The Recent Mass Shootings

       It is often hard to ferret out the truth about these shootings, not only because of erroneous accounts and conflicting information, but because the media will highlight certain facts and downplay others to advance a certain agenda of demonizing white men, calling for more government security apparatus, and banning guns.

        For instance, new facts are leaking out about the shooting event at the Gilroy, California, garlic festival. No, I'm not talking about the coroner determining that the shooter, Santino William Legan, died from a self-inflicted gun shot wound. (Legan had been shot multiple times by police, and apparently shot himself after he was wounded). That is the type of information that you would expect to change as the investigation continues and evidence is examined. No, I'm talking about the news blasting 24/7 that Legan was a white supremacist, based on his reference to an obscure book published some 120 years ago, and the lack of interest in the information that Legan, who is half Iranian, also had reading materials about radical Islam. There was information available immediately after the shooting that Legan might have been motivated by Islam, as one of his few social media posts was about Ali Asghar Vahabzadeh, Legan’s maternal grandfather. The historic Ali Asghar was "the youngest child of Al-Husayn (son of ‘Ali, grandson of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and the third Imam) and Rubab bint Imra’ al-Qays. He was killed during the Battle of Karbala, and is commemorated in shia as the 'personified quintessence of the innocent victim.'" Thus, six days ago, Laura Loomer's media site reported that "An Iranian source told LauraLoomer.us that anybody who idolizes Ali Asghar – Legan’s grandfather’s namesake – would view themselves as a Shia zealot to Islam."

     Now, perhaps that is too obscure for any of hundreds of journalists to have determined. But then, on July 30, reports started to come out that authorities had found radical Islam materials. Of course, you wouldn't know it from the headlines. For instance, the San Francisco Chronicle reported the discovery of the radical Islamic material, but its headline was: "Search of Gilroy gunman’s home finds items suggesting massive attack, white supremacy materials." After noting the items found, the article continues:

The extremist reading materials were not listed among the items found during the early Monday search, but a federal law enforcement official told The Chronicle they were among paper items collected from the unit. The source was not authorized to speak to the media and asked to remain anonymous.

      The next day, this news was repeated by CBS. However, this apparently prompted an impromptu press conference by FBI Special Agent in Charge John Bennett to let us know that the rumors that radical Islamic and white supremacist writings were found during a search of the shooter’s apartment “erroneous and incorrect.” Nevertheless, according to the article, Bennett nevertheless affirmed that some material had been found:

      He said they found material in his apartment but to call it ideology in one way or another is incorrect. 

     “Just because someone has a book in their house doesn’t mean they’re leaning one way or another,” he said.

So, basically, once the information about Islamic material came out, the FBI suddenly wanted to downplay it, but without actually denying that such material was found. That same day (July 31) the Mercury News, after going over all the white supremacist, repeated the FBI line:

Authorities have said that they have not yet determined whether Legan was motivated by any extremist ideologies. On Wednesday, the Bay Area’s top FBI agent refuted news reports that white supremacist and radical Islamic reading materials had been found at the shooter’s Nevada apartment.

However, that is not what the agent said, as another San Francisco Chronicle article from August 2, 2019, makes clear:

While a search of Legan’s Nevada apartment uncovered reading materials on white supremacy and “radical Islam,” according to federal law enforcement officials, Bennett said those materials are not enough to determine a particular ideological leaning or motivation.

And a USA Today article indicated that Bennett's message was that it was not clear what ideology, if any motivated, Legan, whether white supremacy or radical Islam.

    But that nuance is completely gone from most of the reporting because they and various pundits were so eager to push the white supremacist theory. Returning to the July 31, Mercury News, article, it interesting that as soon as the article "debunked" the finding of Islamic material, the article then quickly moves on to a quote from Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino:

“He murders three young people of color, and right before he does it, he posts about mestizos, and then encouraged people to read a book republished by a Nazi publishing house,” Levin said. “What more do you need?”

Well, how about some more facts, including whether he was a Muslim terrorist?

     Maybe this is coincident, but on August 1, 2019, it was suddenly splashed all over the front pages that the FBI was concerned about conspiracy theory extremists as a terrorist threat. You can read the full FBI paper at this link. And then, on August 3, 2019, we have a shooting by someone that claimed to have been motivated by the book, The Great Replacement which is, according to Wikipedia, "also known as replacement theory, [and] is a white nationalist right-wing conspiracy theory..." (even though the United Nations has a white paper encouraging replacement immigration for "eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union).").

