COMMENT: So, another lone nut has gone off and slaughtered a bunch of people in cold blood. With regard to the Connecticut massacre of 12/14/2012, we are not in a position to say if there is anything more to the story than we have been told.
(There were initial reports of a second shooter. The shooter’s mother–owner of the firearms and one of the victims–was a “prepper”–the current term for “survivalist,” a paramilitary right-winger. That does NOT mean that there necessarily was more to this than we have been told. That is certainly a possibility that must be explored. In this context, one should note that none other than Mark Fuhrman was FOX News’ in-house expert called upon to debunk the report that there was more than one shooter. As we have seen, there is a significant body of evidence pointing to Mark Fuhrman’s probable guilt in the O.J. Simpson case. Head of a white-supremacist group within the LAPD, Fuhrman retired to Sandpoint Idaho, an epicenter of the neo-Nazi movement in this country.)
What we can say is that the entire phenomenon has not been properly analyzed.
(Before proceeding, we should observe that two concepts that have almost become obsolete and/or irrelevant here in “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” are mind-control and the agent-provacateur.
With our media establishment having giving itself over to the sensational and the ultra-violent, with so many young people playing violent point-and-shoot video games, with so many people on drugs and with so many examples to copy, it shouldn’t be too surprising that people are going off like this. Add in improperly-vetted psych drugs, behavior-altering street drugs [which are epidemic] bad food [including gmo’s] and various forms of electromagnetic radiation, there are a number of variables that might or can affect human behavior.)
We note in passing that there have been a number of changes in the “human psychological ecology” in recent years. For example, there has been a significant increase in the incidence of autism in this country. That has not been caused by assault weapons. The point in this context being that there have been environmental factors introduced into American society that are causing significant changes in human behavior. These must be factored in as we evaluate the school shootings.
We also note in passing that these incidents spawn “copy-cats” who emulate the behavior of the killers.
A very important and largely overlooked book On Killing by Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman (a former paratrooper and Army Ranger who taught psychology at West Point) makes some important points:
- Colonel Grossman expresses the view that the key variable in the rising epidemic of gun violence perpetrated by relatively young people is the point-and-shoot video games and high-body-count movies and TV programs.
- Colonel Grossman sees those as closely replicating the behavior modification programs employed by the Army to get a higher percentage of soldiers to fire their weapons.
- He notes that youth gangs have existed for decades and that they had access to drugs and alcohol and plenty of firepower–sawed off, pump-action shotguns are very deadly and have been around a long time. Virtually as effective at close range as an assault rifle.
We would note that the presence of firearms–including military-style assault rifles– is not the key variable in analyzing this country’s epidemic of gun violence. In both Israel and Switzerland, military reservists keep their selective-fire military weapons in their homes and those countries have a low level of gun violence. If the presence of assault rifles alone was the key variable, those countries would be experiencing the same type of epidemic and they are not.
In past discussion, we have noted an intelligence community connection to the gun control movement in the United States, as well as influence of the Third Reich’s gun control laws on our own. Interestingly and significantly, the paramilitary right-wing has mobilized around its opposition to gun control, which it views (not entirely incorrectly) as “government suppression.” It doesn’t occur to the denizens of the paramilitary right that they may well be pawns of that very government.
It is important to remember that the issue of gun control is yet another consideration further sowing division and dissension among Americans–something of great interest to the Underground Reich.
It is very important to note that some of the supposedly random shootings that have plagued America have been the work of Nazis and White Supremacists.
Almost a quarter of a century ago, we analyzed the Stockton school yard massacre perpetrated by Patrick Edward Purdy, who had literature from the Aryan Nations and the Moon organization in his possession when he perpetrated his act.
You can listen to both halves of the show (Miscellaneous Archive Show M55: “Purdy’s Last Stand”) here:
http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_55a.mp3
http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_55b.mp3
We’ve also analyzed the Littleton, Colorado massacre at Columbine high school . Perpetrated on Hitler’s Birthday (the neo-Nazis love anniversaries) there appears to have been much more to this than meets the eye.
An excerpt of the description for FTR #150 reads: “Introduction: Teacher Al Wilder was dismissed from Columbine in 1996 for showing his senior class on debate and logic excerpts of the Bernardo Bertolucci film 1900, an historically and sociologically penetrating look at the rise of fascism in Italy. Eventually reinstated by the school board, Wilder was told that the film was “too controversial” and contained violent and sexually explicit content. The controversy drew the attention of major film directors such as Martin Scorcese and Milos Forman. Bertolucci himself testified via telephone on behalf of Wilder. Noting that a decision to sustain Wilder’s suspension would propel the U.S. down the road to “amnesia,” Bertolucci voiced dismay at the departure from traditional American values constituted by Wilder’s dismissal.
The program presents the possibility that Nazi elements (inside and/or outside of government) may have targeted Columbine High because of the controversy over 1900 (the film is anti-fascist). Attempts by the right to censor the curricula of schools have been increasing in recent years. The shooting focused national debate on the issues of censorship of the media and video games (blamed for the massacre by some observers), as well as gun control.
