What You Write Tells Us Who You Are
If you were walking down the street and a random stranger came up to you and said “I’m going to kill you later day around 6 p.m.,” would you believe him?
If you overheard a guy talking to himself in a diner, muttering that he was going to burglarize the home of his neighbor and kill her, would you believe him?
If you read a Medium post by a random guy claiming that he was thinking about suicide but wanted to die by murdering as many people as he could for the notoriety, would you believe him?
If you believed any of these men, would you do something about it? Alert the authorities or contact someone in the mental health community? You know, in that War on Terror “If you see something, say something” model?
Mass shooters with no more motivation than a nihilistic disregard for humans and a desire for notoriety are scary. Most of us live online a bit and think very little of writing hateful rhetoric to faceless people we think are our enemies. In our need to opine about our rage and anguish, we type away on social media platforms a spew of ill-intent. When someone takes it a step further, into actual in-real-life carnage, we act shocked, as if we couldn't have possibly seen it coming.
But we very easily could have seen it coming.
The suspected shooter posted music on several major streaming platforms under the pseudonym Awake the Rapper, and he apparently made and posted music videos online featuring ominous lyrics and animated scenes of gun violence.
In one video titled "Are you Awake," a cartoon animation of a stick-figure shooter resembling the suspect's appearance is seen wearing tactical gear and carrying out an attack with a rifle. Crimo, seen with multicolored hair and face tattoos, narrates, "I need to just do it. It is my destiny."
In another video titled "Toy Soldier," a similar stick-figure resembling the suspect is depicted lying face down on the floor in a pool of his own blood, surrounded by police officers with their guns drawn.
Several of the suspect's online postings "reflected a plan and a desire to commit carnage for a long time in advance," Mayor Rotering said in an interview with NBC's Hoda Kotb on Today.
This skinny, tattooed fucker told us what he was going to do. He wrote and posted videos telling anyone listening the plan. He isn't the outlier—most mass shooters write out their intent and display it to the world well before legally purchasing a weapon and unleashing their fury on bystanders.
So why didn't anyone paying attention do anything about it?
One possibility is that we want to be able to openly threaten those we disagree with, even using violent language, on social media. We want to be able to call each other horrible names, threaten to rape and burn J.K. Rowling, suggest that anyone wearing a BLM shirt be strung up, hurl insults and hopes for death at our perceived enemies. If we suddenly turn our discriminating eyes toward the violent bullshit posted by mass shooters we also have to expose our own violent bullshit.
We'd have to admit that many of us online are no different than him. In life, perhaps, but what we write online is only marginally different.
The 21-year-old purchased his weapons legally. The new federal bill would not have prevented him from buying them. Background checks were done on the kid (although taking one good look at him at the counter must have given someone pause). He had no criminal record. No record of domestic violence. There isn't a feasible gun control law that would have prevented this maniacal shithead from doing exactly what he did.
Good guys with guns? There was a whole parade of good guys with guns and the kid got 70 rounds off and split without anyone even seeing him.
The only indicators that this kid was who he became on July 4 were the things he put on the internet, screaming in our faces what he was planning to do.
While Republicans want to stop people from talking about the legacy of slavery and trans identities to third graders and Democrats want to stop people from using the words 'mother,' 'woman,' and anything remotely resembling the amorphous and malleable 'micro aggressions,' no one is bothering to pay attention to a grown man with the single most punchable face in history declaring his intention to gun down random people in a crowd.
We don't really want to take him seriously, though. Not until he actually buys the gun and shoots people. Then we can say he was mentally ill or evil. We shrug our shoulders and ask "How could we have known?" If we take him seriously then we have to take our own violent writing seriously and, of course, we don't want that.
From 1966 to 2019, 77 percent of mass shooters obtained the weapons they used in their crimes through legal purchases, according to a comprehensive survey of law enforcement data, academic papers and news accounts compiled by the National Institute of Justice, the research wing of the Justice Department.
In upstate New York a few months ago, the 18-year-old suspect in the Buffalo shooting walked into Vintage Firearms in sleepy Endicott, passed an instant background check without a glitch and bought a used Bushmaster XM-15 semiautomatic rifle, a copy of the ubiquitous AR-15 used in many other mass shootings.
The suspect, Payton Gendron, had recently been required to undergo psychological evaluation after making menacing, violent comments to high school classmates, but the episode was not enough to set off the state’s “red flag” law, which bars the mentally ill from buying weapons.
Then he went home, borrowed his father’s electric drill, and removed a restraining bolt, required by state law, that limited its capacity to a 10-round clip. That modification allowed him to load multiple 30-round magazines, making it easier for him to hunt, target and kill Black people, according to a manifesto he posted online.
Weapons legally obtained. Passed background check. Wrote about it long before they committed the act. This is the common portrait and no one is doing jackshit about it.
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Following the news that while in Vegas my third wife had effectively created an entire lifestyle apart from our marriage, I took a look at her poetry and fiction.
It turns out, she was telling me who she was and what she was doing all along. I missed it. I'd read her stories and pornographic poems and think she was just so creative. What she wrote was telling me who she was.
This is not specific to her. This is true for everyone. What you put out in the world is a reflection of who you are and what you're capable of. Me? I'm a bit of an asshole, I'm purposely antagonistic, and needlessly pompous. I've hurled insults but never threats.
When you tweet about Clarence Thomas being an 'Uncle Tom,' you tell me exactly how performative and shallow your racial allyship truly is. You fight for social justice but only for the black people you like.
When you write a Faceborg post about being 'pro-life' yet want to cut food stamps and funding to help the homeless, I know who you really are.
When you Snapchat about the dignity of trans women but openly write about Rowling being killed, you have exposed what a horrible piece of shit you happen to be.
And when you put up a YouTube video declaring your intent to slaughter random people, if I'm not a fucking idiot, I'll take you at your word.
This isn't the pre-crime of Minority Report. This is the confession before the crime. If someone tells you they will think nothing of stealing your shit, you'd believe them.
We need to start believing these angry young men and prevent them from buying guns.