     I am, of course, referring to shooting carried out by Patrick Crusius, 21, of Allen, Texas, who apparently drove 8 or 9 hours to an El Paso, Texas, Walmart store where he allegedly killed 20 people and injured 26 others on Saturday. (See also this report from the Daily Mail). At least 7 of the dead were Mexican nationals, and, based on photographs and names most (but not all) of the other victims were probably Hispanic. In this case, the shooter left a manifesto that purported to set out his reasoning for what he did. According to the manifesto, Crusius, says that he was motivated to action by the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto which seemed to affirm Crusius' previously held beliefs about the dangers of immigration and demographic change to jobs and the political makeup of the country. Crusius also mentions that because of immigration and automation, he did not believe that he had a future economically or politically.

     There is some debate whether the manifesto should be taken seriously, or if it was written specifically as a form of trolling to cause fighting between the Democrats and Republicans. Under this theory, the shooter was not motivated by grievances, but simply was a thrill killer. I've read a couple comments indicating that the manifesto has been debunked, but I can't find any actual article or post debunking the manifesto. The FBI seems to be taking the manifesto seriously, however, as suggested by this August 4 statement:

The attack in El Paso, Texas, underscores the continued threat posed by domestic violent extremists and perpetrators of hate crimes. The FBI is supporting its state and local partners in Texas through investigative, intelligence, and technical assistance. The El Paso investigation is also being supported by the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell, which was established in spring 2019. Composed of subject matter experts from both the Criminal Investigative and Counterterrorism Divisions, the fusion cell offers program coordination from FBI Headquarters, helps ensure seamless information sharing across divisions, and augments investigative resources.

      And there is some question of the shooter's political leanings. There were the curious tricks played with Crusius' My Life page, to change the information from showing him as a Democrat to showing him as a Republican. The shooter also believed in Universal Basic Income, Environmentalism, and healthcare for all, which is suggestive as to his political stance.

     I am also intrigued by the witness reports of multiple gunmen. For instance, the Daily Mail article mentioned above reports:

      A family of three was one of a dozen waiting outside a local bus station, trying to get back to their car, in blocked-off Walmart parking lot.

     'I heard the shots but I thought they were hits, like roof construction,' said Adriana Quezada, 39, who was in Walmart with in the women’s clothing section with her two children.

      She said she saw four men, dressed in black, wearing shirts, moved together firing guns indiscriminately.

      'I saw four men, shooting everywhere,' Quezada said.

      'I told my son, those are gunshots.'

      Her daughter, 19, and son, 16, threw themselves on the ground, then ran out of the Walmart through an emergency exit. 

      They were unhurt. 

While I could understand that she might have seen some of arriving law enforcement officers, but why would they have been shooting if Crusius was captured without incident? Did she just hear shots and assume that the four were shooting because they had weapons? Perhaps this should be a reminder of the unreliability of witness accounts.

     Like in the incident involving Legan, the media was quick to pounce on Crusius as a white supremacist. George P. Bush, the grandson of former President George H. W. Bush, evidently must be planning on running for higher office, because he, too, decided to jump on the bandwagon and described the attack as "white terrorism." As would be expected, the Democratic presidential candidates reacted to the shooting by calling for more gun control, including a ban on popular semi-automatic rifles.

     Finally, early Sunday morning, we had a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio. The suspect, Connor Betts, purportedly killed 9 and injured 29. Unlike other shootings where the media (or authorities) have generally reticent about identifying the dead, in this case we already know that the following were killed:

In addition to Megan Betts [the shooter's sister], they are Lois Oglesby, black female, 27; Saeed Saleh, 38, black male; Logan Turner, white male, 30; Nicholas Cummer, white male, 25; Thomas McNichols, black male, 25; Beatrice Warren Curtis, black female, 36; Monica Brickhouse, black female, 39; and Derrick Fudge, black male, 57.

Rather odd that the article would go out of the way to describe the race of the victims. One of the above was Megan Bett's boyfriend, although I was not able to find any articles reporting his identity--only that he had also been killed.

