A reader emails:
As a long time reader on your blog, I’d like to let you know that I am a member of LA Fitness and my wife and I were at the gym after dinner last night. I saw the entire class (15-20 people, all women) waiting outside of the aerobic room before the class was to begin at 8:00 pm. My wife was on the top level and I was on the lower level where the actual shooting happened. I heard about 30 rounds in spurts before I was able to make it to the back door where everyone was running. My wife came down frantically with a group of people from the higher level about 30 seconds after the shooting began. Those 30 seconds, when I did not know where she was, seemed like an eternity. We were able to both make it to the outside parking lot where we saw 2 different girls who were wounded. One was shot in the thigh with lots of bleeding and another was shot clear through the left shoulder. Both seemed to be doing as well as you could except once the ambulances arrived. Everyone who made it out safely was totally bewildered and horrified. Those crazy 10 minutes after the shooting already feel hazy because it happened so quickly.
What scares me the most is that my wife sometimes takes the same class that the shooting happened. Our car is still at the gym because both of our keys are locked in the locker room.
Just crazy.
The Grand Panjandrum
1. Always say “I love you” to those you love.
2. Enjoy every sandwich.
asiangrrlMN
Oh my god. I am thankful that the reader’s wife was ok. I send a quick silent thought for the victims of the shooting and surround them with a white light.
Oh, and I agree with The Grand Panjandrum. Enjoy every fucking sandwich, and tell the people you love that you love them.
Nick
Dude hadn’t been laid in 19 years.
Those precious bodily fluids just built up to an unacceptable level.
Just Some Fuckhead
Just one more reason to stay away from the gym.
vacuumslayer
Message to bitter women-murdering men: we can’t fuck you if we’re dead.
Ned R.
Ridiculously sad and stupid and tragic.
I admit to a little curiosity about the church and pastor mentioned. FWIW, their site. I suspect the prayer list needs updating.
General Winfield Stuck
Like the line in the movie. Whenever you pick up a gun, sooner or later someone gets a bullet. We have a lot of guns to pick up in this country and a lot of people with beefs, and we (and me) support a robust second amendment, Big boy rules.
We mourn the innocent victims and await the next tragedy.
My Condolences for these innocent young women.
ironranger
The shooter said in his blog that his pastor convinced him he could commit mass murder & still go to heaven. Maybe this very ill person used an innocuous forgiveness message in church to justify what he wanted to do anyway but I’d like to know more about the pastor’s preaching & the church.
MikeJ
@General Winfield Stuck: What movie? I’d always heard Chekov.
General Winfield Stuck
@MikeJ:
The Devil’s Own
Brad Pitt as Frankie Mcguire . IRA dood/
gbear
You say that like there’s something wrong with it.
Good thing I’m not bitter…
Crashman06
To the anonymous reader,
Very glad that you and your wife are safe. It’s very sad that someone would do something like this.
What else is there to say?
Cat Lady
It’s always too close for everybody’s comfort these days. The nuts have guns, the nutty cops have guns, and every third person with a grudge or a beef or a bad day at home or the office has a gun. Frankly, it’s surprising to me that there haven’t been more of these incidents, given the economy and the divisive media. Heckuva job NRA!
IndieTarheel
Winger spin blaming this on the left in 5, 4, 3, 2…
pharniel
talk about by the skin of your teeth…good luck and wow. that’s just way too much crazy going around these days.
anonevent
I wonder if the NRA has a line of guns made for exercising with, since their answer to these situations is to have everyone bring a gun with them.
I’m not advocating against guns, just the ridiculous idea that a lot of people with guns would have either caused the guy to think twice, or that the guns would be readily usable.
Balconesfault
@Cat Lady:
Seems to me that the frequency is on the uptick.
The sad thing is – there’s no solution. The nation has by and large rejected pacifism. Communalism, which is the real solution, is demonized, while tribalism and “rugged individualism” are fetishized. I expect more of this until certain media personalities actually become scared of what crazy-talk can ferment.
WyldPirate
not laid since ’84?
legalize prostitution. give deranged yo-yos like this a better chance to get his ya-ya’s out.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Just imagine if you carried. You coulda gone upstairs to “help”. Imagine if oh, another 4-5 people already up there “carried”. Who would you shoot once you arrived? Who would you believe if they said “I already shot the bastard”? Suppose the “bastard” was the actual shooter, you believe him, and whammo, you’re dead.
And your right to “carry” wouldn’t have helped you one bit.
