Elliot Rodger - California killing spree - all the issues

hedonist

Maybe...afraid of tits.

Possibly that fear turns into hate, which begets violence.

(doesn't apply only to tits, either)

chadwick

you will be safer in rural america than you will be in, let's say, long beach. it's only a fact. put large numbers of ppl crammed together & the result is not pretty. with a 2010 population of 467,892 people, i will be more than thrilled to be in rural america w/out a gun.

i believe if i lived in a city i would be having a loaded shotgun nearby & this is how many millions of ppl think

"We don't see too many wolf packs here in Long Beach, California." - cosmo

maybe not actuall wolves but believe me, you have wolf packs many times more nasty than any timber wolves i've ever heard of

hedonist

I've never lived in a rural area but have lived the whole of my life in what some might call a concrete jungle.

For the most part, I've been safe...have felt safe and though eyes everwide-open, have lived as such too.

No need to be armed, even with all those with fangs out and about.

(some of us city-folk are pretty peaceful )

Cosmo

chadwick said:

you will be safer in rural america than you will be in, let's say, long beach. it's only a fact. put large numbers of ppl crammed together & the result is not pretty. with a 2010 population of 467,892 people, i will be more than thrilled to be in rural america w/out a gun.

i believe if i lived in a city i would be having a loaded shotgun nearby & this is how many millions of ppl think

"We don't see too many wolf packs here in Long Beach, California." - cosmo

maybe not actuall wolves but believe me, you have wolf packs many times more nasty than any timber wolves i've ever heard of

...
You're right. The more people, the greater the chance of something happening to you at the hands of another human.
But... I'll take that risk because i like living in the city. I just think there's more stuff tyhat I like going on over here. But, to each, their own.
...
My point is... rural vs. metropolitan regions have different requirements. That's why if Los Angeles County wants to try to curtail the number of guns out here... we don't need NRA types coming in from Utah, Montana and Idaho to put their two cents in how we are trying to solve our problems. We don't go over to their state to influence their laws... they need to quit coming over here, trying to influence ours.

chadwick

hedonist,

ever lived in or hung out in the slum areas?









does long beach even have a ghetto? how far is compton...25 miles or so?
i'm moving into compton
yep that's what im a gonna do any day now

hedonist

chadwick,

To answer what I hope was a genuine question, no...I haven't lived in a slum but have spent a bit of time in areas some would deem to be.

Perception isn't always reality.

You mention Compton - used to be a great, authentic deli there years ago (edit - used to be a great AREA years ago), and we'd drive from our safe little home to them for lunch every month or so with my dad (he loved speaking German with his fellow countryman who owned the place), and my sister and her husband.

When we started seeing more and more gang members along the way - not just driving in traffic with them, mind you - also getting the along-side-cruises from boys too young to be acting so tough, Dad figured it wasn't worth it.

chadwick

elliot was one entitled little shit. pampered? oh hell no, not elliot. did ya see the video where he's wearing his high end shades & talking about his awesome bmw & how much a gentleman he is?
who is flipping the bill for his schooling? oh that's right, the same ppl who gave him the bmw & $300+ sunglasses

dude is...... dude was a little weird fucker

true people can be mean but this dude must of had like zero game or something to have not one female ever even look at him.

spoiled little shit shoulda earned a few blisters, that right there makes women insane for even the goofiest neanderthal. man up, fucker!

hedonist

I don't know, I'm not sure it was about game (though I don't know too much about that, never been much into that aspect of people).

When he dubbed himself "magnificent" in one of his videos, it kind of sealed the deal that the images of who he wanted to be, who he was, and who he was treated as were way off the mark.

Where does that come from?

Really fucking sad. I mean, we can all pontificate all we want but at the end of last Friday, the lives of some young people ended needlessly because of him.

Merkin Baller

chadwick said:

elliot was one entitled little shit. pampered? oh hell no, not elliot. did ya see the video where he's wearing his high end shades & talking about his awesome bmw & how much a gentleman he is?
who is flipping the bill for his schooling? oh that's right, the same ppl who gave him the bmw & $300+ sunglasses

dude is...... dude was a little weird fucker

true people can be mean but this dude must of had like zero game or something to have not one female ever even look at him.

spoiled little shit shoulda earned a few blisters, that right there makes women insane for even the goofiest neanderthal. man up, fucker!

Right? He should have seen the Jetta I drove back in the day. Talk about no game . . . . . . Still, I was god-damned happy to have the thing.

hedonist

And I'll say this - if his odd vibe were as strong in person as it's been watching bits here and there online, no wonder women avoided him. Who would subject themselves to that?

