Text is a tweet by @/commukniss (Housing 4 All is Hot) reading:
95% of American mass shooters: “I am a nazi and I do this because I want to ethnically cleansed the world. Here is my manifesto where I detail all of my nazi beliefs.”
The media: The mentally ill lone wolf had a rough life. No one wanted to be his friend.
Not-identifying-as-Nazi-but-promoting-fascist-propaganda-news-commentator: Maybe it’s a false flag operation funded by [wealthy Jew]?
Media: I guess we’ll never know~~~
‘Something, something Soros’
Okay, I get where you’re going with this, but…
This is just the headlines that popped up on my iPhone - from a wide range of media sources - and a couple of the top headlines from a Google search.
The press is not your enemy, the media is not your enemy, journalists are not your enemy. You know who is your enemy? The people calling those “fake news”. The people saying journalists are all biased against [political party] and you shouldn’t listen to them, ONLY get your news from social media, the people you follow on Twitter and Facebook are more informed and trustworthy than the fake news lamestream media!
Note, in case someone was considering commenting on “police say” and “officials say” - that doesn’t mean “some dude said this, but there’s no way to really know…”
It’s citing sources. It means “unlike some people, we aren’t pulling this out of our asses. This is our authoritative source, so you can’t argue with our facts. Unless you believe we’re lying start to finish, you can’t say we’re just biased against [in this case, far-right-ers] and making stuff up.” Without sources, you’re just writing an opinion piece. And that is how you get FOX-style ‘fake news’.
@constructedparadox So I was skimming through the live updates on Wall Street Journal, because I did remember they had a headline about the mental health evaluation. Here are two of the headlines that my phone got from them:
Ah, yes, one does mention the mental health evaluation! Okay, let’s click on that.
It’s the live updates, interesting. It is very VERY long, there are like thirty full articles in here. Let’s skim them and find that mention of the mental health evaluation that the headline alludes to.
Here are some selections. Alongside a lot of other stuff about 4chan, a lot of stuff about the victims, a lot of stuff about how he discussed his plans with others and got advice on what weapons and armor to get, a full article about him streaming this on Twitch and the failure of efforts to restrict racist extremist groups on Twitch.
You may notice nothing about the mental health evaluation. That’s because I literally didn’t see it on my first scroll-through. I went back and finally found it:
That’s it. That’s the only mention I can find, in what’s probably 50 plus pages of text, is that he was evaluated for a threat. The point of mentioning it in their article was that it was known by police that he had previously made a threat and should not have been allowed to purchase heavy weaponry.
But yes! It is mentioned in a headline. …followed by a headline about “descent into racist extremism”. Which is entirely about. The groups. Of Racist extremists. As is 85% of the thing with the other headline, the other 14.9% being about the victims.
This is my town. A friend of mine worked at this Tops stocking shelves for years. He used to live in this neighborhood, he only recently moved. Another one of my best friends lives just two blocks from Jefferson.
Is there anything to say? I don’t know what else to say. Buffalo is the City of Good Neighbors. No matter where you are, you can find a jump for your car, someone to help you carry your groceries, an extra set of hands to shovel your driveway. We’re not perfect, but we are kind. This is such a violation.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for links and reputable sources to help the families of the victims, and to help support the Buffalo black community. I’ll post them here.
The Miami Herald reports that Nikolas Cruz harassed a girl who lived near his workplace, obsessively texting and calling her non-stop in the weeks leading up to the February 14 shooting.
This girl was referenced in a video Cruz made on his phone right before the shooting. BSO released the video in May.
“My love for you, [redacted], will never go away,” Cruz said, topping off a droning speech about his loneliness, isolation, and anger. “I hope to see you in the afterlife.”
Cruz stored her as “Warning Love of Your Life” in his phone’s contacts. While the girl texted with Cruz, she never dated him and did not reciprocate those feelings, reporting that she was afraid of him.
As he was waiting to be taken to jail, a local reporter asked Willie Cory Godbolt why he did it. Why did he kill all those people?