You = fucking gun nuts, NRA and various right wing, batshit crazy assholes.
Asshole was rudundant.
The Moar You Know
I am glad our reader was not one of the victims, nor his wife.
I’m also glad that Mr. Sodini put a bullet in his own head. Too bad he didn’t do it sooner; the man had issues with women (specifically, his mother) and some innocent lives could have been saved if he’d just done the right thing and shot himself first.
flukebucket
I suspect the prayer list needs updating.
No shit.
Julia Grey
My Condolences for these innocent young women.
Not to be a bitch or anything, but in the interests of accuracy, and perhaps in the service of irony, given the shooter’s beef regarding not being able to get any nubile white women because the black guys were taking them all, the women who were actually killed were in their late thirties or early forties.
Sad, sad business.
Losers get mad when life punishes their inadequacies, and then losers lose it.
What gets me is these creepy guys never understand that the reason we won’t go with them is because of their creepy vibe. We can feel what you’re thinking, fella, even if we can’t hear the actual words you use to talk to yourself.
Shudder. Get. Away. From. Me.
Face
This would scare the living fuck outta me, such that I wouldn’t be in a gym again for years.
I stayed out of convience stores for 6 months after someone drove their car thru it, missing me by about a yard. A murder/suicide shootup is about 1000x worse.
DAMN….
The Moar You Know
@Balconesfault: I keep hearing this said and it fails utterly to take into account the underlying motivations of those who seek to become “media personalities”. Scared? Never happen. They get off on it.
Don’t look to those people for responsibility. Every bleeding body that the sickos or the pitchfork-armed mob leaves behind increases their importance, and they know it. And they love it.
vacuumslayer
@The Moar You Know: Amen. I’m just scared that this is going to start some meme about women causing this. By being too unavailable. To psychos.
MathInPortAngeles
Gov. Ed Rendell called it “another senseless shooting and a tragic shooting. It’s a case where someone who clearly shouldn’t have had a firearm because of mental problems had a firearm. This guy had severe mental problems. He had a deep abiding hatred of women.”
I have some disagreements with Rendell’s policies, but he nails it on the head. We could probably talk about a lot of things here, healthcare, sensible gun control (fuck the NRA, seriously), and others, but it really sort of does get back to why feminism is really important. This guy couldn’t connect to women, in a society that told him they “belonged” to him and his kind, and that he was worthless if he didn’t get laid/”have” one. Patriarchy kills.
Upper West
Jules Feiffer wrote “Little Murders” in 1968. It’s gradually coming true, thanks to psychos like Wayne LaPierre and Beck, Savage et al.
Cat Lady
@Balconesfault:
I agree. The lady taking pictures outside the National Guard headquarters had rants on her website inspired by Glenn coocoo bananas Beck, and I read somewhere that even he may be starting to see where this is all going. The irony, lost on all the angry nutjobs, is that the well paid media ranters are playing them for the ignorant rubes they are and don’t believe most of what they themselves say. It’s a shtick, people! Wake the fuck up!
arguingwithsignposts
I have had two friends who have been involved in mass shootings ( church in TX and Va Tech). I am continually amazed at the random nature of such, and the desire of authority types to cover their asses when the facts show there were plenty of indicators.
Glad the e-mailer and his loved one are okay. peace.
Interrobang
These “random shootings” are what violent, unstable, misogynistic assholes do if they don’t have a convenient piece of woman-property and/or child-property to abuse and murder when said property doesn’t do what the asshole thinks it should. (Wasn’t there a case just recently where a guy murdered his ex’s entire family, saying it was because she wouldn’t reconcile with him? And how many cases are there on record of some guy murdering his wife and/or kids because he was supposedly “distraught over the divorce”? Scratch one of those guys, find a spousal abuser…)
Marc Lepine shot 19 women in Montreal in 1989 because he was mad that they were allowed to take engineering classes. Charles Carl Roberts shot five Amish schoolgirls out of resentment at not being able to molest them, and over losing a piece of female child-property 20 years before. Seung Hui-Cho stalked two women and killed one of them before shooting 31 other people dead.
Homicide is the #3 cause of death for pregnant women, after pregnancy complications and traffic accidents.
When are these incidents going to be called what they actually are: systemic criminal activity intended to terrorize an entire class of people by example — anti-woman hate crimes?
