Mass Shootings In America

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I’m going to piss off a few people, but I want to ask the question about the elephant in the room. Why is it that after every mass shooting or mass murder incident in the United States, there is always the same verbiage in every damn case?

“The suspect was known to police”
“The suspect was on a watch list”
“The suspect was quiet and stuck to themselves”
“The weapon was purchased (or obtained) legally”; or “The weapon was stolen from a legal owner”
and the kicker is always from friends and family “we didn’t see this coming” or “There were no signs of trouble. I saw no signs of trouble”

Well, you did see it fucking coming, you didn’t react to it. Hell, you could see this dumbass kid from the damn space station. We aren’t talking about the suspect who was driving along and suddenly the thought of “hey I should go to a parade today and kill a bunch of people” just popped into his head. No, every single one of these asshats, did months and months of planning, talking about it online on Reddit or 4chan or one of a million different chat sites/programs like Discord (I’m in no way talking negatively about Reddit, Discord, or 4chan, they happen to be where these dumbasses hang out and spread their twisted views).

After the incident and the media starts to get ahold of the history of this asshat, it looks like something from X-files.

I’m talking about the Highland Park shooter (Robert Eugene “Bobby” Crimo III), (mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade ) and the damn headlines appear like this:

“GRUESOME POSTS Robert Crimo shared shock beheading video despite Highland Park suspects family saying there were ‘no warning signs’” and “THE alleged gunman in the July 4 parade massacre reportedly shared a beheading video online despite his family saying there were “no warning signs”.” (Source)

Most of the content that he has posted has been taken down by the FBI but supposedly he is an amateur rapper going by the name of ‘Awake the Rapper’, is into wearing women’s clothing, loves first-person shooter video games, lives at home, has tattoos on his face, a self-proclaimed singer, songwriter, actor, and director (he even made his own IMDB.com webpage) and part of the incel online community (incel – a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active.)

Here is a video of a fellow rapper, and his take on “Awake the rapper”‘s the video “Always on my mind” (it is some strange shit and you have been warned)

This whole, ‘known to law enforcement really pisses me off. How in the world are we not looking into why all these assholes are known by police, most have been investigated and talked to police about some violent issue in their past. It is very obvious that the gun(s) are not to blame, as the gun is just a tool, it could easily be something another weapon. But why are we not catching these huge obvious red flags? I understand that law enforcement is really lacking money, lacking manpower, but we can do better, we need to do better.

I don’t have a complete solution, so I’m not really helping the problem, but the fact that “law enforcement was aware” is not acceptable, period.

I would like to know what “known by law enforcement” actually means. I’m assuming that it means that he has been in trouble before and the police had to deal with him or the aftermath of something that he has done. Does it mean that law enforcement had enough information to label him as “most likely to go postal”?

It seems to me that we should be focusing on this a little.

I get so upset when the knee-jerk reaction is “confiscate all the guns and”, shut down websites like 4chan or Reddit. Those do not solve the problem, if we take down the website xyz.com, their users will all move somewhere else and hang out. So we that isn’t going to do anything besides likely piss off one of these mentally unstable people who were using the website xyz.com

It isn’t the gun, if we “take all the guns” a bad person will find a way to accomplish the carnage that they are seeking. Think about it this way for a few minutes.

The below incidents are set for a parade route in a small town in America.

A person takes a gun and sets up a snipers nest and shoots into the parade crowd (like the Highland Park shooter on July 4th), killing or injuring dozens

A person doesn’t own a gun, but he uses his SUV to enter the parade route and uses his vehicle to hit and run, killing or injuring dozens

A person sits on the roof of a building along the parade route and throws dozens of Molotov cocktails into the parade route, killing or injuring dozens

A person enters the parade route and pulls out two swords and runs down the parade route swinging the swords, killing or injuring dozens, killing or injuring dozens (believe it or not there is a popular VR game called Beat Saber that only uses a sword.

A person plants an IED along the parade route and detonates it killing or injuring dozens (Boston Marathon 2013) (source)

Do you see where I’m going here? Bad people will find a way to do bad things. Currently, the gun is just the preferred weapon of choice. Why? They choose guns because they can distance themselves from the reality of what they are doing. They play hours and hours of first-person shooter games and sitting in a “snipper nest” just pulling the trigger, is just like they would in a video game. If we eliminate the gun from the equation, we will slow things down for a while, but the next “big thing” will come around and we will all be looking for a way to stop that weapon of choice. And the next big thing may not be a conventional weapon either, maybe it is a drug, a computer virus, or maybe a real pandemic that kills hundreds of millions.

So what is the real problem?

There is a major mental health problem in this country because a person who is mentally stable doesn’t even entertain the thought of “I’m going to get a gun and kill you”. People who are mentally stable have other, non-violent ways of dealing with problems.

So in a matter of 30 minutes, we have identified that we need to fund the police more, but we really need a nationwide task force that is taking all these “the suspect is known to police” and actually doing something with that information. We can’t ask Barney Fife from Mayberry to do an effective job of this, that isn’t what he is trained to do. And we know that we have a HUGE mental health problem in this country.

Hell, half of us voted for a 78-year-old senile man, who can’t even remember a simple statement, and the other half voted for a 75-year-old loudmouth with a bad spray tan, who has to be one of the most unconventional Presidents in history. And we supposedly voted in record numbers.

I mean when did the President of the United States become an old man’s job? If we were driving down the highway, most of us fly right past the 70+-year-old driver in the car in the slow lane, going 20 mph under the speed limit with their turn signal, and think to ourselves that, the driver of that car is too old to drive. But hell we will vote for them to be President. Being in charge of the country should be for someone who is younger and for someone who can handle the stress and pressure.

Just take a look at President Obama who was 47 years old when he was sworn into office. That means he was 55 when he left office. The below photos clearly show how much that job can physically age someone.