“Because I love my wife and I love my children,” he replied matter-of-factly.
Of course, it wasn’t about love at all. Cory had just been arrested for committing a massacre. He was accused of slaughtering eight people: his wife’s mother, her older sister and her aunt, her cousin and her cousin’s husband, her pastor’s grandson and another young boy, as well as the officer who responded to the 911 call.
Why did Cory say it was love that led him to kill so many? Only one person understood.
“He didn’t want nobody else around us,” Cory’s wife, Sheena Godbolt, said sitting on her sister’s couch one scorching hot afternoon in July, almost two months after the shooting.
“He wanted me there with him, with no friends or family members, nothing,” she said. She shifted in her seat, drew a deep breath, shook her head. “That’s not love.”
[photo id: a series of tweets from writer patrick blanchfield. the first is a tweet from 8/3/19 and it reads, “America decided killing children was bearable before America was America”
in a series of tweets from 5/24/22 beginning with a quotetweet of that tweet, patrick adds,
“please don’t do the america decided etc after the Sandy Hook meme / you wouldn’t even need to drive two hours from Uvalde in any direction, but particularly south, to find multiple sites where some combination of rangers, posses, or US military forces not only decided killing children was OK but advantageous and got praised and rewarded for it / and for that matter some things did change, in some ways, after Sandy Hook. all to say: however understandable the bleak despair of the sentiment it masks a jaded nihilism and betrays logics of innocence, identification and disposability that are a core part of the problem itself”]
Major policy issues like gun control often require massive social and institutional changes, but many of these issues also have underlying cultural assumptions that make the status quo seem normal. By following smaller changes in the way people think about issues, we can see gradual adjustments in our culture that ultimately make the big changes more plausible.
For example, today’s gun debate even drills down to the little cartoons on your phone. There’s a whole process for proposing and reviewing new emoji, but different platforms have their own control over how they design the cartoons in coordination with the formal standards. Last week, Twitter pointed me to a recent report from Emojipedia about platform updates to the contested “pistol” emoji, moving from a cartoon revolver to a water pistol:
Inan update to the original post, all major vendors have committed to this design change for “cross-platform compatibility.”
There are a couple ways to look at this change from a sociological angle. You could tell a story about change from the bottom-up, through social movements like the March For Our Lives, calling for gun reform in the wake of mass shootings. These movements are drawing attention to the way guns permeate American culture, and their public visibility makes smaller choices about the representation of guns more contentious. Apple didn’t comment directly on the intentions behind the redesign when it came out, but it has weighed in on the politics of emoji design in the past.
You could also tell a story about change from the top-down, where large tech companies have looked to copy Apple’s innovation for consistency in a contentious and uncertain political climate (sociologists call this “institutional isomorphism”). In the diagram, you can see how Apple’s early redesign provided an alternative framework for other companies to take up later on, just like Google and Microsoft adopted the dominant pistol design in earlier years.
Either way, if you favor common sense gun reform, redesigning emojis is obviously not enough. But cases like this help us understand how larger shifts in social norms are made up of many smaller changes that challenge the status quo.
Evan Stewart is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota. You can follow him on Twitter.
History has repeated itself, police officers have stood by once again while children were being murdered in their classroom. It’s a repeat of Parkland.
“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.
Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.
Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still massed outside the building.
