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In a "what the fuck even is this timeline" update: Anderson lee Aldrich, the Q Club shooter, is apparently non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and already had an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing his career as a 15 year old "professional hacker", calling him a pedophile, and describing his absent father as an MMA fighter and porn star.
I'm feeling very vindicated in my impulse to hold off conclusions... but I would think that, given my biases, wouldn't it? The real test would be a tragedy that looks at first glance to fit my biases perfectly and allows me to cathartically Boo Outgroup. I suspect that differences in media ecosystems have that less likely... but I would think that too, wouldn't I?
Plus obvious, audacious narrative updates in real time.
And our first echo shooting, as usually happens in the immediate wake of a highly publicized mass shooting. No apparent political/CW element, disgruntled employee.
It seems to me that his identity is more aligned with a progressive identity than a conservative one. He is the product of a progressive lax culture, not a conservative one. He’s the child of a drug addicted porn star father and a felon mother. His father was addicted to meth, a commonly abused drug in the gay nightclub scene. His parents’ lifestyle was the opposite of conservative.
The fact that he was previously charged for threatening to blow up his mother’s house strongly suggests that he targeted the sexually promiscuous nightclub because of its similarity to his father (in his mind). Clearly he had an interest in violence against his parents before.
If you want less of these kinds of attacks, what is the best course of action?
To best prevent future cases of this sort of violence, producing even more lgbt propaganda will accomplish nothing (it’s already omnipresent after all), but fixing society and keening families together would probably help. It would be more advantageous to actually extol the value of a stable mother-father marriage, versus continually talking about gays
Uh...wanna bet? The statistic of interest is P(anti-gay | attacked gays), not the other way around. P(attacked gays) is low regardless of the condition, seeing as this is stochastic terrorism. Compare various other types of crime.
Yes. I am not aware of any context in which ideologically-motivated assaults by strangers are the majority, or even a statistically-significant minority, of assaults committed against any sub-population.
The vast majority of crimes against the person (with a semi-exception for crimes like rape and armed robbery where absconding with some benefit undetected are major considerations, and even there only 40-45% are committed by strangers) are committed by people known to the victim. Crimes which result in physical assault with a weapon are some of the least likely to be committed against strangers (as ideologically-motivated attacks would be most likely to be).
Fair point. Overall crimes against LGBT are very unlikely to be ideological.
I read the OP as specifically talking about stochastic terrorism like this mass shooting. Of mass killings targeting LGBT, I would still bet that most were ideological. Given the rarity of targets, random or workplace sprees are unlikely to target LGBT. Though Pulse was apparently an exception!
You keep calling this shooting "stochastic terrorism." Based on (a) my understanding of both the currently-known facts about this shooting, and (b) my understanding of the meaning of "stochastic terrorism", this seems to be a completely unjustified classification.
"Stochastic terrorism" is defined as "the public demonization of an individual or group leading to violence against the demonized individual or group." Even assuming that "groomer discourse" actually represents "demonization" (which I would dispute), you have completely failed to demonstrate any link between it and this shooting other than your own prior. I haven't seen any indication linking "groomer" discourse to the shooter at all. There's no manifesto floating around, no Brendan Tarrant-style Go-Pro propaganda footage, nor even any alleged anti-gay, anti-trans, or anti-groomer statements by the shooter at any time.
So no, until there's some evidence of it, this shooting isn't "stochastic terrorism." Your labelling it as such, under these conditions, is at best an exercise in blinkered question-begging and at worst bad-faith fake-news consensus-building.
Nightclubs, concert venues, and other celebrations get shot up all the time, for completely non-ideological reasons. Example. Example 2. Example 3. Example 4. Example 6. And, most famously, Example 5. Even random vigils/wakes get shot up. Example 7. Lots of things happen all the time, for reasons unrelated to the grand-narratives that currently have everyone's attention. Just because the culture war sucks up all of our attention doesn't mean it dominates the real world in the same way.
There is actually at least one neighbor who made incredibly vague claims the shooter has a history of some incredibly vague homophobic slurs. OTOH, the same article I read also said the shooter had been the victim of homophobic slurs in high school, and his fairly well documented internet lolcow history doesn’t seem to include any hate speech.
Thank you for this information. The neighbor's testimony makes me update slightly in favor of purposeful targeting of LGBT individuals, though the history of violence against his own family still leads me to believe that this was a generally violent individual whose choice of target was a secondary consideration, rather than being an ordinarily-peaceful individual moved particularly to violence by the strength of rhetoric or belief about a single issue.
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