Program Highlights Include: indications that the two gunmen may have had help; the curious behavior of the police in the case; comparisons to Patrick Edward Purdy (see Miscellaneous Archive Show M55), another “school shooter” with Nazi inclinations; the film Harris and Klebold made for a class, directly foreshadowing their killing spree (they were not able to show the film because of its violent content) . . .”
On the same day as the Newtown shootings, another, similar incident appears to have been executed by a member of a white supremacist biker gang–The Invaders.
EXCERPT: Police in Indiana said they found a stockpile of 47 guns hidden throughout the home of a man who had threatened to set fire to his wife and then walk to a nearby elementary school and “kill as many people as he could.”
Von I. Meyer, 60, was arrested at his Cedar Lake home Saturday afternoon on suspicion of felony intimidation, resisting arrest and domestic battery.
Police in Cedar Lake, less than 100 miles from Chicago, said they were called to the man’s home early Friday after he threatened to kill his wife and open fire at Jane Ball Elementary School, located less than 1,000 feet from his home and connected by a series of trails through a wooden area.
The threat came the same day 26 people, including 20 students, were shot and killed by a gunman at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.
Police identified Meyer as a member of a local motorcycle gang, the Invaders, and said his arsenal was hidden throughout his two-story home. . . .
EXCERPT: . . . . More than 30 members and associates of the Invaders Motorcycle Club, a white supremacist gang founded in 1965 in Gary, Ind., were arrested on drug trafficking charges during raids throughout Northwest Indiana, Missouri and Colorado. DEA agents seized chemicals used to make methamphetamine, 35 firearms, and paraphernalia bearing the gang’s logo — a swastika with “SS” lightning bolts. . . .
COMMENT: As incredible as it may seem to some, there are elements of the Nazi and fascist movements that see these “lone-wolf” mass killings as vehicles for destabilizing society. In the Nazi tract Siege by James Mason, the efforts of some of these mass killers are lauded. The bold-faced excerpts in the passage that follows highlight the philosophy and motive apparently underlying the endorsement of such slaughter.
EXCERPT: . . . . One year later, [Michael] Moynihan was more preoccupied by literary than legal matters. His Denver-based Storm Press published Siege, a 400-page anthology of the writings of James Mason, the Nazi fan of Charles Manson. In his acknowledgments, Moynihan (“Michael M. Jenkins”) thanked (among others) both Adam Parfrey and Anton LaVey • for their help in facilitating Siege’s publication.
Mason argued in Siege that National Socialism had lost its violent, revolutionary edge. “We want to see crime and chaos rise to such a degree where the System becomes no longer viable and falls apart,” he wrote. In a tract called “Smashing the Pig System,” he growled: “If a bunch of Black Nationalists rob a Brinks truck, if they kill some System Pigs, WHO CARES??!!”
Siege also paid homage to white racist “lone wolf” assassins like Mason’s former ANP colleague Joseph Franklin, who specialized in shooting interracial couples (“race traitors”); and James Huberty, who massacred a largely Hispanic clientele at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Diego. Mason felt that the lone wolves were merely expressing healthy “Viking berserker rage” against “Big Brother.” He especially liked the fact that, since they acted alone, these lone wolves were very difficult to catch. Siege also glorified Charles Manson. Mason even created a Manson-inspired successor group to the NSLF called the Universal Order in an effort to transcend the traditional “left-right spectrum.”
In his introduction to Siege, Moynihan also highlighted Mason’s call for a unity of extremes against the System:
At this point in history there were no such things as “innocent bystanders.” The degeneration and decline of the West had long since passed the point where such ideas had any meaning. Now it all boiled down to whether you were working “for” or “against” the System, and anything which helped further augment instability in society – no matter what comer it came from, or what “opposing” (i.e.. Left Wing or Marxist) group might be responsible. The break with conservatism and “Right-Wingism” (the categories most people invariably believe Nazism falls into) had now been made once and for all...Mason will reiterate that he wishes the best of luck to anyone willing to attack the System head-on.
For all its crudeness, Siege echoed Franco Freda’s radical Evolan call for total social disruption in La Disintegrazione del Sistema. . . .
COMMENT: Note that the publication of Siege was assisted by Adam Parfrey, whose Feral House imprint has considerable cache in elements of “alternative culture.” As noted in FTR #437, Feral House publishes “counter-culture fascist” tracts like The Lords of Chaos, in addition to promoting books of interest to students of para-politics, such as America’s political assassinations. Feral House also caters to Manson Family afficianados and Satanists among other subcultures.
As we noted in FTR #437: . . . . Another central point of discussion is Moynihan’s long time friend, professional associate and political fellow traveler Adam Parfrey, the owner of Feral House and a significant presence on the alternative publishing scene. Coalescing in the Abraxas Foundation, an alternative music/occult/fascist/Social Darwinist think tank (their description), Parfrey, Moynihan and Boyd Rice have intertwined musical and political cultures with a counterculture fascist ideology. (Rice is pictured at right and above, with Nazi associate Robert Heick.)