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”
I’m not going to talk about basketball. Nothing’s happened with our team in the last six hours. We’re going to start the same way tonight. Any basketball questions don’t matter. Since we left shootaround, 14 children were killed 400 miles from here. And a teacher. In the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California. Now we have children murdered at school. When are we going to do something? I’m tired. I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there. I’m so tired. Excuse me. I’m sorry. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough! There’s 50 senators right now who refuse to vote on HR8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago. It’s been sitting there for two years. And there’s a reason they won’t vote on it: to hold onto power. So I ask you, Mitch McConnell, I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings and supermarket shootings. I ask you: Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers? Because that’s what it looks like. It’s what we do every week. So I’m fed up. I’ve had enough. We’re going to play the game tonight. But I want every person here, every person listening to this, to think about your own child or grandchild, or mother or father, sister, brother. How would you feel if this happened to you today? We can’t get numb to this. We can’t sit here and just read about it and go, well, let’s have a moment of silence – yea, Go Dubs. C'mon, Mavs, let’s go. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go play a basketball game. Fifty senators in Washington are going to hold us hostage. Do you realize that 90 percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want background checks – universal background checks? Ninety percent of us. We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote, despite what we, the American people, want. They won’t vote on it because they want to hold onto their own power. It’s pathetic! I’ve had enough!
There’s no 24-hour news coverage for this story. There’s no tearful press conference. There’s no memorial full of flowers and stuffed animals. There’s no outrage.
Because this time, a good woman with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun, and no one else was hurt.
I am so glad that woman had her pistol. She did exactly the right thing - she shot the guy before he could hurt anyone.
You won’t see these stories, because there really isn’t much of a story. Only one person died, and it was the bad guy. Move on, go about your day.
The media will convince you that America has a “gun violence problem,” despite the U.S. being NUMBER ELEVEN for deaths per capita from mass public shootings out of just Europe, U.S., and Canada.
Yet stories like this one happen every day, as many as 1.67 million times in 2021 (in fact, that averages to 4,575 per day), where a gun owner defends themselves or their family using their firearm against a would-be attacker.
It is FAR more common for a responsible gun owner to defend themselves against an attacker than for a crazy person to commit a mass public shooting.
So I saw a pretty incredible thread on Twitter regarding the fucking disaster at Uvalde. I rec folks go have a look, because it reminded me of a MUCH LESS severe incident in my own career… but the overall sentiment remains the same: If you aren’t prepared to put your life on the line, take the fucking badge off and go home.
So we got a call one night for a teen who had attempted suicide. He’d downed an entire bottle of NyQuill, and then tried to cut his wrists. When we arrived, there was a cop waiting for us, because the call came in with the magic words, “subject has a knife”, which meant that the cop had to “make the scene safe for us to enter”. Thing is, call ALSO came in as “subject is unconscious and unresponsive”, so none of us were the least bit worried about the “knife”. We’d evaluate when we could see what was going on.
What was going on was there was a kid, mid-teens, passed the fuck out in an overstuffed chair in the basement. Did not respond to us calling for him, and his “friends” nearby were playing video games and waving in his direction, “he’s over there.” (Some friends)
Oh, and he had a BUTTER KNIFE held loosely in one UNCONSCIOUS hand. It was even a very obviously DULL BUTTERKNIFE, and the wrist that he had tried to cut with it didn’t even have a mark.
But the cop… oh the fucking cop was having an absolute CONNIPTION. “He’s got a knife! Stay back! He’s armed!” And this guy had his gun out and was freaking out that this unconscious kid had a dull butterknife that didn’t even have a POINT in his hand. Weapon drawn, demanding that we “clear the scene” until he can “secure it” because the “subject was armed”.
So my Captain that night was this like seven foot tall, three hundred pound linebacker of a guy who also moonlighted as an ER nurse and general Brute Squad. He calmly stared at the cop, before taking off his bunker coat, shoving past the panicking officer, and tossing the coat over the unconscious kid from a couple feet away. “Scene’s secure. You can go now.”
Oh the cop just lost his SHIT at that point, and said that he would report my Cap for “breaking SOPs” (standard operating procedures) and some other shit, but we just ignored him and got to work on this kid, who, even if he woke up right then, he’d have to get through three layers of nomex, canvas, and leather to get to us with that butterknife. The knife that my Cap then casually removed from his hand and handed off to the irate cop.
