From the last Morning Jolt of the week:
Is Yesterday’s Awful Shooting Really Such a Mystery?
“This is something we should politicize!” — President Obama, speaking to the press, yesterday afternoon. Can you summarize his presidency in just six words any better?
This seems like an odd contradiction, perhaps to the point of being deliberately obtuse:
Umpqua Community College is now a crime scene and will remain closed until Monday after a gunman opened fire Thursday, killing nine people and critically wounding seven others. The gunman also died during a shootout with police.
Survivors and their families say the killer asked people if they were Christians, but investigators have yet to determine the shooter’s motive, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone.
Maybe it’s too early to definitively conclude the killer’s sole motivation was animosity to Christians, but . . . doesn’t it seem pretty clear it’s in the mix?
The gunman, while reloading his handgun, ordered the students to stand up and asked if they were Christians, Boylan told her family.
“And they would stand up and he said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,’” Boylan’s father, Stacy, told CNN, relaying her account.
“And then he shot and killed them.”
Now, last night I found a MySpace page for a person with has the same name as the one released by authorities, and who posted lots of pictures of the Irish Republican Army, boasting that they had never been defeated. Only two friends or connections were listed; one was a girl who posted a picture of Hannibal Lecter and the anarchy symbol, and a guy who posted jihadist pictures.
No one’s mentioned the shooter asking the particular Christian denomination of his victims, so it seems the shooter’s admiration for the IRA was mostly for their violence, not any particular attachment to Ireland or the (disputed) Catholic identity of the group. (I say disputed because Church leaders insist“what they were doing was a perversion of everything the Church stood for.”)
He reportedly wrote, in response to the Virginia shooting a few months ago:
On an interesting note, I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.
Last night, there was disputed debate about whether the shooter was someone who posted on a 4chan discussion board: “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you’re in the Northwest.” Apparently those kinds of messages are unbelievably common there. It’s a horrible discussion board. You don’t want to spend much time there, unless you want to marinate in rage, misanthropy, and home-grown, glowing-screen cultivated evil. As the Daily Mail dryly summarizes it, “many users encouraged the person to go ahead with their threat and even advised the poster on the best ways to kill people.”
Notice that these killers no longer merely target the bully who teased them, the professor who gave them a bad grade, or the girl who wouldn’t go out with them. It’s a free-floating rage at everyone around them.
This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if I’m the First Amendment absolutist I think I am. If that chat board got taken down tomorrow, and all subsequent ones were hacked or taken down, would the world be a better place or a worse place? Some will argue the forums are an outlet for this rage of young men. I can’t help but wonder if it releases that rage or cultivates it.
Is there a constitutional objection to the FBI being able to track the IPs and identities of users on a forum like this without a warrant? Someone asked whether somebody saying, “I’m gonna shoot up my school” represents probable cause and authorities could get a warrant for that information pretty easily. The problem is, once somebody types something like that, how much time do authorities have to intervene?