Parfrey’s significant and growing presence in the conspiracy publishing field is worth noting. Feral House political books–much of their inventory deals with cultural, not political, subjects–tend to be uneven: many volumes have excellent material mixed in with drivel, some of the books are quite good and others ludicrous and insane.
What is important about the use of conspiracy theories in the context of a proto-fascist political view is the confusion that can result for those who come to realize that in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill Kennedy. This awareness may leave some in a relativistic political/intellectual universe. “Maybe the Holocaust didn’t happen!” In the era of the big lie, Parfrey and others who market some political truth mixed in with the vilest of fascist ideologies are truly dangerous and are sowing the seeds of doom.
Although Parfrey and company have deep connections to fascist and Nazi elements and have worked extensively to further some of those elements’ projects, one should not be too quick to label Parfrey a fascist himself. Rather, he might be termed a “fellow traveler,” whose efforts on behalf of, and association with, Nazi/fascist elements may be due to Parfrey’s devotion to the promulgation of “extreme culture.”
Defying easy definition, “extreme culture” could be said to be defined by anything that is edgy, over-the-top and, more often than not, offensive and/or unbelievable. . . .
COMMENT: In a related consideration, Parfrey and his associate Boyd Rice helped start a website called Unpop Art, which caters to the “extreme culture” touched on above. Significant elements of that culture are overtly or quasi-fascistic, with some of them even extolling incidents such as the Columbine shootings. The website and its operators also present material of interest to the Manson Family accolytes mentioned above.
Again, we should note that exponents of “extreme culture,” such as the Unpop Art crowd should not necessarily be viewed as fascists per se. They may be motivated by degeneracy rather than ideology. Perhaps they just have “too many birds on their antennae.”
Nonetheless, the effect of this sort of thing on the growing number of people in this society who aren’t wrapped too tight is to be seriously contemplated. If, say, an Adam Lanza is exposed to this sort of thing, what might be the effect?
The last item for consideration here is an incident that took place in Weimar Germany and which served to further destabilize that imperiled society. In the early 1920’s, a case broke in the German city of Hanover that shocked and horrified the German citizenry. An ostensibly feeble-minded gay man named Fritz Haarmann went on a spree in which he murdered more than a hundred boys, butchering their corpses and selling the flesh in meat pies. Haarmann used Hanover police department ID and a front as a “detective agency” to help perpetrate his horrors.
In addition to discrediting the nascent gay rights movement in Weimar Germany, the Fritz Haarmann episode discredited the Weimar authorities.
The slaughter of so many young innocents inclined people to wonder how such a thing could have happened and what needed to be done to to put things right.
“We need order! Can’t ANYONE or ANYTHING stop this?” might be an accurate encapsulation of popular sentiment at the time.
Having children murdered, particularly at Christmastime no doubt affects Americans in a similar fashion.
Listen to the account presented of the Fritz Haarmann incident (in the spring of 1987) and compare it with what is happening today.
Are some of these school massacres serving as a contemporary “Fritz Haarmann” incident? Are people echoing the cry of the citizens of Weimar Germany? Will the American people experience the same fate as the Weimar citizenry?
We analyzed the Fritz Haarmann incident in Miscellaneous Archive Show M13, “The Pink Triangle: Gay Rights, Reproductive Rights and the Third Reich.”
The two sides of the program containing discussion of the Fritz Haarmann incident are:
Side A: http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_13a.mp3
Side B: http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/misc/m_13b.mp3
Presentation of the Fritz Haarmann episode begins around 39 minutes into side A and continues into side B.
M13 draws on the book The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals by Richard Plant.
The Political Implications of the UFO Phenomenon and the "ET" Myth
One of the more notable aspects of the coverage of this event has been the degree of outright disinformation that’s been making it’s way into the coverage. And it looks like Fox is possibly leading the way on a new motive. Yesterday there was a big “Fox Exclusive” report citing a family friend that heard that the shooter was aware of plans by his mother to have him forcibly institutionalized and that he was very angry the plans and this is what triggered the event. While that’s very possibly the motive there’s also a big problem with this “Exclusive” report:
Now, speculative reporting is somewhat unavoidable at this point given the scope of the tragedy and how little information is known so far. But it’s worth pointing out that I was watching the Greta van Sustren show expand on this story last night on Fox News, adding to the story from the pastor’s son that the targeting of the classrooms may have been caused by the shooter’s jealousy over the time volunteer time the mother spent in those classes in the last year. There was NO mention of the refutation of this story by the source’s father and this was a live show that running at 10PM Eastern time (I saw the rerun three hours later). The timestamp on the above story is 7 PM (and I think that’s an Eastern timezone article), so it’s likely that Fox would have known that this was a contentious report (especially since the father said he told Fox not to run it). Are we seeing myth-building at work?