Halifax2TheMax

unsung said:

dignin said:

goingtoverona said:

@cosmo, oh yeah man for sure I agree we should keep guns out of the hands of wackos. the question is, how do we do that? the problem is no one has the answer but everyone thinks they have the answer. Chicago is a prime example that strict gun laws don't mean shit, yet the most often "cure" for gun violence, is tighter gun laws. with every law passed, with every new restriction, there is still violence. that's why we can't look back at the Clinton era assault rifle and high cap mag ban and say holy shit guys, look at the difference in violence when the ban existed.

I don't know if Chicago is a great example. Word on the street is the gangs get the guns from outside of Chicago to get around the tough gun laws. I suppose if those same laws applied everywhere in the US it might be a lot harder for them to get their hands on them, given that they would have to cross a border. But that is just a guess.

Word on the street? Ok.

Word on the street is they get the guns from the Mexican drug cartels who got the guns from the Obama administration through Fast and Furious.

Who's street? Your street? Or maybe they got them from the Bush administration when they started Fast and Furious. And no, I don't remember your vociferous opposition to any government malfeasance back then (on these forums anyway). It seems to have started when Barack Hussein Obama wrapped up the democrat nomination.

Peace.

wolfamongwolves

A good article that looks at the interaction between all the issues being raised:


Elliot Rodger was a misogynist – but is that all he was?

The killer was enabled by a culture that validates the feelings of angry, lonely and sometimes mentally unwell men

Hadley Freeman
The Guardian, Tuesday 27 May 2014 17.03 BST


Elliot Rodger was a misogynist. This cannot really be in doubt about a young man who went out on Friday, armed with three semi-automatic shotguns he had bought legally, to punish all women for rejecting him sexually.

"You girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it," he wrote in his manifesto. "I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one."

That Rodger ended up killing twice as many men (Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, George Chen, 19, Weihan Wang, 20, and Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20) as women (Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, 19) on his shooting spree isn't relevant. Misogynists with murderous intent often end up killing men when they set out to kill women (a woman's new partner or a male friend, for example). So, that proves nothing: Rodger was definitely a misogynist.

But is that all he was? Since news of the deaths broke over the weekend, journalists and commentators have argued vociferously about what, precisely, would make a young man from a privileged and, by all accounts, loving family feel such rage against women that he would end up killing six people and himself. Many writers I read and respect enormously have argued that to say Rodger's real problem was mental illness is to dismiss his misogyny – and the misogyny that is endemic in western society. To argue that mental illness lay at the root of Rodger's problem, they write, is almost to excuse him as a lone aberration, as opposed to seeing him for what he was: part of a pattern that is the inevitable effect of a sick society.

I have a lot of sympathy for this point of view. As one of my favourite feminist writers, Erin Gloria Ryan, has pointed out, when a man from the Middle East kills people, the western media immediately ascribes it to terrorism; when a black man kills people, it's put down to cultural thuggery; but when a white man kills people, it is dismissed, she tweeted, as "a freak mental illness ... The fact that the mostly white media scrambles to remove white, privileged men from blame is exactly why we need more diverse newsrooms."

This is all true. But this isn't necessarily an either/or situation. Yes, Rodger was a misogynist. He also very likely had mental difficulties, and to say so doesn't diminish the part a misogynistic culture played in this tragedy. If anything, it emphasises precisely why this culture is so dangerous. Rodger had been in therapy since he was nine years old. Friends of the family have given numerous interviews testifying to his parents' long-term concern for him. His parents stayed in contact with mental-health professionals after Rodger turned 18, but there was little they could do: their son was now an adult, and he hadn't said or done anything that would have merited involuntary mental health treatment. It looks as if, at some point, Rodger found an outlet for his difficulties: misogyny. This is where the culture comes into play.

Rodger was enabled in his misogynistic feelings by a culture that exists to validate the feelings of angry, lonely and sometimes mentally unwell men. Judging from the language Rodger used in his videos, he had been a follower of the pick-up artist (PUA) online community, which teaches men that they can and should trick and bully women into sleeping with them (Tom Cruise's character in Magnolia is an excellent representation of the PUA community). Rodger described himself as "an alpha" and "incel" – "involuntary celibate"; these are terms that come straight from the PUA textbooks.

But Rodger was also a frequent contributor to the PUAhate online community boards, which are for men who find that PUA tricks don't work for them. These men spend their time on the internet railing against women who fail to appreciate their inherent goodness, and argue that women shouldn't be allowed to choose who they have sex with. Indeed, in his manifesto, Rodger wrote: "Women should not have the right to choose who to mate with. That choice should be made for them by civilised men of intelligence."

This misogynistic culture exists, absolutely, and what's so dangerous about it is that it attracts potentially mentally unstable people, including Rodger, and validates their most extreme feelings. To say that mental illness played a part in Rodger's behaviour doesn't dismiss the culture that played a part in it any more than saying eating disorders are a mental illness (which they are) excuses the part played by the sick fetishisation of women's bodies in western culture.

