that there people out there who may not have been stable, peaceful individuals that nevertheless wouldn't have become mass shooters if it weren't for the toxic political waters we swim in.
It probably wasn't framed in an ideal way, nor does putting it in the context of his previous posts paint a very flattering picture, but...I think his point about not calling your fellow citizens pedophile groomers is valid? If you don't want to engage with it, you don't need to try and reduce it to puerile twitter one-liners.
With all love and respect to PmMeClassicMemes, they really need to grow a thicker skin on this topic; it's obvious that this gets their goat so badly that they dispense with all the usual decorum and rules-following they normally have. I swear, the nastiness from PMCM only ever comes out when this topic comes up, and it's not good for them or for us.
You're not wrong, but there's still a valid argument there to consider.
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