Dan Conley
One thing never discussed after these events — why on earth don’t we have universal mental health coverage in this country? We go to war to prevent fictional WMDs from going off, but we do nothing to defuse the time bombs walking and driving around our country every day.
Balconesfault
@Upper West:
Saw a production of that a couple years ago. And you’re spot on.
I wholly agree. First of all, I suspect that a lot of these guys just need to actually talk to a woman from time to time … and besides the release of vital bodily fluids, just the human interaction outside of the workplace could be therapeutic.
Second, tying another meme in (the “Shudder. Get. Away. From. Me.” POV – which I’m not criticizing in the least) – I think that any woman being stalked would be able to get the guy onto a junk mail list that regularly made clear to him the free-market provided alternatives to a bitter, desperate life of isolation. In all price ranges.
Church Lady
I just read Soldini’s online diary. (shudder)
It’s scary to realize that someone can be that obviously deranged and yet no one around them even has a clue.
Trollhattan
Best wishes to the reader and spouse–I hope you recover some semblence of normalcy. Me, I’d be jumpy for the next three years.
We are a society armed to the teeth and what, exactly, has that given us?
Comrade Darkness
@Balconesfault: The sad thing is – there’s no solution. The nation has by and large rejected
pacifismJesus’s teachings.Atheist here, but I had to throw that out there. I’d quote Gandhi next, but it’s been overquoted already.
Betsy
@vacuumslayer:
This one exists comfortably alongside the one that says of women murdered or abused by their spouses/partners: “Tsk tsk, she should have known he was bad news. If she hadn’t dated/married/divorced/stayed with him, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”
schrodinger's cat
Are we not safe anywhere? I love aerobics classes I find the gym machines boring and like to mix it up with aerobics classes along with my weekly runs. Next time I go to my fitness center, I am going to be haunted by this incident. We need more regulations on gun ownership, at least it should be as hard as getting your driver’s license.
The Moar You Know
@Church Lady: Apparently, every woman he’s ever talked to had more than a clue.
I suspect most of his co-workers knew as well. His neighbors sure did.
Hell, I’ll bet every human being who ever had more than the most casual of contact with the murdering fuck knew he’d do this one day; the problem is that we, as a society, don’t have any means of stopping people like him until it’s too late.
Nick
Church Lady
I just read Soldini’s online diary. (shudder)
It’s scary to realize that someone can be that obviously deranged and yet no one around them even has a clue.
——————————–
I think everyone falls somewhere on a continuum between being a sociopath and being extremely empathetic.
After reading his diary, I had the sense that he had some empathy, that he wasn’t completely devoid of fellow feeling. But he was also bitterly lonely.
Good looking guy with money ($250k net worth) and a good job, but just couldn’t connect with people (as I type a comment into an internet site).
Not much good to say about his family, and particularly his brother, who will have a nice time explaining to his wife why he said she wasn’t very attractive.
Betsy
And to the anonymous reader: I’m very glad you and your wife are ok. It’s terrible that you had to witness that.
Jay in Oregon
@WyldPirate:
Why should some psycho be able to pay a prostitute to be able to beat the crap out of her?
No one has an inalienable right to get laid. Julia Grey @22 had it right; if he was creepy enough that he couldn’t get a date once in a while, that is no one’s problem but his own.
(And I would point out that the illegality of prostitution has never seriously hampered the trade; if this guy wanted to pay for sex, he could have.)
JenJen
My sincere condolences to the anonymous who sent John that letter. This event has shaken me to my core, in its horrific randomness, but I can’t begin to imagine what you’ve gone through. I’m so happy you’re safe.
Was just reading some of the stuff from this whackjob’s website. In addition to his many issues, he also appears to have been a little troubled by the recent election and even turned it into some kind of attack on his inability to connect with women:
“Planned to do this in the summer but figure to stick around to see the election outcome. This particular one got so much attention and I was just curious. Not like I give a flying fcuk who won, since this exit plan was already planned. Good luck to Obama! He will be successful. The liberal media LOVES him. Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good! In light of this I got ideas outside of Obama’s plans for the economy and such. Here it is: Every black man should get a young white girl hoe to hone up on. Kinda a reverse indentured servitude thing. Long ago, many a older white male landowner had a young Negro wench girl for his desires. Bout’ time tables are turned on that shit. Besides, dem young white hoez dig da bruthrs! LOL. More so than they dig the white dudes! Every daddy know when he sends his little girl to college, she be bangin a bruthr real good. I saw it. “Not my little girl”, daddy says! (Yeah right!!) Black dudes have thier choice of best white hoez. You do the math, there are enough young white so all the brothers can each have one for 3 or 6 months or so.”