It’s important to note that, even 10 years after Columbine, there is still the persistent myth that the shooters were outcasts intent on getting revenge for their outcast status. That also turns out to be not at all true based on the volume of evidence:
I should add that Fox’s panelists were continuing to emphasize the shooter’s apparent autism without noting the possibility that there were other factors compounding the shooter’s mental condition in the coverage I saw yesterday. One must assume those panelists don’t themselves have any kids on the autism spectrum (and are generally just assholes) because if an autism/mass killer myth emerges from this event the consequences could impact some of the most vulnerable members of this society.
That “counterpsyops.com” looks like it has some downright false information on their site. Most of their posts are b.s., but their information on the LIBOR scandal looked like it could be true.
Don’t know if this is accurate or contributes to any deeper understanding of this tragedy. Found a link about how the father of the Newtown, CT mass murderer and the father of the Aurora, CO theater shootings were linked. The 2 fathers were supposed to be involved in a hearing or something of that nature.
According to this link :http://counterpsyops.com/2012/12/17/libor-scandal-link-fathers-of-two-mass-murderers-lanza-holmes-were-to-testify/
“Both men were to testify before the US Sentate in the ongoing LIBOR scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested.”
Now that link for the full article has been removed or moved somewhere else. Again, I don’t know how accurate or legit the site is. Just sad.
@Rose:
That site is pushing a hoax story. And it’s just one the hoaxes and misreporting that has already emerged.
It’s also worth noting that last night’s Greta van Susteren show also had a segment on the suspicions that the shooter had help. Her guest was none other that Mark Fuhrman. The second shooter was part of the initial report by a teacher at the school who there were two shooters running past the gym. Early CBS news reports of an eye witness that describes a man wearing “camo pants” and a dark jacket being taken into custody and saying that “I didn’t do it” to the parents as he was passing by as he was escorted in handcuffs by the police. The eyewitness tells the reporter that “he’s sitting over there in the police car right now” and points off camera, so there appeared to be a pretty unambiguous report of a man in camouflage pants and a dark jacket that was taken into custody and early reports of two gunmen at the school. Memory is a complicated thing, especially during mass casualty events. But if a second shooter is reported by a teacher during the shooting and a man is marched past eyewitnesses wearing “camo pants” and a dark jacket and taken into custody, it’s just irresponsible of the media to just forget that this happened and never provide an explanation.
Also, according to this recent dated local CT news report(note that this is reported as if it was written on Friday, Dec 14th, but it’s also listed as one of the “top_stories” in the link URL and has a December 18th online publication date and a December 19th date in the URL — the date it was accessed by me — so the dates are screwy on this site but this also appears to be a small, local news organization so that’s not to be entirely unexpected), the police had yet to determine if that second person arrested was working with the shooter or coincidentally walking into the school at the same time:
Given the complicated history of past mass killings and how little information we have available about the Newtown shootings at this point it would be absurd to rule out the possibility that the shooter had help, especially of the man in camouflage pants and a dark jacket just happened to be trying to enter the school at the same time. Instead, on the same day of the attack the media and investigators embraced the idea of a single shooter without ever resolving the undeniable fact that a second person was taken into custody near the area of the mass killing. Recall that the arrest of the shooter’s brother, the one originally identified as the shooter, sort of took over as “the second person in custody” meme as the story unfolded. If there’s any follow up regarding the man taken into custody that day I haven’t been able to find it. So, unfortunately, we have to continue considering the possibility that there was more going on here than the consensus narrative suggests. It’s a consequence of mass media mass amnesia.
Here’s a belated followup on the “exclusive” Fox News report that was pushing the idea that fear of being involuntarily institutionalized by the shooter’s mom is what prompted the event. This was supposed to by coming from someone close to the family. As we saw, however, the father of the individual that provided Fox News with this info refuted the idea as unconfirmed and stated that he told Fox not to run with it. They continued to run with is last Wednesday night(Dec 19th), with Greta van Susteren revisiting the topic in a brief update on the unfolding investigation. That brief update included only a handful of items and one of them, of course, was a reference back to the “exclusive” Fox News report. So it’s worth noting that the source of this “exclusive” report doesn’t appear to condone it either:
I will always believe that these masacers are an extension of the MK-ultra program. In this case it is to get the guns. Remember one of the first mustachioed paper hanger operations is to remove the the ability of the general populace to resist. This did happen in Nazi Germany
@Harry Pecha: I’m not so sure of that myself, though. Remember, the Nazi gun control laws didn’t target ALL Germans....just those who weren’t “Aryans”, including & especially the Jews:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1791/did-hitler-ban-gun-ownership
And here’s one more close call on what appears to be a planned school attack by a white-supremacist student:
Ladies and gentlemen! Behold, Glenn Beck jumping Alex Jones jumping the shark! The double shark jump is quite a sight to see.
And now on the heels of the Alex Jones CNN freakout we have stories of Sandy Hook “Trutherism” which appears to be mostly fixated on the theory that it was all an elaborate government false flag hoax using actors and no one actually died...including the shooter. And all of this is coupled with growing rhetoric from politicians and media outlets pushing the “Obama is a dictator like Hitler and Stalin because he wants to go on a power/gun grabbing Executive Order spree” memes. So we can be pretty sure that the Sandy Hook False flag “the government did it to grab your guns” theories should be infecting the mainstream right-wing sooner or later and that means it’s only a matter of time before we start hearing the “get ready for civil war” rhetoric.
