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We have two instances of the trans-identifying carrying out mass shootings against Christian schoolchildren. Saying "one is too many" is smug; two is too many, two is pattern. The idea has been seeded, people are considering it. It will not be allowed to keep happening.
There is something intriguing from civilization's standpoint, how there aren't examples of men murdering their ex-wives and judges in instances where those men have been prohibited from interfering in hormonal treatments their child is receiving. I wonder if it's that there's something inherent to the men, both in what led them to pairing with the mothers of their children, and to their children undergoing such hormonal therapies. Meaning, that there are plenty of men who would kill their ex-wives and/or judges in those situations, but such men never find themselves in those situations.
The segue here is Tyler Robinson, it's loosely relevant for Luigi Mangione, and then relevant again for the past two trans-identifying school shooters, and for any other perpetrators of that sort of random violence. I think it must be concluded that radical rhetoric cannot bend a healthy mind to violence, I think if it could, we would have seen it far more often, left and right, and we haven't. That it takes an already unhealthy mind with a preexisting murderous disposition to move to violence. This does not absolve, it reinforces the culpability on that rhetoric, because it takes such people and gives them a target, a target who often throws gasoline on the fire of politics.
I recall someone wondering about something like this with people who would have been serial killers instead carrying out mass shootings. So maybe it is worth contemplating that Tyler Robinson maybe wasn't twisted out of normalcy by the internet but rather by some event, perhaps some trauma in his life, and that he would have murdered someone else, or multiple people, or tried to, if not Charlie Kirk. But equally, that a murderer chose Charlie Kirk because of leftist rhetoric.
I'm only aware of one such case (the very recent one); could you name them both, please? I remember multiple cases where it was suspected the shooter was trans-identifying but it turned out to be bad early intel.
The Annunciation shooting in Minneapolis last month and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville in 2023.
Ah, I'd mentally filed away the latter as an unrelated case because it was an FTM and most of the concern is about MTFs.
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I think part of this ties into the contagiousness of mental pathologies. Scott discusses how in countries that have never heard of depression, nobody has depression. Before Columbine, nobody had ever heard of a school shooting, so nobody did school shootings (and even today, outside America, nobody does them).
This is basically Calvinism if you squint at it, which is basically self-selection when you scrub away all the fluff. People tune into signals that fit their cognitive state, and tune out signals that do not. People who like math naturally tune into math channels. People who have an urge to violence naturally seek out a signal to justify why committing violence is akshually okay.
I don't think this is quite what happened to either Luigi or Tyler, though. Especially in Luigi's case, in which I'm a bit more confident in my analysis, I think it's clear his own personal experience with The System convinced him that yes, the system really is full of shit and angered him to violence. I don't think it was tuning into any sort of external rhetorical signal at all. The underlying impetus is actually justice, although obviously external observers do not perceive it this way. When you see something that doesn't work because people are stupid or misguided or confused or lazy, none of that really motivates you to violence; but when you see something not working because you outright believe someone is lying to benefit themselves, well... I do think that arouses an urge to violence in any sensible man.
Charles Whitman shot and killed 15 people (and injured 31 others) at the University of Texas in 1966. Surprisingly, it was not the only notable school shooting that year. I think part of the reason Columbine sticks out for us as being "the first of its kind" is because there is video footage of them murdering their classmates.
Of note - Whitman had a significant organic brain injury (a tumor) in a location that could feasibly cause violent impulses.
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I know people have harped on this already, but being that the Westside Elementary Massacre happened in the school district next to mine before Columbine, and family and friends were there at the time, I feel the need to contradict the point. How much people get away with terroristic threats always feels similar to all the people getting away with larceny to me, because immediately after Westside, we got authority figures drilling home that terroristic threats would no longer be tolerated, period.
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This is, of course, plainly false. Here’s a list of school shootings in Europe, another list from Canada, and one from Brazil. Russia alone has had a number of notable school shootings, including the Kerch Polytechnic shooting and the Kazan school shooting/bombing.
And moreover mass casualty attacks are a known problem with a long history in Asia, with 'running amok' or Chinese mass-hacking attacks.
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And moreover, Columbine wasn't the first school shooting.
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It isn't, though. Just look at the content of those lists instead of Googling for gotchas and pasting them. Most of the incidents are just accidents or personal beefs that happened to take place at a school.
The "bring a gun to school to shoot as many people as possible" thing was rare pre-Columbine, precisely because it did not exist in the popular memeplex.
Just to emphasise that school shootings were very much a "thing" prior to Columbine and not limited to the US:
There were plenty I omitted because of low body counts, and the majority in that article took place post-Columbine (it's plausible that some, but far from all, were copycat massacres directly inspired by Columbine itself). I found your claim that "nobody" commits school shootings outside of the US particularly galling in light of the Dunblane massacre, easily one of the most notorious British crimes of the twentieth century (ranking up there with Rosemary & Fred West, Ian Brady & Myra Hindley, and the Yorkshire Ripper) and which was the direct impetus for sweeping gun legislation.