Good gawd, sometimes Americans really frighten me.
R-Jud
@Betsy:
My friend’s sister was murdered by her husband. Here is something I actually heard someone say afterwards:
“If she thought he was going to kill her if she left him, why didn’t she just leave?”
Cat Lady
@Betsy:
If she hadn’t dated/married/divorced/stayed
… or have enough sex. I’m listening to the bobbleheads focusing on the fact that the killer hadn’t gotten any since 1990 or whenever. I can easily see a meme developing that men go crazy without teh sex, so come on ladies, it’s your duty to keep us all safe. Meh.
Jay in Oregon
@Betsy:
The flipside, of course, is when a woman screws up the courage to leave and the psycho flips out and kills her, their kids, her family, or random strangers, then she should have tried to work things out, shouldn’t have denied him the right to see their kids, etc.
General Winfield Stuck
@Julia Grey:
all depends on where on the sands of time your number is. At 56, they seem quite young to me.
And as a side note, I doubt this guy did what he did cause he couldn’t get laid. If he had all the sex he could stand, there would have been another excuse and another set of victims to be mad at. He just wanted to kill some people for the fact that he exists, and thought he had a good enough reason to focus it on women. People who do mass murder are way past rationality and probably been thinking about doing such a thing for a very long time.
srv
@ironranger:
What would be different about this church from all the others that have no problem with all our wars?
Pop Christianity teaches us all that St. Peter does a lot of nuance.
anonevent, I like your thinking. We can now expect bullet proof spandex, metal detectors and aerobics instructors with sidearms. Why Super Walmarts don’t have a chapel, shooting range and gym has always been beyond me.
DonkeyKong
Maybe we need to start doing PSA’s for suicidal shooters. Basicallly, if you’re pissed at the world, start and end with blowing your own fucking head off!
Senyordave
Good gawd, sometimes Americans really frighten me.
The part that scares me is that we have congesspeople and senators who don’t seem very balanced. Its sad that a district could elect a Michelle Bachman, or that a state could elect an Inhofe.
Show me a reasonable Republican in national politics, and I’ll show you someone who’s considered part of the loonie left by party faithful.
Napoleon
@Cat Lady:
Cat Lady says: “I’m listening to the bobbleheads focusing on the fact that the killer hadn’t gotten any since 1990 or whenever. I can easily see a meme developing that men go crazy without teh sex, so come on ladies, it’s your duty to keep us all safe. Meh.”
Well if some stupid meme has to take hold I can think of worse ones then that ;)
Nick
General Winfield Stuck
And as a side note, I doubt this guy did what he did cause he couldn’t get laid.
————————–
I don’t either. I just think not getting laid, not having physical intimacy, is a good sign of how alienated he was from the rest of society.
The Grand Panjandrum
@General Winfield Stuck:
Amen, brother.
John Cole
The XL clips he used to hold more bullets used to be banned, but became legal when the assault weapon ban ended in 2004.
We’re a nation of morons.
John S.
General Winfield Stuck
@John Cole:
While I’m pro 2nd amendment, we don’t need no automatic assault weaponry for the average citizen, we don’t need adjudicated dangerous people buying guns, we don’t need free for all gun shows to bypass sensible gun laws.
But the NRA has scared dems politically, and the status quo will remain.
John S.
Sometimes you need 30 bullets to, uh, take down a deer…because they can be very elusive and sometimes wear bulletproof vests.
Or something.
Calouste
@comrade scott’s agenda of rage:
“Just imagine if you carried. You coulda gone upstairs to “help”. Imagine if oh, another 4-5 people already up there “carried”. Who would you shoot once you arrived? Who would you believe if they said “I already shot the bastard”? Suppose the “bastard” was the actual shooter, you believe him, and whammo, you’re dead.
And your right to “carry” wouldn’t have helped you one bit.
”
The shooter switched off the lights and then started shooting. If there were other people with guns in the room, there would most likely have been more victims, not less.
SiubhanDuinne
Adding my sympathies to the victims’ families, and my best wishes to the anonymous reader and his wife, who came so close.