And 3...2...1...
And now, a look back at Wayne LaPierre’s “thoughts” on the slippery
slopejagged cliff of gun control:Glenn Beck thinks a civil war is coming. He warns his base not to form anti-government compounds and then states that Waco and Ruby Ridge were primary there fault of the government.
So we’ve now entered the “I’m warning you all not to do this! *even though you would be justified*”-phase of the far-right’s rhetorical push towards a violent insurrection.
Ummmm...this is a bad idea.
If you thought this was scary, you probably don’t want to read the ‘update’ here. Let’s just say that the use of code words is starting to become optional.
signs of the times.
Given the focus of the GOP leadership’s 2009 inaugural night meeting, you have to wonder what the theme was this year. Hmmm...
It’s kind of fascinating how the NRA has adopted a strategy of saying you can’t trust the White House’s gun control proposals because Obama secretly wants to take your guns away. It is this lack of ‘trust’ that caused the NRA to reverse their long-standing advocacy of universal background checks, fearing that it will become a gun-owner database that will allow for future gun confiscations. But, Wayne LaPierre recently reminded us, the NRA would support a universal background check system as long as it includes a weakening of mental health privacy laws so we can create a federal registry of the mentally ill. He also seems to want to police the ability to pick up people off the street they deem to be mentally ill and forcibly institutionalized and some sort of massive sweep of the inner cities by federal agents to round up and jail anyone thought to be a gang member. Yep, the NRA won’t trust the federal government with the powers associated with the creation of a national gun-owner database unless that power also comes with the dramatically enhanced federal abilities to track the official mental health status of citizens and enhanced police powers to forcibly commit people and preemptively jail those thought to be part of a criminal gang. Yep, those are the solutions he’s peddling to an audience that is increasingly concerned about an oppressive federal government:
Now, the issue of how to handle a failing mental health system and topics like forcible institutionalization are genuinely difficult topics that need to be addressed. Not that fixing problems with the mental health system will actually do much to prevent gun violence but they should still be dealt with just in principle. But you have to wonder about the mental health status of NRA supporters that are super paranoid about being put on a gun registry because they fear the federal government is secretly plotting to confiscate their guns (and then impose some sort of Kenyan Muslim Socialist communist dictatorship) unless this same feared federal government as enhanced abilities to declare you insane and forcibly institutionalize you. You also have to wonder if Wayne LaPierre meant to include all the gangs out there or just the inner city ones.
According to unnamed sources (so don’t be too surprised if this turns out to be inaccurate), the Newtown shooter was obsessed with far-right Olso killer Anders Breivik:
It’s unclear just whether or not the shooter was obsessed with simply “out scoring” Breivik with the number of deaths or if it included an obsession with Breivik’s far-right politics. He’s been described as “politically conservative” by family and friends and the “prepper” movement certainly has its share of far-right members but up until this report there didn’t appear to be anything that strongly suggested he was a Breivik-league far-right nutjob. Note that, at the end of the report there’s statement by the investigation’s spokesperson Paul Vance that the investigation into the motive is ongoing and any statements about intent are speculative. So who knows at this point how strong the Breivik-obsession evidence really is but it sure sounds like the investigators found quite a bit of Breivik-related content.
@Pterrafractyl–
Good find! It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Best,
Dave Emory
@Dave: It looks like the investigators are continuing to downplay the Breivik theory so it’s really unclear how accurate it is. Paul Vance even described the report as ‘hideous’. It also sounds like there’s been some limited success in extracting info from one of the computer hard drives leading to subpoenas for computers of individuals in contact with him through online gaming. In addition, the shooter’s mom had recently met a new boyfriend and the guy would sometimes stay at the house, so there could be an eyewitness to the home life that’s been missing up to this point but there’s almost no info on this individual. So there are some significant new developments but nothing confirmed :
@ PTERRAFRACTYL
It remains to be seen if these reports are true, but there is the definite opportunity for Nazi fellow travelers to recruit susceptible individuals through these web connected ‘point and shoot’ video games. Not just the simulated killing, but the ever more expanding and ever more intricate virtual universes begin to displace the real world. Add to that the connectivity of these games which provide great recruitment potential, and you’ve got niche sector for Nazi networking and mobilization.
A good fictionalization of this potential is a subplot in the novel Daemon by Daniel Suarez.
@Grumpus: I suspect the reports on Breivik came from someone working in the FBI given that the leak/speculation from “law enforcement officials” happened after investigators headed to DC to brief unidentified authorities. Plus and the investigators appear to be rather livid over the whole thing. And who knows how to interpret it if it really was the FBI involved in the leak. The evidence given by the sources appeared to be based on the presence of some news clippings about Breivik at the shooter’s home so it sounds like investigators probably weren’t exaggerating when they characterized the report as “speculative”.