      Contrary to insinuation that Bett was a white supremacist, the information known about him show that he was the archetypal Leftist: he was a Satanist, leftist-socialist, a fan of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and supported Antifa. This consistent with Facebook postings from his parents, including a post from his mother declaring "stop the alt right," and his father's criticism of President Trump. Authorities have indicated that they do not yet have a motive for the shooting. It seems reasonable it must involve his sister, somehow, and perhaps her boyfriend, since he shot and killed them. It certainly wasn't because Bett was right wing or a white supremacist. Perhaps it is because he is Antifa.

     The takeaway from all of this is that the main stream media, politicians, and left-wing pundits are not interested in the facts of these events, except to the extent it supports their pre-conceived agenda. And frankly, you can see this even in such basic concepts as what constitutes a mass shooting. For instance, the Los Angeles Times ran a scare article yesterday entitled "Recent mass shootings in the U.S.: A timeline." It helpfully explains:

    The term [mass shooting] is not a legal one — which means that definitions fluctuate. The Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tallies gun violence in the United States, defines a mass shooting as four or more victims shot or killed. Some media outlets use three fatalities as a baseline for a mass shooting; others four. The topic is widely debated.

     For this timeline, The Times is defining a mass shooting as four or more deaths (which currently leaves the tragic Gilroy, Calif., shooting off the list). ...

Which means, according to the LA Times, that if some criminal lined up 100 people and shot each of them in the foot, such that no one died, it would not constitute a mass shooting! This is convenient because it allows the Times to ignore gang violence, which is mostly black or Latino. So, for instance, when 7 people were shot in a Chicago park this weekend, it doesn't count as a mass shooting because there were not a sufficient number of fatalities. And, in fact, we see no outrage over the fact that 51 were shot in Chicago over the weekend.

      But it also skews how people think of mass shootings. For instance, the Los Angeles Times also published a op-ed by Jillian Peterson and James Densley who run the Violence Project and whose research is being funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. The op-ed has the title, "We have studied every mass shooting since 1966. Here’s what we’ve learned about the shooters." Of course, this is only a true statement if they studied a subset of mass shootings artificially constrained by their definition of "mass shooting."

    In any event, they write:

      Although we haven’t found that mass shooters are all alike, our data do reveal four commonalities among the perpetrators of nearly all the mass shootings we studied.

       First, the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying. The trauma was often a precursor to mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, thought disorders or suicidality.

      Second, practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. They often had become angry and despondent because of a specific grievance. For workplace shooters, a change in job status was frequently the trigger. For shooters in other contexts, relationship rejection or loss often played a role. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.

       Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives. People in crisis have always existed. But in the age of 24-hour rolling news and social media, there are scripts to follow that promise notoriety in death. Societal fear and fascination with mass shootings partly drives the motivation to commit them. Hence, as we have seen in the last week, mass shootings tend to come in clusters. They are socially contagious. Perpetrators study other perpetrators and model their acts after previous shootings. Many are radicalized online in their search for validation from others that their will to murder is justified.

       Fourth, the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans. Once someone decides life is no longer worth living and that murdering others would be a proper revenge, only means and opportunity stand in the way of another mass shooting. Is an appropriate shooting site accessible? Can the would-be shooter obtain firearms? In 80% of school shootings, perpetrators got their weapons from family members, according to our data. Workplace shooters tended to use handguns they legally owned. Other public shooters were more likely to acquire them illegally.

      So, immediately you should note that there are a few things that suggest some methods to identify and prevent such shootings, such as providing the social network and moral framework that would allow them to move through their period of crises without lashing out in violence. I don't know, maybe something that has been used for hundreds of years, like religion and stable families. Or maybe someone should be concerned that more than 20% of millennials claim to have no friends. But, no, that is not the priority of our esteemed boffins. They instead want more police state:

      One step needs to be depriving potential shooters of the means to carry out their plans. Potential shooting sites can be made less accessible with visible security measures such as metal detectors and police officers. And weapons need to be better controlled, through age restrictions, permit-to-purchase licensing, universal background checks, safe storage campaigns and red-flag laws — measures that help control firearm access for vulnerable individuals or people in crisis.