No one disputes that the Columbine massacre is the most infamous school shooting since the concept came into existence (in spite of its paltry body count, less than half of the Virginia Tech shooting), that it inspired numerous copycat crimes, or that it created a "script" for such massacres that many copycats have been following (consciously or unconsciously) to this day. But the concept of a school shooting did exist prior to Columbine. As to the question of their relative frequency within the US vs. without, they're so rare in absolute terms that the difference between the US and other industrialised regions is nowhere near as dramatic as the availability heuristic would have you believe. For example, there have only been two school shootings in the US so far this year, from a population of 330m, which gives us a per capita rate of 0.00061/100k. The total population of Europe is more than double the population of the US at 751 million. With exactly the same rate of school shootings in the US as in Europe, we would expect 5 school shootings to take place in Europe this year. Instead, there have been two school shootings with a combined body count of 21, along with a third in which one person was wounded but no one killed (and a fourth which Wikipedia classifies as a school shooting but really looks more like a political assassination which incidentally happened to take place at a school). Only counting the first two incidents, Europe's school shooting rate this year is 0.000266/100k; including the third, 0.000399/100k. Ergo, the US's school shooting rate is anywhere from 1.5 to 2.3 times more frequent than Europe's: a significant difference, but the idea that school shootings are some crazy phenomenon completely unique to the US and unheard of elsewhere is not borne out by the evidence.
I found this comment while trying to find another one via the search function. I just want to add that I did some reading out of curiosity and I think I have to nitpick a bit.
Eppstein (Germany, 1983; 6 killed incl. perpetrator) - committed by an adult
Sofia University (Bulgaria, 1974; 8 killed) - committed in a university dormitory, not a school
For these reasons I'd argue these weren't school shootings in the everyday sense of the word.
This seems like splitting hairs on two fronts. Some of the most infamous "canonical" school shootings were committed by adults: Sandy Hook, Parkland High, Uvalde, Columbine (Eric Harris turned 18 a week before the shooting; Dylan Klebold was 17). The category "school shooting" is generally taken to include shootings which take place at universities, hence why Virginia Tech is usually considered the bloodiest school shooting in American history. The idea that "school shootings" only refers to mass shootings committed by minors at primary or secondary (but not post-secondary) educational institutions seems like a stipulative definition that doesn't reflect common usage.
My assumption is that widespread cable TV coverage and peculiar interpretations of the ‘classic’ US school shootings of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s compelled normies to put these in a different mental bucket as a particular phenomenon different from spree killings or ‘mass shootings’ in general.
The common characteristics are:
• The horror of ‘kids killing kids’ (of course, many ghetto shootings technically fall into the same category, but again, normies generally ignore those altogether or at least put them in a different mental bucket), college students and recent graduates who are technically already adults also being “just kids” in this context
• If the killer happens to be an adult, he’s a young adult who attended the school in question and is motivated by vengeance; otherwise adult killers are largely uninteresting and thus fall into a different mental category
• The killer is not mentally ill in the technical sense of the word (which is another reason I argue the Bulgarian case does not count) but is driven crazy through addiction to violent FPS games and metal music, by a deep dive into various weird-ass online subcultures or due to sexual frustration
• The massacre is happening strictly on school premises, with the killer hunting his victims indoors like prey
• Neither the killer nor the victims are nonwhite criminal or criminal-adjacent ghetto-dwellers; this needs to be stressed because it’s a big aspect making the whole incident a case of incomprehensible horror
• The shooting is interpreted as a sad commentary on the decadence of modern society and kids these days just being all screwed up
Perhaps this is what the typical person thinks when they hear "school shooting", but I'm not sure if it accurately describes any specific school shooting, thus rendering it a Dead Unicorn Trope. Consider the most infamous American school shooting which inspired legions of copycats, Columbine:
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I did read the contents. There are many of the Columbine-style mass shootings nestled in there among the personal beefs. Again, do you acknowledge that things like Kerch Polytechnic, Kazan, and Izhevsk (just to name three from Russia alone) are Columbine-style school shootings?
How about the École Polytechnic shooting in Montreal, which happened before Columbine? Or the Dawson College shooting, also in Montreal? Or the La Loche shootings in Saskatchewan?
Bro, what are you even trying to say? Do you think Scott was actually saying there were literally 0 people in the continent of Africa with depression until whites brought the concept there? Obviously not. Obviously the contention is the prevalence skyrocketed once the concept became a "thing" in the collective mindscape.
Come on, man, what are we even doing here.
You made an over-broad claim, I countered it with actual evidence, and now you’re acting flabbergasted that I took your claim seriously enough to refute it, instead of treating it like the empty bluster it apparently was.
I said it directly adjacent to the Scott reference on depression in Africa. Come on man, stop conflating pedantry for insight. I don't care about gotchas; I care about understanding stuff.
If you want a zingers and gotchas, there's... well, Charlie Kirk's TikToks.
I’m not trying to do a gotcha. I’m pointing out that a specific claim you made was wildly overblown. I’m not trying to be insightful or even attack the edifice of your post in any holistic way. I’m literally just focused on that specific claim, which I think was inaccurate.
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