There is something about having an episode like this near at hand — even if it doesn’t directly affect you — that really changes the way you deal with certain places and situations. Many years ago, a lone shooter went into the food court of a suburban Atlanta shopping mall at lunch time and killed/wounded several people, I’ve forgotten how many now or even what year this took place. But it happened in the mall that my father used to go to fairly often, and when the news broke I was scared to death for hours that he might have been there at the time. They arrested the gunman, but I tell you, it was a lo-o-o-o-ong time before I could bring myself to go to that particular mall. (My dad, of course, as it turned out, wasn’t there during the shooting, and HE never had any problems going back!)
The Saff
@JenJen: Wow. I don’t even know how to respond to a man who writes something that hateful and that wrong.
Lesley
Apparently the gunman blogged his plans to massacre women for over a year. If he had readers, why didn’t anyone contact the police??????????
WyldPirate
jay in oregon:
dude. no need to get your knickers in a knot. i wasn’t advocating the beating of women or prostitutes. Nice BS red herring, though
prostitution is much like the recreational drug use–it will never be regulated out of existence. Making it legal would allow for an outlet for men that have difficulty getting laid that doesn’t have the sketchiness associated with illegal prostitution. Additionally, health check-ups would decrease transmission of STDs and give an outlet for prostitutes that ARE ASSAULTED by crazy f**kwits to report it to the police.
You will note that I didn’t jump your sillyassed argument and insinuate that you support the slave trade in women and enfoprced prostitution of kidnapped teenagers in the illegal sale of sex which you seem to condone w/ your post).
mcc
@JenJen: It’s odd how a lot of articles about this shooting haven’t noticed or don’t seem to want to touch the Obama/racism angle, even though a lot of them are talking about his blog. For example, here’s the article that was leading on Google News when I looked. It goes into enormous detail on his online postings, but appears to think the only interesting thing about them is his difficulties finding a date.
Insert obvious joke here along the lines of “gee, I wonder why he had such trouble finding a date”
jaydenver
Of course, the next step will be to check everyone’s bag when they come to the gym — I see a real uptick in the security business. Can’t wait for the search wands to start probing and the metal detectors to be installed. And after the gyms, the supermarkets or wherever another weaponized wacko with a grudge decides to vent.
John Hamilton Farr
Guess what? The killer was another right-wing loon. Apparently the media is ignoring this so far, concentrating instead on his sexual hangups.
Evidence of the results of wingnut hate-mongering is all around us, and the screaming just gets louder. Very glad I live in almost empty northern NM. Anarchy is almost a tradition here, but with realistic politeness: Hispanos, Anglos, Indians get along because consequences of prejudice can be fatal. “Live and let live” means what it says! Tone of day-to-day dialogue re other ethnic groups was MUCH nastier back East in MD.
God, I love the West.
Anne Laurie
Much as I’d like to see sex work legalized, so that sex workers can get the same minimal level of protection as the rest of us American peons, George Sodini was a member of a fundamentalist church and such churches usually frown on sex outside of a “traditional” marriage.
Haven’t read his online diary — I have enough nightmare images already — but from the news stories it doesn’t sound like Sodini was so unplugged from modern culture that he couldn’t have found a hooker if all he wanted was a warm place to stick his dick.
The guy was crazy, and as Interrobang and others have already said, hating WOMEN as a class is still considered “permissible” in America. There will be plenty of Reasonable Members (my money is on Ross Douthat as first to post) among the Media Village Idiots who will blame this on feminism in general and every woman Sodini ever came in contact with in particular. And there will probably be a few people who show up here to complain how it’s totally unreasonable to assume that Sodini’s crimes had anything to do with how “we” think about women, because dood was nutz. (Yeah, he also seems to have had a very low opinion of “The Black Man”, but Sodini didn’t carefully prepare to shoot up a building full of African-American men, much less something that would have drawn attention from the Secret Service. )General Winfield Stuck phrases it well:
Shinobi
Jezebel has some interesting commentary on the response from some antifeminist sites.
vacuumslayer
@Shinobi: I can’t bear to read them. I know it will make my blood pressure shoot up. And I’m already a tense person. Ugh.
Jay in Oregon
@WyldPirate:
Whoa, I think you read way more into my post than I intended.
My point was, if this guy was creepy enough that he couldn’t get a regular date, why would going to a (legal) prostitute be any better?