It's also worth pointing out that Rodger didn't just rail against women in his manifesto – he also spewed plenty of racist bile, which is getting far less attention, even though the first people he killed were his two Asian roommates and their Asian friend, whom he had specifically described as "repulsive". (Rodger was half-Asian himself and blamed this for his lack of success with women.)

It is also worth pointing out that even if Rodger had been diagnosed with a serious mental illness he would still have been able to buy a gun, even in California, which has some of the most stringent laws about buying guns in the United States.

Was misogyny the reason a 22-year-old man went on a killing spree? Hell yes. Were other factors at play here, too, such as mental health, a financially straitened mental health system and an American political system cowed by the NRA, leading to too much access to guns? Yes, yes and yes. And to say that doesn't diminish the part played by any of these reasons. In fact, they underline the dangers in one another.

unsung

Halifax2TheMax said:

unsung said:

dignin said:

goingtoverona said:

@cosmo, oh yeah man for sure I agree we should keep guns out of the hands of wackos. the question is, how do we do that? the problem is no one has the answer but everyone thinks they have the answer. Chicago is a prime example that strict gun laws don't mean shit, yet the most often "cure" for gun violence, is tighter gun laws. with every law passed, with every new restriction, there is still violence. that's why we can't look back at the Clinton era assault rifle and high cap mag ban and say holy shit guys, look at the difference in violence when the ban existed.

I don't know if Chicago is a great example. Word on the street is the gangs get the guns from outside of Chicago to get around the tough gun laws. I suppose if those same laws applied everywhere in the US it might be a lot harder for them to get their hands on them, given that they would have to cross a border. But that is just a guess.

Word on the street? Ok.

Word on the street is they get the guns from the Mexican drug cartels who got the guns from the Obama administration through Fast and Furious.

Who's street? Your street? Or maybe they got them from the Bush administration when they started Fast and Furious. And no, I don't remember your vociferous opposition to any government malfeasance back then (on these forums anyway). It seems to have started when Barack Hussein Obama wrapped up the democrat nomination.

Peace.

I voted for Obama for US Senate. Your theory is null and void.

unsung

I'm beginning to believe that the pharmaceutical industry is to blame for these incidents, kids just don't know how to deal with life because they've been drugged up their entire teenage years.

Point your fingers there.

Godfather.

unsung said:

I'm beginning to believe that the pharmaceutical industry is to blame for these incidents, kids just don't know how to deal with life because they've been drugged up their entire teenage years.

Point your fingers there.

the pharmaceutical industry or drugs from the street the short and long term effects are sometimes very dangerous.

Godfather.

i_lov_it

unsung said:

I'm beginning to believe that the pharmaceutical industry is to blame for these incidents, kids just don't know how to deal with life because they've been drugged up their entire teenage years.

Point your fingers there.

Good point...and they Make a lot of Money in the Process.

chadwick

'game' would equal many things

kindness
smarts
conversationalist
shower taker
open one's gifted self & do your thing
operate smoked/trashed car (unlike elliot)
change your name if you are elliot
do not purchase $376.99 sunglasses

'game' does not mean 'game'

every person walking this planet had better have 'game' or they are walking dead

if someone owns $376.99 shades they should be slapped so hard that they actually fallover

jmuscatello

So GF - if you are still out there today, and interested in seeing why the NRA and RMGO came out so strongly against a civil commitments bill, go to: www.legiscan.com In bottom left corner search for Colorado and then 1386. It had bipartisan support in the House and was killed in Senate committee earlier this month (unfortunately, I'd say).

There were no provisions specific to guns or background checks, period, although the gun lobby characterized it as a gun-grab bill. This was about changing the language so that "imminent" danger was no longer a requirement to get someone held in an emergency mental health crisis. The net effect would have been to increase emergency holds and accelerate the hold process. The criteria for prohibiting someone from owning a gun are federal and would not have been affected by this. Yet, that was why RMGO and NRA lobbied so hard against the bill - they believed more people would be subject to NCIS, and that would infringe on their 2nd Amendment rights. Just me, but I'd say that even if that were true, I think it might just be okay to restrict gun purchases from people being considered for emergency mental holds.

Again, if you've ever been part of the horrible process of trying to get an emergency mental health hold in place, you'd understand why I'm so pissed at the gun lobby (or more pissed than usual, I guess).

jmuscatello

and I'd throw in our narcissistic culture is not helping matters either... lack of empathy and sense of entitlement not exactly healthy traits

unsung

He passed his background checks, he waited the 10 day cooling off period, he bought the guns legally, he possessed no magazine larger than 10 rounds, he didn't use an 'assault rifle', etc...

He obeyed every California gun control law.

What else is there?

I know. Blame Bush.