And in the spirit of speculation, and regarding the possibility of using online gaming for far-right recruitment, you have to wonder just how much information is potentially available on an individual if the only information you have about them is their IP address (which might be provided in the game). And you have lot’s of money. With online marketing technologies, laws, and the sheer volume of already-collected data getting to the point where entire browsing profiles associated with an IP can be sold to anyone willing to pay and with minimal regulations it’s not inconceivable that we’ll have a future (or present) where someone could potentially buy a reasonably accurate mini-psychological profile of you just by matching your IP address with the collection of digital marketing profiles held by a growing number of private companies. And if indirect profiling of our activities ever gets too predictive — good enough to predict “this person might be ideologically driven to be capable of violence and/or just kind of nuts and manipulable” — not only will society be faced with another temptation to engage in “precog” surveillance of itself, but it will become that much easier for groups to find and recruit vulnerable psyches. Double ugh.
Just FYI, Obama is raising a private black army and he’s coming for you and everything you hold dear:
A new round of media updates from anonymous sources “close to the investigation” has been hitting the news. It looks like the shooter had been collecting information on all sorts of mass murderers, not just Anders Breivik. It also sounds like the 2nd hard drive could take 6 months to 2 years to recover, so we can probably forget about any of that drive’s info getting used for the eventual final report. They also have had some success tracking his past movements using cell phone data and found that he made a number of trips to a mall in April and May that are characterized as atypical for someone that never leaves the house (which has led to speculation that he may have been casing the mall for an attack). More drip drip drip from anonymous sources:
Also note that the courts sealed the search warrants and police records, so anonymous sources might be the only sources for a lot of the details of this case for the foreseeable future:
There was a recent article in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post about a 7‑foot-by-4-foot “spreadsheet” of past mass killers found in the Newtown shooter’s possession as well as conclusions by the CT police that he had spent years planning this attack . The anonymous law enforcement source also strongly implies that investigators think that the shooter was employing some sort of “violent video gamer” rational in his actions. As this article from The Atlantic points out, it’s one of those news reports that makes it pretty clear that young avid video game players are going to be increasingly portrayed as “mass shooters waiting to happen and in need of mental health interventions” within the NRA/GOP-oriented wing of the US political spectrum in coming years:
The role that violent video could might play in triggering violent actions in that tiny subset of the truly mentally vulnerable is going to one of those issues that really never goes away, especially as gaming technology becomes more advanced and immersive. It’s an emerging technology that’s going to become even more immersive over time (imagine when graphics become indistinguishable from the real world) so we should expect this debate to eventually morph into a larger debate over what impact virtual reality-like technologies might have on human psyches in the future. It’s sort of like a predecessor to the upcoming transhumanism debates that future technologies are likely to unleash and like the current debate over video games and violence, we should probably expect future debates over immersive technologies, mental health, and violence to be filled with similar kinds of mindless and damaging rhetoric like we see coming from that NY Post article and folks like LaPierre. The debate over the potent for violence emerging from video games is also somewhat analogous the debates surrounding the Drug War and whether or not illegal drug use will lead to violent crimes and the general downfall of civilization.
If history is our guide, Americans should probably expect a protracted, decades-long period where the government continues to blunder though one public policy failure over another while never really doing anything meaningful to reduce gun violence and generating enormous profits for powerful industries. It’s one of those things the US excels at. History may be a pretty accurate guide, but it’s usually doesn’t take you where you want to go.
Today’s violent video games clearly aren’t a large risk for the vast majority of “gamers” because the US would have already descended into some sort of Mad Max hellscape by now given the number of gamers already playing them. But the question of whether or not video games now, or in the future, truly do pose a real risk for a tiny number of mentally vulnerable individuals isn’t going away because, like any technology, questions of its impact on society are sort of ever-present. Any robust civilization needs to be self-aware, to some extent, and that involves trying to understand how what we do and what we build impacts ourselves and others. It’s one of the many reason’s humanity’s apparent collective inability to critically self-examine itself is so perilous as we proceed forward. Even when we ask the right questions, humanity’s track record on providing sane answers seems to chronically involve decades or centuries of perpetual blundering until a generation comes along that say “ok, this is dumb, let’s try something else”.
Progress can happen, though, so at some point we should expect the debate over gun violence, mental health, and video games to move past its current LaPierre-ization. For instance, it’s pretty much a given at this point that the last few decades of Republican Party hysteria over a variety of social issues has seriously eroded the future of appeal of that party to Americans under the age of 30. To a large extent, the embrace of extreme social conservatism that historically was the norm (opposition to gay rights and abortion, advocacy of creationism and other forms of Biblical fundamentalism in schools, etc.) didn’t just fail at appealing to the bulk of the US youth vote, it actively pushed away a large number of potential voters that might have otherwise been receptive to the GOP’s signature form of socioeconomic-Darwinism (another area humanity seems doomed to blunder on for decades to come). We’ve finally hit that generation that said “this is dumb, let’s try something else” on a whole host of issues that played well, politically, throughout the 90’s and 00’s. Maintaining those policy positions will come at an enormous long-term costs for the GOP and this is why the GOP needs a serious “rebranding” and soon.