As Anne Laurie pointed out, even if prostitution were legal, the killer’s so-called Christian beliefs would probably not allow him to enjoy the services of a prostitute without feeding feelings of guilt or shame, which would do little to help him and endanger the woman. (Of course, I could be wrong; right-wingers can be amazingly hypocritical when it comes to doing the nasty.)
kay
@jaydenver:
“Of course, the next step will be to check everyone’s bag when they come to the gym—I see a real uptick in the security business. Can’t wait for the search wands to start probing and the metal detectors to be installed. And after the gyms, the supermarkets or wherever another weaponized wacko with a grudge decides to vent.”
Exactly.
But, that’s YOUR rights, jay, and they don’t matter. It’s perfectly logical. Rather than institute some reasonable weapons regulation, we’re going to regulate your every move.
We’ll expect you to consent to a search if you want to enter a building. Because YOUR rights don’t mean jack. What’s important is we not regulate gun owners. Everyone else will be regulated to protect us from gun enthusiasts.
Okay? Sound fair?
I feel freer already.
gbear
fail
adamchaz
I don’t think the man hated women. He hated the fact that he had been rejected by women. In his mind he had been rejected by society.
The guy went to an extreme but his depression is real and we need to encourage people to seek help.
Elie
We are such an insane society! We encourage everyone to have guns, indeed, to tote them concealed in some instances. Then we have to mandate that everyone be searched to keep public gatherings and places safe from said guns. We do minimal screening to allow people to buy guns. Yet, we have major limitations even in the most generous medical coverage to provide for mental illness screening and ongoing treatment. Our schools are sending kids home who wear t-shirts that criticize government policies or officials, or who take ibuprofen but we spend no time getting kids who are estranged and lonely any help.
We are deeply, deeply sad and confused… we now have people screaming at public meetings to keep the government from helping every citizen to get medical care…
I just shake my head and wonder…
kay
@Elie:
Well, inconveniencing gun purchasers is unimaginably cruel and limits their liberty. Really. It’s a fair trade-off, right?
Shinobi
@adamchaz:
Just to take this a step further, he hated the fact that women had autonomy and were allowed to reject him, when he so clearly deserved something warm and concave to put his dick in for some unknown reason I don’t understand. And so he decided to punish them by killing them.
The point I’m trying to make is that no one has a right not to be rejected. Saying that he hated that he was rejected is like saying that he breathed air, no one likes to be rejected. There was something else wrong with him that caused him to react to rejection irrationally.
I think it is important to consider, was he depressed because “society” had rejected him? Or did “society” reject him because he was the kind of person who might some day shoot random people for his own selfish reasons?
But you’re right about seeking help. There are therapists, people should go to them.
Ash Can
@WyldPirate:
And just what the hell difference would this have made? This guy could have gotten laid every day since his sixteenth birthday, and it wouldn’t have made any damned difference, because he was criminally insane. He hated a certain group (viz. women) and evidently had been headed in the direction of acting out on them for quite some time. Only psychiatric intervention could have both prevented this acting out and saved him. This medical care never materialized, and the rest is tragic history.
Likewise, I even believe that stricter gun-ownership regulations alone could not have prevented tragedy in this case, although they sure as hell would have lowered the body count.
@kay:
This.
To be frank, I’ve always wondered about the courts’ interpretation of the second amendment to mean that anyone who damn well feels like it can own a gun, seeing as said amendment starts off by framing the issue in terms of maintaining a militia. But interpret it in this way they have, so I must live with it. And I do, fairly comfortably. But for fuck’s sake, if guns can’t be kept out of the hands of wackos bent on using them on innocent fellow citizens, by getting serious about checking the mental history and condition of gun owners, then what the hell good is a second amendment in the first place? We’ve already sacrificed a big chunk of our privacy to the violence in our society. I’m not about to sacrifice my life, or the lives of any of my loved ones, to what has become tantamount to a religion of gun ownership in our society.
Julia Grey
This guy couldn’t connect to women, in a society that told him … that he was worthless if he didn’t get laid/”have” one. Patriarchy kills.
You ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie.
asiangrrlMN
@adamchaz: He hated women. Read his online journal. It’s in every sentence, starting with how he objectified them. The women in his life weren’t real–they were only there to be fit into a category. They were either bullies like his mom (which is telling), or they were fuckable young things. He had no idea what to do with women as real people.
If he kept getting rejected by women, and let’s face it, it’s easy to see why, then maybe he should have, oh, I don’t know, turned his gaze inward and try to figure out what the hell he’s doing wrong.
As for the pro angle, why? Someone this fucked up would be pretty into meting out pain (and I say that as someone who digs S & M to a certain extent), and as others have commented, he could have had a hooker if that’s all he wanted. He was twisted in a way that visiting a sex worker wouldn’t have fixed.