      Another step is to try to make it more difficult for potential perpetrators to find validation for their planned actions. Media campaigns like #nonotoriety are helping starve perpetrators of the oxygen of publicity, and technology companies are increasingly being held accountable for facilitating mass violence. But we all can slow the spread of mass shootings by changing how we consume, produce, and distribute violent content on media and social media. Don’t like or share violent content. Don’t read or share killers’ manifestos and other hate screeds posted on the internet. We also need to study our current approaches. For example, do lockdown and active shooter drills help children prepare for the worst or hand potential shooters the script for mass violence by normalizing or rehearsing it?

      We also need to, as a society, be more proactive. Most mass public shooters are suicidal, and their crises are often well known to others before the shooting occurs. The vast majority of mass shooters leak their plans ahead of time. People who see or sense something is wrong, however, may not always say something to someone owing to the absence of clear reporting protocols or fear of overreaction and unduly labeling a person as a potential threat. Proactive violence prevention starts with schools, colleges, churches and employers initiating conversations about mental health and establishing systems for identifying individuals in crisis, reporting concerns and reaching out — not with punitive measures but with resources and long-term intervention. Everyone should be trained to recognize the signs of a crisis.

       Proactivity needs to extend also to the traumas in early life that are common to so many mass shooters. Those early exposures to violence need addressing when they happen with ready access to social services and high-quality, affordable mental health treatment in the community. School counselors and social workers, employee wellness programs, projects that teach resilience and social emotional learning, and policies and practices that decrease the stigma around mental illness will not just help prevent mass shootings, but will also help promote the social and emotional success of all Americans.

You might have seen some of the disconnect. For instance, they say that most school shooters steal their weapons from family members, while most work place shooters use legally owned firearms. So how, exactly, does that lead to the conclusion that "weapons need to be better controlled, through age restrictions, permit-to-purchase licensing, universal background checks, safe storage campaigns and red-flag laws"? School shooters are already age restricted, and if they are intent on stealing a firearm, taking a key or learning a combination isn't going to slow them down. Older shooters, that have legally obtained their firearms, aren't going to be stopped by permit-to-purchase licensing or universal background checks. And we know what a joke red-flag laws will be just by looking at what happened with  ‎Nikolas Cruz. And California's vaunted red-flag laws obviously did nothing to stop Santino Legan.

     And the suggestion that we need censorship to stop mass shootings is laughable. While the research on whether violent media content increases violent crime is mixed, the real world experience has shown significant reductions in violent crime at the same time as violent media became more accessible and more realistic. As for censorship, that road always leads to mass propaganda and societal control.

     The rest of their suggestions are the same liberal talking points that didn't work in the 1960's, '70s, or '80s.

     So what can we expect moving forward? Well, there is already a call for a return of the so-called Assault Weapon Ban. At a minimum, we can expect some sort of federal red-flag law and more monitoring of social media accounts. President Trump avoided references to gun confiscation, but did raise the following that he believed the country needed to do (quoting from a TTAG article):

• Work with social media companies to detect mass shooters before they strike.
• Stop the glorification of violence, including gruesome video games. Cultural change is hard, he said.
• We must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals to give people treatment and, when necessary, involuntary confinement.
• Enact red flag laws with due process.
• Use the death penalty for those convicted of mass murder.

Mexico wants to sue the United States to require more protection for its citizens. While this may seem rich coming from a country overrun with deadly cartel violence, it is merely an example of lawfare being conducted by another country. And perhaps Mexico can find a friendly judge that will try to change gun laws via injunction. The Left, of course, wants to go much farther. Vox has published an article that calls for massive gun confiscation, the author writing:

      But let's be clear about precisely what kind of decision is letting events like this recur, most recently in Dayton and El Paso. Congress's decision not to pass background checks is not what's keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap. What's behind the gap, plenty of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns. The statistics are mind-blowing: America has 4.4 percent of the world's population but almost half of its civilian-owned guns.

     Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.

It contains some pretty laughable reasoning, including this: "The US doesn't just have a gun violence problem because of its lax gun regulation. It has a problem because it has a culture that encourages large-scale gun possession, and other countries do not." Which is demonstrably false just by looking at the countries with the highest homicide rates and comparing it to gun ownership in those same countries. No, America has a gun violence problem because it has a minority gang problem.