Oh, FFS · 2:18am Apr 21st, 2021
So, it came out that the asshole who committed the FedEx atrocity was a brony...
Apparently, Bronies Are Murderous Right-wing Extremist Whackjobs, Now...
I'm a forensic scientist, not a behavioral profiler, so forgive my straying outside my domain. But, as I understand it from the people whose domain it is, every mass murderer of this ilk (the term of art is, "active shooter") always obsesses about something or other; it's one of the symptoms. This time, it was MLP; the asshole who shot up the Republican Senate softball team was a Bernie Bro, the asshole who shot up the kid's camp in Norway really was a right-wing, neo-Nazi extremist...
I'm less interested in what this particular asshole obsessed about than I'm interested in precisely how he got bagged under a Red Flag law, placed on a 72 hour mental health hold, and the prosecutors chose NOT to hold a competency hearing. "No technique works if it isn't applied." I'm unimpressed by vague handwaving about how he didn't think he'd win the hearing. I want specifics, or I'm frankly going to default to non-feasance.
Applejack, in the far-right tumor that has metastasized within this fandom, is used as 'tradwife' propaganda. The shooter also liked memes saying Hitler was a reincarnation of Jesus.
100% the little twerp thought he was fighting the jews and degenerates by shooting up a bunch of innocent people. People do not live in vacuums and small actions can have lasting impacts. The butterfly effect, etc. He got bagged by red-flag laws, but would he have shot up a bunch of people if his little noggin wasn't filled with nazi bile and rhetoric? I doubt it.
Very nice of that article to label bronies as "obsessed," and "extreme fans," and "sexually attracted [to fictional pony characters]" all in the first three sentences, making us seem as awful as possible. Only a couple sentences later we get reenforcement of that with "[bronies have] a history of extremist tendancies" and then "Brony online culture has displayed elements of far-right and white nationalist extremism." It's so nice of them to note near the very end that the shooter's love of ponies hasn't actually been linked to his motivations to commit a murder-suicide, but y'know, the implication of the rest of the article is pretty ham-fisted...
Been following this trend for a week now, and things are pretty heated in some corners of fimfiction. We all know the media is going to latch on like this article...
Take what I say with a grain of salt, because I don't have source links at my fingertips, but my understanding of the red flag situation is this:
-Brandon's mom filed a complaint that he was potentially dangerous amd armed
-police nabbed him and took his shotgun
-the red flag process has been watered down, and prosecutors weren't confident that it would be successful
-if the process failed, they would have to give his shotgun back
-so, they dodged: Brandon was let go, but cops got to keep the shotgun
-Brandon went out and bought more guns
I'd have to do more digging to get into the specifics of the red flag laws in his area and why prosecutors felt they weren't likely to succeed.
Apologies for not getting back to you guys sooner - meatspace problems.
[BTW, I have something of a personal policy: when referring to an atrocity, I try to avoid using the name of the perpetrator. I just call him/her, "Asshole". Call it a personal quirk...]
5502836
Well, I'm not sure that your comment is entirely accurate. We had the one asshole who was a Bernie Bro, another asshole who was all over the Left side of the map when he shot up Gabbie Giffords' political rally (is there such a thing as an anarcho-Communist? That whackjob was probably too disorganized to have even enough coherency for anarchism...). Switching gears for a moment, even the right-wing asshole who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City had no provable links to any of the neo-Nazi groups, IIRC, and what links did seem to pop up were more of the tenuous, "friend of a friend of a friend" linkages. (Not to say that the asshole's thinking might not have paralleled neo-Nazis - sick minds think alike...)
Point remains that it's less what the asshole is obsessing about, and more about his tendency to obsess in the first place. Almost uniformly, regardless of political affiliation, the assholes demonstrate two things: a tendency to obsess about something, and a tendency to apply the obsessive pathology to nurse grievances, real or imagined, out of all proportion to the impact by any objective measure.
Forgive me, but I don't believe it's helpful to view this exclusively through a political lens and dismiss the latest asshole as a neo-Nazi. It blinds us to the pathology that exists regardless of political leanings
5502992
Thanks. You opened with my first concern. I'm an old guy, remember? Let me date myself: I was around when Dungeons and Dragons was turning me and all my friends into demon-worshippers (go to IMDb and search Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters - you'll laugh like Hell...) I remember when LARP was the big thing, and White Wolf Games was manufacturing vampire cults (no specific source, but, bless his heart, one of the mundane talk show hosts (might have been Maury Povich) got a few of the whackos on the same stage with some LARPers, and the host asked Storyteller for the LARP group what he thought. Answer: "I think they're a bunch of BLEEPing IDIOTS!" And then, shenanigans ensued...)
The first part (and the title) of this blog post is inspired my disgust at the hysteria and sensationalism. Today, it's Nazis. A quarter of a century ago, it was cultists. Half a century ago, it was demon-worshippers. The douchebags at the NY Post, the UK Daily Mail, and a whole shitpot full of other places are stoking up the hysteria just to sell clicks, Whatever it does for the douchebags' bottom line, it sure doesn't help all of us in fandom that they're tarring with a damned broad brush, almost like a Mel Brooks spoof of an old ad jingle, "I'm a Nazi, he's a Nazi, she's a Nazi, they're all Nazis, wouldn't you like to be a Nazi, to-o-o-o?!"
Don't know about y'all, but I resent the HELL out of that...
The second part, thanks. It's been a few days, and a bit of the breathless rumor-mongering has ceased, and a few of the actual, honest-to-Faust FACTS are starting to come out. The meatspace issues have prevented me from tracking this atrocity closely enough to make informed judgments about the Marion County prosecutor's decisions on this one, and I am compelled to admit that IANAL, and that I don't have much experience of Indiana state law. Having said that, however...
Speaking for myself, I've got a serious problem with overly-aggressive Red Flag laws, because you don't get the protection of the Constitutional and Common Law presumption of innocence under those - jthey're written to a legal standard of "preponderance of evidence" - which amounts to 50% +1. Leaving aside the potential of slander from persons with grudges that I heard claimed from the right-wing contingent... Care to ask the Deacons for Defense how they would have fared under that standard in the face of Jim Crow laws? Or how well Pink Pistols might have done in states dominated by Baptists under that 50%+1 standard? Me, neither. So, yeah, I Get That.
Having said that, here we've got an Emotionally-Disturbed Person, who was sufficiently off that IMPD was able to get a Mental Health Hold (or whatever they call it under Indiana statutes - In California, they call it a 5150, after the Health and Safety Code statute that outlines the requirements for a mental health hold) - AND you could confiscate his firearms under the Red Flag laws. If he was dangerous enough to justify that, why not push further and find out if you could get him committed for long enough to kick in the Federal Law under the Gun Control Act of 1968 and have him permanently barred from buying a gun? If I tried and failed, then a) from a moral perspective, at least I know I tried; and b) from a political perspective, I can push to get the Legislature to close that gap.
I'm probably going to be tied up for several more days, Shach - if you would, keep me posted? Thanks.