By the way. Men, if you want women to listen to you, first, have something worthwhile to say. Second, be willing to listen in return. You’d be amaze how much that second part matters.
I am so sick of this shit. Really. For women, it’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Guys like this need to start taking responsibility for their own failings. Think about it. Women get rejected, too. Women are bitterly depressed and lonely, too. However, women very rarely kill their lovers for this reason, and they even more rarely go on mass shooting sprees.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Roissy in DC (no way, not going to link to it, ever) has a truly unbelievably disturbing thread about how “game” would have “saved this guy’s life”. The comments section is a cesspool of male entitlement and misogyny. Supposedly women are “hypergamous” and only want to sleep with the highest status men they can find, and have a depraved indifference for lower status men.
Now, I personally don’t have much of a problem with the “pick up strategy” thing that some guys use, since most of the time I don’t think there’s any ill-will behind it, and I think it can therapeutically raise the confidence of some men with pathologically low confidence levels. But to see the level of misogyny promoted by the men that hawk these techniques—I think I might have to revise my views.
WyldPirate
@Jay in Oregon:
No problem Jay, perhaps I overreacted a bit. My apologies if I did.
My point was that if the dude had an outlet to stick his wee-wee in occasionally, then perhaps he wouldn’t have built up so much rage towards women. I haven’t–and don’t care to-considered the mental illness of his particular religious beliefs.
The “twofer” with legalized prostitution is that it would provide protection to a degree for prostitutes and their customers and give an outlet for those that don’t get laid enough to suit them.
The dude was clearly as crazy as a s*%t-house rat. Short of living in a complete police state–and I don’t think even that would prevent these kinds of things–some of these disturbed people are going to find ways to commit senseless crimes.
Mr Furious
@WyldPirate: That’s a fucking cop-out and stupid suggestion.
Not being laid is obviously no excuse for this guy’s actions.
Instead it was what he chose to blame his fucking problem on. If he was regularly seeing prostitutes to “release the fluid pressure” as people keep referring to, he’d certainly be beating them, and probably killing them and writing in his diary how they wouldn’t talk to or look at him the right way.
This guy was a straight up psycho, and if this goes down the road of him needing to get laid, it’s fucking pathetic.
Knock it the fuck off.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@WyldPirate:
Judging by the violence directed at prostitutes by their patrons, I think that’s unlikely. The guy would have done the same thing, but instead complained that women “only wanted his money” and “didn’t really care about him”.
Mr Furious
@Ash Can:
Well put.
WyldPirate
Mr. Furious, I wasn’t condoning the guys action. What are you f**king stupid?
And BTW, go f**k yourself. Also. Too.
Batocchio
I’m glad they’re all right. Horrible. Best wishes to the injured and the loved ones of those murdered.
Mr Furious
@WyldPirate:
Dude. Your post bore the brunt of many “needed to get laid”-type comments I’ve seen thusfar, and my reaction was immediate—straight to the bottom to respond.
After going back and reading the rest of the thread, I see you’ve answered some others since you made that comment. I see where you’re coming from, but still think it’s a dangerous tangent.
My “knock it the fuck off” is not directed at you or your comment specifically, but what seems to be too many people focusing on the stupid-ass sexual frustration angle, which is very likely to completely overshadow every other aspect of this sick fucking story.
And that REALLY pisses me off. Nothing to do with you personally.
Balconesfault
@Mr Furious: Instead it was what he chose to blame his fucking problem on. If he was regularly seeing prostitutes to “release the fluid pressure” as people keep referring to, he’d certainly be beating them, and probably killing them and writing in his diary how they wouldn’t talk to or look at him the right way.
Cough – bullshit. If prostitution was legal, beatings of prostitutes would quickly be reported to LE, and he’d have been in jail long ago if that was his m.o. The current underworld/underprotected status of professional ladies puts them at greater risk for abuse.
That said … it’s not just the “vital bodily fluids” … it’s a connection. Sad fact is, there are a lot of men who just don’t know how to make one. And the longer they go without spending any time with women, the worse that estrangement gets. Far be it from me to say that a prostitute-john relationship is the perfect format for a man to find a woman who will talk with him for 60 minutes without running away … but then again, neither is paying a psychologist. And a lot of guys aren’t ever going to go see a shrink without a court order.