So you have to wonder about future attitudes towards gun control on this nation in the upcoming generations. Recent studies have suggested that a surprisingly high number of youths (high school or college aged), plan to own a gun at some point, so it might seem like a safe long-term move by the GOP to maintain an amped-up gun fetish as part of their official party “brand” going forward. But the effectiveness of that strategy over the long haul kind of depends on the real world impact that the GOP’s “brand name” policies are going to have on the lives of the next generation. We really don’t know what the kids of the future are going to think about having militarized schools, especially when they get older and learn that the reason they had to be frisked and probed and prodded growing up was so crazy Uncle Wayne could keep his powerful toys in order to more fully immerse himself in his weekend “Armed Insurrection” games. The kids might not actually appreciate that. Similiarly, it’s very unclear how young males, especially socially awkward nerdy young males that are maybe a little depressed (i.e. most teenage males), are going to enjoy being routinely “checked” by the future “mental health buddies” that the NRA desires so that robust mental health records can be recorded, shared, and mined and that future law enforcement agencies can pick out those deemed to be perhaps somewhat “at risk” for random, unprecedented violence. Sure, those deemed “at risk”, won’t be immediately sent to counseling or anything...they’ll just be quietly tracked in the mental health system and quietly observed in order to ensure they don’t exhibit any more immediate “warning signs”. And those individuals being tracked will quietly know this as it will be pretty obvious to everyone who is considered “at risk”. And, increasing, kids will know a friend that gets “flagged” and tagged as “at risk”. You have to wonder which party/social movement those future young voters will want to thank for that?
And don’t forget, guns are only one type of potentially destructive technology platform that future “deranged gamers” could conceivably use to carry out a mass killing. What about “at risk” youth/young adults that take an interest in computer programmer and security. They might be able to take down an entire power-grid. Should they be tracked too? Tracked quietly, of course, but done nonetheless...you know, just in case.
Tomorrow’s youth is the demographic that’s pretty much guaranteed to be the primary focus of any new “mental health”/video game violence screening regimes that we should expect to emerge over the next few decades. Yes, many of the mass killers of late have been older adults, but older adults that don’t currently have mental health records indicating a risk aren’t likely to be the targets of any new screening regimes. Kid’s, on the other hand, are just a much more natural cohort to keep routine records on as they develop. And the profit potential for such regimes tracking kids is just too large for our current political system to resist. The writing is on the wall with respect to the politics and policy inclinations of today’s politicians. Today’s adults can fight back politically against having their own privacy invaded in the name of public safety. Kids and teens can’t hire lobby or threaten to vote for the other party and they are an enormous potential revenue generator. Some sort of new screening of America’s youth is more or less guaranteed at this point.
History pretty much demand that we do so...otherwise how would be complete the cycle of one profitable policy blunder after another until a new generation says “ok, this is dumb, let’s try something else”? At least one generation of kids is going to have to grow up under such a system before they can vote for something different. This is how we progress. Sadly. And since these new “mental health” screening regimes with an orientation toward video game-playing socially awkward males are also likely to be part of the new NRA/GOP “brand” in the minds of today’s and tomorrow’s youth, you have to wonder if we aren’t seeing the GOP once again embrace temporarily expedient politics that will allow the party to continue appealing to a still politically-significant but shrinking older political demographic at the cost of turning the party into an even bigger youth pariah in the future. Especially if the black helicopters never arrive:
A correction: The awful article about those dangerous “gamers” discussed above was from Mort Zuckerman’s New York Daily News, not Murdoch’s New York Post.
My bad!The video games made me do it.Another correction: Remember how the original reporting said the shooter was wearing a bullet-proof vest but then investigators later said that, no, it was just a utility vest? We now have an explanation for that reporting discrepancy: It looks like the bullet-proof vest emerged from the first responder reports. There were also three classrooms initially reported attacked, but that was later revised to two. It’s a reminder that in such an extreme situation major revisions of what was encountered might take place. The vest and classroom count discrepancies are amongst the most understandable instances of misreporting that’s taken place in this entire tragedy. Everyone responding to it would be immediately traumatized.
Less understandable is how the vast majority of the news articles in the last week covering the March 28 release of documents by State’s Attorney Stephen J. Sedensky (warrants, etc.) and all reported that the shooter had a bullet-proof vest. The newly released documents said it was a bullet-proof vest but they were also the newly released initial first responder reports. This is a minor detail but one worth clarifying because it was rather confusing how it was suddenly reported again in the last week that the shooter was wearing a bullet-proof vest. It was also a fun mass amnesia moment.