We treated the kid, finally got him to wake up, got him started on meds and O2 and passed off to the ambulance to take in to the hospital, and went back to quarters. And, sure nuff, the next shift, my Cap was called downtown to get “talked to” by one of the Chiefs. The cop had filed a complaint, and, while everyone on the FD side knew that my Cap had done exactly the right thing - the cop drew his weapon on an unconscious child, FFS - they “had” to “talk to him about the SOPs”.
So, here’s the thing. I’ve mentioned it before but we are trained to “Risk a lot to save a lot”. We don’t throw our lives away for property, but we’ll risk our lives for someone else’s life. THAT IS THE FUCKING JOB. That’s the POINT. That’s the WHOLE REASON WE DO THIS SHIT. When we get to pin on that shiny badge and hop in the driver’s seat of the Big Red Truck, it is with the understanding that we are willing to lay down our life for someone else. If that’s too scary?
TAKE OFF THE BADGE AND GO THE FUCK HOME.
If we NEVER EVER put our lives at risk, we would never walk into a burning building. We’d never work a car wreck on an open highway. We’d never treat ANY patients - after all, we don’t know their disease status! So we put on the uniform, pin on the badge, and UNDERSTAND that we are doing so because we are willing to make that sacrifice, to take that risk, when appropriate.
The closest I have ever come to an armed standoff was when we had a drunk guy use his 357 Magnum as a chili spoon, so, yeah, I’ve never actually had to deal with a Uvalde… but we ALL got the training on how and what to do. I wasn’t allowed to carry a gun while on duty… but that never stopped me from putting myself between immanent danger and the people we were sent to help. (And yes, I did get my ass kicked once or twice by bystanders/family, so that’s not hyperbole, thanks)
And those fucking COWARDS in Uvalde STOOD OUTSIDE AND LISTENED TO KIDS GETTING KILLED, rather than risk themselves and go in to stop the shooter. They ARRESTED PARENTS for begging to be allowed to risk their OWN lives to go in.
Because that was the “SOP”. Because they have been trained to think “your life first, THEN your partner’s, THEN the public.” Because “how can you help anyone when you become a victim, too?”
SOPs which are being applied UNIVERSALLY and WITHOUT DUE CONSIDERATION TO THE ACTUAL SITUATION AT HAND.
SOPs which are being treated as a cookie cutter answer to everything and all situations.
SOPs which have trained these cowards to NEVER THINK FOR THEMSELVES.
And kids died.
Who knows if they would have been able to save any of the kids that died if they had been willing to FUCKING THINK and FULFILL THE OATH THEY MADE WHEN THEY PINNED ON THE BADGE. But that bastard was left alone in that school for nearly an HOUR to keep killing as he saw fit. And even better, when the cops finally DID make entry, they yelled for any kids to call for help if they needed it… and one girl, who was alive and hidden, answered him…
And the shooter promptly found her and killed her. Because of SOPs and an inability to fucking THINK.
Inappropriately applied SOPs at that, as I know that *I* was trained that you don’t ask people to out themselves during an active incident, until the shooter is either contained, eliminated, or OUT OF THE AREA.
They refused to go in for an HOUR. Because it wasn’t “safe”. NO SHIT IT WASN’T SAFE! KIDS WERE DYING!
But it wasn’t safe enough for THEM, so they waited for people with bigger guns and body armor to show up, and listened to the gunshots and to kids DYING for an hour… Because they all forgot their oath. They forgot, or ignored, the promise they made when they pinned that badge on -
Risk a lot to save a lot.
If you aren’t prepared to pay the price? To take the risks for other people? Then go. the fuck. home. Because doing exactly that?
Is your JOB.*
OH MY FUCKING GODS. So it got even WORSE!
They didn’t wait outside for an hour to wait for folks with bigger guns and body armor and shit to arrive… A TCTICAL ASSAULT TEAM FROM BORDER PATROL WAS THERE RIGHT AWAY! (and that is a whoooole other ball of wax… tactical asault teams and border patrol and ICE and all sorts of bullshit…)
THE COPS REFUSED TO ALLOW THE ASSAULT TEAM ENTRY TO CONFRONT AND CONTAIN THE SHOOTER FOR AN HOUR!
