Late Saturday morning, a young white man entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and opened fire with an AK-47-style rifle, killing 20 people and injuring 26 more. Police apprehended the suspected shooter, a 21-year-old man from Allen, Texas. It didn’t take long for internet researchers to find a four-page manifesto posted less than an hour before the violence, a document that El Paso’s police chief appeared to later confirm was being examined by officials. The document had been uploaded to the notorious, unmoderated message board 8chan at 10:15 a.m. local time, and it included a request: “Do your part and spread this brothers!”
In the anti-immigrant screed, the author describes plans to perpetrate a mass shooting against the Latino people he believes are invading the United States, the weapons he will use to do it, and his white-nationalist beliefs. Soon after it was first posted on 8chan, the manifesto could be found on 4chan, another message board with scant rules about what people can or cannot share. And not long after that, it was circulating as images on Twitter and Facebook and easily findable in a Google image search. Clearly someone got the author’s message.
The writer of the manifesto said he was inspired by the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand—before which the gunman, another young white man, posted a sprawling essay on 8chan as well as a link to a Facebook Live broadcast of the massacre and instructions to share. That video was removed about 45 minutes after the broadcast began, giving his audience ample time to copy the footage. It was posted to Facebook 1.5 million times in the first 24 hours after the shooting.
The involvement of 8chan is becoming a familiar detail in cases of white-supremacist violence. The El Paso shooting appears to be the second one since the Christchurch massacre to draw from that killer’s playbook. About five weeks later, two hours before another young man murdered someone at a synagogue in Poway, California, the suspected shooter also posted a manifesto to 8chan. In it, he detailed his ideological rationale for mass murder and gave instructions to spread his words far and wide. Each of these shootings appeared to have been designed to go viral—a horrific act would catch the world’s attention, and a manifesto would deliver the hate-filled payload.
In light of this and the shooter in Dayton, here’s something I had written a while ago, just to get the conversation started (I’m literally out the door, about to be late to work; but wanted to get something up so readers could discuss/debate):
The trend over the last few decades (overall until maybe very recently) in murder rate and violent crime has been going down.
What’s really been changing is our connection to each other and to be overwhelmed with news. If it bleeds, it leads. Social media is lit up. Every morning on FB, friends and news sites are flooding my news feed with endless talks about the Florida shooting (back in February when it happened). And because of that? It’s a magnet that draws other troubled people to find attraction in earning “fame” and try and outdo the previous shooting that attracted so much notoriety for the shooter.Bullies and the bullied have been around for ages. The disturbed and mentally-sick; ones who don’t quite fit into society. Yet in the past, how many decided to act out through school shootings? When we consider how many schools in society exist, is it an epidemic uptick of school shootings? Or just that we live in the information highway age of social media and 24-7 news coverage of if-it-bleeds-it-leads? And does that massive amount of attention feed into the likelihood of inspiring other copycats who also seek attention and fame, even if it’s negative fame? Everyone seems to want to be noticed; even those not interested in harming society and achieving negative attention (look at all the Youtube channels from people trying to get subscribers and earn celebrity notoriety through facebook pages and video channels).This is a little dated now:Recent school shooters seem to indicate that their actions are finding inspiration from all the attention given to previous shootings.Joshua Alexander O’Connor from Everett, just a day or so before the Florida Stoneman Douglas school shooting:“O’Connor wrote that he wanted the death count to be as high as possible so that the shooting would be infamous, according to court papers. He went into detail about building pressure-cooker bombs, activating inert grenades and deploying explosives for maximum casualties.“I need to make this count,” O’Connor reportedly wrote. “I’ve been reviewing many mass shootings/bombings (and attempted bombings) I’m learning from past shooters/bombers mistakes.”And the Stoneman Douglas shooter himself made comments about wanting to become a professional school shooter and being influenced by those who came before him.“Investigators found messages on his cellphone that showed the teen had been planning an attack for at least a week at Jackson Middle School, near Massillon. He also showed admiration for the two students who carried out the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado nearly 19 years ago.“I’d hurt and destroy something bigger but my schools an easy target,” Simons wrote in one message found on his phone.“I want to leave a lasting impression on the world,” he said in another message written days before he took the.22-caliber gun to school on Feb. 20. “I’m going to die doing it.”He had been researching other school shooters for months and, determined to outdo them, learned exactly how many people they’d murdered: 13 at Columbine High; 26 at Sandy Hook Elementary; 32 at Virginia Tech.“I think ill probably most likely kill around 50 or 60,” Jesse declared. “If I get lucky maybe 150.”On Valentine’s Day, at the same time police say another angry teen, Nikolas Cruz, slaughtered 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school with a semiautomatic AR-15, Jesse was sitting in a South Carolina courtroom, waiting to find out if he would be tried as an adult for a 2016 rampage that left his father and a 6-year-old dead.The two teens have much in common. Both, investigators say, tortured animals, obsessed over guns and bragged of their deadly intentions on social media. And in the hours after Cruz’s alleged killing spree, as the nation began, once again, to ask why, a group of detectives, prosecutors and psychiatrists were providing answers about Jesse, now 15. He’d detailed his motives in dozens of online messages, in his 46-page confession and in lengthy interviews with doctors who evaluated him, offering extraordinary insight into the mind of an American school shooter.For Peter Langman, one of the country’s leading experts on the subject, the teen’s calculated approach and lack of empathy called to mind Eric Harris, one of the Columbine killers Jesse idolized.“The coldbloodedness, the callousness of the attack — not only before but afterwards,” said Langman, who was not involved in the case but has reviewed Jesse’s confession. “Even having done it, he’s not struck with horror or guilt.”In fact, James Ballenger, a psychiatrist who interviewed Jesse for a total of nine hours, found that the teen reveled in what he’d done.“He wants to talk about how dangerous he is,” Ballenger testified. “He wanted people to know.”~~~~“I HAVE TO BEAT ADAM LAZA …,” he wrote nine days before the Sept. 28, 2016, shooting in a misspelled reference to the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza. “Atleast 40.”
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.