So anyways, it was a utility-vest:
Here’s that Feb. 18, 2008, New York TImes article about the Northern Illinois University (NIU) shooter. The 2008 Northern Illinois University shooter, Steve Kazmierczek, was originally portrayed as a shy loner but it later came out that he he had been institutionalized in high-school for his obsession with white-power and Satanism. As an adult grad student he apparently had an obsession with gruesome horror movies (as was James Holmes) and was covered with tattoos of the Saw Movie guy and other things of that nature. That all came out much later. There were those reports about the classmate that said the Newtown shooter had a website dedicated to Satan. I don’t think those reports were ever confirmed, but given that the Newtown shooter had a real fascination with the 2008 NIU shooter and Brievik (who was also a far-right nut-job) and the “prepper” background, it will be interesting to see if any interest in far-right ideologies emerge in the Newtown shooter’s background in the final report that’s supposed to be out some time this summer.
It seems Congress is discovering that creating a national database of those deemed to be “too crazy” to own a gun is a horrifically complex issue because it inevitably involves “drawing a line” on what is a legally acceptable state of mind. That can be a suprisling soul-wrenching topic. It’s also a topic that’s likely to remind us that are some phenomena that are harder to find the harder you look:
It’s worth noting, in the NRA’s defense, that they did warn us all about a new danger that might arise if and when the US Federal government implements the much more “inclusive” list of people with any sort of mental “issues” into a single national database: Hackers. A robustly populated single national database of that nature could be quite a tempting target. And just last month the NRA warned us all about this hacking possibility...in their own special way.
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Oh dear. It’s not a good sign when the organizer of the national conference set up to discuss these issues wants us to expand the search for the “too crazy to own a gun” category beyond the mental health realm and into the areas of alcohol and substance abuse. Because why set up laws that reduce people’s incentives to get mental health treatment alone when you can also reduce the incentives to get drug and alcohol treatment? We could just legalize drugs, treat it as a health issue, and watch drug-war-related gun-crimes plummet while making it far more likely for someone to seek treatment, but that would be too sane an approach to reducing gun-violence. Instead, we have serious consideration of the NRA’s “armed guards in schools (and eventually other public spaces)”-solution.
We could also, you know, remind ourselves that one of the best tools we could possibly imagine for preventing “mental illness” is not something specifically directed at mental health at all. That amazing “anti-crazy” tool at our disposal happens to be the “robust socioeconomic safety-net functioning in a society that lacks the grotesque socioeconomic inequality we see in the US today”-tool. Three decades of stagnant wages and increasingly strained social services can create the kinds of unrelenting chronic stresses that can turn an otherwise sane individual into someone that just might “too crazy to own a gun”. Odds are decades of chronic, worsening stress will just make someone really really unhappy and the vast vast majority of people that endure the chronic stresses created by our stupid economy do not become prone towards violence. But if we’re really serious about preventing people without a history of mental health issues from “snapping” and going on a shooting spree, it should be widely acknowledged that stress is generally harmful for humans and the US culture encourages chronic stress, chronic stresses make people unhappy, and being chronically unhappy appears to be one of the near-universal experiences that these spree-killers tend to have. There are indeed some people that are born with a strong genetic predisposition that makes them very likely to develop a serious mental illness but we have to keep in mind that quite a few cases of mental illness are circumstantial. When you have an absurd economy rooted in a “race to the bottom”/“drug war” cruelty you should expect above-baseline levels of insanity to emerge.
That’s all part of why our national efforts to draw a legal line specifying who is “too crazy to own a gun” is so fraught with peril: creating more stress, especially financial stress, is a core part of the Ayn Randian ideology that dominates DC’s id. The general “mental health” strategy that is likeliest to work — one where we don’t target “the mentally ill” but just try to make like better for everyone in general — is antithetical to the DC mentality. If the proles aren’t living a life filled with chronic physical and financial stresses then society will become weak and mentally feeble (plus, the proles might have time to organize). You have to be kind of crazy in the first place to make the Sword of Damacles of Bankruptcy your national muse so none of this should be particularly surprising. But it’s still depressing.
There’s some new details out on the proposed new “mental health” program for schools. It appears to focus on training teachers on how to identify early warning signs of mental illness in kids. The fellow that chaired the DSM-IV has some thought on the proposed mental health screening system for kids. He doesn’t seem to think it sounds like a healthy approach:
So it sounds like the existing evidence suggests this new screening system won’t actually catch any future spree-killers (or help with mental health issues in general) but it will lead to an even more dramatic increase in the rates of medicating the kids. Plus, now we have a whole new category of society’s problems to blame on teachers. Nice.
Gun ‘R’ US:
According to a recent poll, 29% of registered US voters think an armed rebellion might be necessary in the US in the next five years:
Now where are they getting these ‘Government takeover’ ideas?:
Well isn’t that special: The NRA just chose a new president/culture warrior to replace David Keene at its annual conference in Houston. Meet Jim Porter:
In a tangentially-related story, there was an apparent “suicide by cop” incident at the Bush International Airport in Houston yesterday when a man pulled out an AR-15 and fired two shots into the ceiling. The cause is unclear
although mental-health issues appear to be a factorbut Glenn thinks it might be an Obama-orchestrated Reichstag fire.