They weren’t “waiting for the right people” to arrive… the “right people” were there already! OMFG, the RAGE I have right now.
So I saw a pretty incredible thread on Twitter regarding the fucking disaster at Uvalde. I rec folks go have a look, because it reminded me of a MUCH LESS severe incident in my own career… but the overall sentiment remains the same: If you aren’t prepared to put your life on the line, take the fucking badge off and go home.
So we got a call one night for a teen who had attempted suicide. He’d downed an entire bottle of NyQuill, and then tried to cut his wrists. When we arrived, there was a cop waiting for us, because the call came in with the magic words, “subject has a knife”, which meant that the cop had to “make the scene safe for us to enter”. Thing is, call ALSO came in as “subject is unconscious and unresponsive”, so none of us were the least bit worried about the “knife”. We’d evaluate when we could see what was going on.
What was going on was there was a kid, mid-teens, passed the fuck out in an overstuffed chair in the basement. Did not respond to us calling for him, and his “friends” nearby were playing video games and waving in his direction, “he’s over there.” (Some friends)
Oh, and he had a BUTTER KNIFE held loosely in one UNCONSCIOUS hand. It was even a very obviously DULL BUTTERKNIFE, and the wrist that he had tried to cut with it didn’t even have a mark.
But the cop… oh the fucking cop was having an absolute CONNIPTION. “He’s got a knife! Stay back! He’s armed!” And this guy had his gun out and was freaking out that this unconscious kid had a dull butterknife that didn’t even have a POINT in his hand. Weapon drawn, demanding that we “clear the scene” until he can “secure it” because the “subject was armed”.
So my Captain that night was this like seven foot tall, three hundred pound linebacker of a guy who also moonlighted as an ER nurse and general Brute Squad. He calmly stared at the cop, before taking off his bunker coat, shoving past the panicking officer, and tossing the coat over the unconscious kid from a couple feet away. “Scene’s secure. You can go now.”
Oh the cop just lost his SHIT at that point, and said that he would report my Cap for “breaking SOPs” (standard operating procedures) and some other shit, but we just ignored him and got to work on this kid, who, even if he woke up right then, he’d have to get through three layers of nomex, canvas, and leather to get to us with that butterknife. The knife that my Cap then casually removed from his hand and handed off to the irate cop.
We treated the kid, finally got him to wake up, got him started on meds and O2 and passed off to the ambulance to take in to the hospital, and went back to quarters. And, sure nuff, the next shift, my Cap was called downtown to get “talked to” by one of the Chiefs. The cop had filed a complaint, and, while everyone on the FD side knew that my Cap had done exactly the right thing - the cop drew his weapon on an unconscious child, FFS - they “had” to “talk to him about the SOPs”.
So, here’s the thing. I’ve mentioned it before but we are trained to “Risk a lot to save a lot”. We don’t throw our lives away for property, but we’ll risk our lives for someone else’s life. THAT IS THE FUCKING JOB. That’s the POINT. That’s the WHOLE REASON WE DO THIS SHIT. When we get to pin on that shiny badge and hop in the driver’s seat of the Big Red Truck, it is with the understanding that we are willing to lay down our life for someone else. If that’s too scary?
TAKE OFF THE BADGE AND GO THE FUCK HOME.
If we NEVER EVER put our lives at risk, we would never walk into a burning building. We’d never work a car wreck on an open highway. We’d never treat ANY patients - after all, we don’t know their disease status! So we put on the uniform, pin on the badge, and UNDERSTAND that we are doing so because we are willing to make that sacrifice, to take that risk, when appropriate.
The closest I have ever come to an armed standoff was when we had a drunk guy use his 357 Magnum as a chili spoon, so, yeah, I’ve never actually had to deal with a Uvalde… but we ALL got the training on how and what to do. I wasn’t allowed to carry a gun while on duty… but that never stopped me from putting myself between immanent danger and the people we were sent to help. (And yes, I did get my ass kicked once or twice by bystanders/family, so that’s not hyperbole, thanks)
And those fucking COWARDS in Uvalde STOOD OUTSIDE AND LISTENED TO KIDS GETTING KILLED, rather than risk themselves and go in to stop the shooter. They ARRESTED PARENTS for begging to be allowed to risk their OWN lives to go in.
Because that was the “SOP”. Because they have been trained to think “your life first, THEN your partner’s, THEN the public.” Because “how can you help anyone when you become a victim, too?”
SOPs which are being applied UNIVERSALLY and WITHOUT DUE CONSIDERATION TO THE ACTUAL SITUATION AT HAND.
SOPs which are being treated as a cookie cutter answer to everything and all situations.
SOPs which have trained these cowards to NEVER THINK FOR THEMSELVES.
And kids died.
Who knows if they would have been able to save any of the kids that died if they had been willing to FUCKING THINK and FULFILL THE OATH THEY MADE WHEN THEY PINNED ON THE BADGE. But that bastard was left alone in that school for nearly an HOUR to keep killing as he saw fit. And even better, when the cops finally DID make entry, they yelled for any kids to call for help if they needed it… and one girl, who was alive and hidden, answered him…
And the shooter promptly found her and killed her. Because of SOPs and an inability to fucking THINK.
Inappropriately applied SOPs at that, as I know that *I* was trained that you don’t ask people to out themselves during an active incident, until the shooter is either contained, eliminated, or OUT OF THE AREA.
They refused to go in for an HOUR. Because it wasn’t “safe”. NO SHIT IT WASN’T SAFE! KIDS WERE DYING!
But it wasn’t safe enough for THEM, so they waited for people with bigger guns and body armor to show up, and listened to the gunshots and to kids DYING for an hour… Because they all forgot their oath. They forgot, or ignored, the promise they made when they pinned that badge on -
Risk a lot to save a lot.
If you aren’t prepared to pay the price? To take the risks for other people? Then go. the fuck. home. Because doing exactly that?
Another massacre of innocent young lives in the country that has a hard-on for guns. Yeah america cares more about guns than it does about the lives of children.
Paul has since deleted this tweet. But since he does not care that he probably just ruined a transgender person’s life, of course he’s made no public apology. Well, not last I checked.
Also the 4chan person that pushed it literally said he knew that person had no involvement in it but wanted to get them bullied and hopefully lead to them committing suicide.
These are the people that republicans push conspiracy theories from.
[Image ID: a screenshot of a tweet (from May 24, 2022) from user oneunderscore_ reading “This false “shooter was trans" rumor going around the far-right is from a 4chan thread that links to a completely uninvolved person on Reddit who is still alive, doesn’t live in Texas, and obviously had nothing to do with the shooting.” With the tweet is a screenshot of a tweet from user DrPaulGosar, which reads “We know already fool. It’s a transsexual alien named Salvatore Ramos. It’s apparently your kind of trash.” DrPaulGosar is himself quote tweeting a deleted tweet. End ID]
Paul has since deleted this tweet. But since he does not care that he probably just ruined a transgender person’s life, of course he’s made no public apology. Well, not last I checked.
Also the 4chan person that pushed it literally said he knew that person had no involvement in it but wanted to get them bullied and hopefully lead to them committing suicide.
These are the people that republicans push conspiracy theories from.
[Image ID: a screenshot of a tweet (from May 24, 2022) from user oneunderscore_ reading “This false “shooter was trans" rumor going around the far-right is from a 4chan thread that links to a completely uninvolved person on Reddit who is still alive, doesn’t live in Texas, and obviously had nothing to do with the shooting.” With the tweet is a screenshot of a tweet from user DrPaulGosar, which reads “We know already fool. It’s a transsexual alien named Salvatore Ramos. It’s apparently your kind of trash.” DrPaulGosar is himself quote tweeting a deleted tweet. End ID]