Mr Furious
And I stand by the assertion that this guy, with ready access to women he could treat as property would not have been satiated in any way, shape or form. He would certainly have been abusive, dangerous and, who the hell knows, a serial killer of said women.
Legalizing prostitution is a debatable position, and one I can see various pros and cons on, but it shouldn’t be relevant to this topic. It’s a shiny distraction.
No “pro” you could typically make about legal prostitution—not protection, safety, regulation… would mean anything but greater access to victims for this asshole.
WyldPirate
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
Possibly. But it would also cut out violence directed at prostitutes by their pimps, give them legitimacy in which they can complain to police about the violence from customers, etc.
Ah, I see you are clairvoyant. Nice. Got any stock tips? ;)
Mr Furious
Balconesfault,
That’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.
—
Blue balls => Homicide is what is bothering me more than anything in this discussion.
Mr Furious
And, no, I realize none of you are actually using that as a rationalization, but even putting that stuff in the same paragraph is giving it some credence.
WyldPirate
Mr. Furious,
No problems. IT’s easy to misinterpret words without visual cues sometimes. I let lose on Jay from Oregon for the same reason.
I hate that this crime happened as much as anyone here. Unfortunately, we can’t rewind the tape of this dude’s life to see what went wrong with him or predict what “might have been”. Seems like that is what a lot of us here are doing.
Mr Furious
Cool.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@WyldPirate:
At the same time, I will grant you that his lack of interaction with women probably made an already miserable situation more dangerous. It’s much easier to kill people you don’t think of as human beings, and it’s much easier not think of people as human beings if you don’t interact with them.
But then again, look at these devotees of “The Game”. These guys presumably interact with women a lot, but nonetheless manage to maintain the belief that women are biological automatons and status whores.
John T
I think many people are too quick to rely on facile pneumatic metaphors — if only he had an “escape valve” or “release”, the “pressure” wouldn’t have built up and he wouldn’t have “exploded”. As if a plumber could have fixed the guy’s problems. We’re talking about a crazy mind here, not a steam engine.
Betsy
@John T:
Win.
Betsy
@R-Jud:
That is terrible. I’m so sorry. And the irony of that infuriating, victim-blaming statement is highlighted @Jay in Oregon: ‘s point that it’s when women leave that they are most in danger of being murdered. (Which you likely know, but I’m venting.) It’s no-win. The best you can hope for is that the victim is able, with the help of a domestic violence victim’s advocate, to put together an escape plan. And even that is often not possible, depending on immigration status, disability, children…
Ben Richards
@Just Some Fuckhead: Heh. Another bullet point in your MVP resume for commenting on this site in 2009. Bravo!
BOB is the dark horse in this race by the way .
Anne Laurie
Because someone has to bring up the Feminism 101 point: The importance of keeping sex work (“prostitution”) illegal is part of the same Talibangelical worldview as the belief that women are vile, scheming, non-autonomous subhumans whose only PROPER roles are as fvckholes, baby-incubators, and unpaid domestic servants. The number of “prostitutes” goes up, and their prices go down, whenever a fundamentalist/authoritarian government makes it impossible for women to get an education or a “real” job — it ain’t a bug, it’s a feature.
Elie
We can speculate endlessley about this sad man and the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands like him…
My husband is not violent but he has real mental illness. He struggles with his perceptions and mood every effing day. He strains my capacity for understanding and energy. I cannot imagine what it would be like if he were also violent.
We have such a tiny system of help for those with emotional and psychological problems and it is very hard to get the expertise in both the cognitive (talk therapy) and psychopharmacological arena. Its hard to get the therapists to care –. For the clinic therapists — they are swimming in cases, up to their ears in sad, and horribly sick people. Their desks are covered with charts….
We see overwhelming evidence of psychological and emotional illness all around us, every day. Yet we have no evidence that the public cares to do anything about it except to arm themselves to the teeth and deny broad access to the help people need to understand themselves and their lives.
I am heartbroken for the people whose loved ones were among the victims of this latest explosion of violent mental illness. Until they and all of us start screaming and demanding better, we will continue to get this — the clucking sounds of sympathy for the victims, the old bromides about gun violence and the escapist denial that allows us to believe that this won’t ever happen to us.
I am tired, as are many in this huge, rich country of pleading for mercy for our fragile and vulnerable people…
Go look in the mirror. Chances are if you aren’t affected, someone in your family or circle of close friends is.
Own it. Recognize it. We must change this
Lesley
What Anne Laurie and asiangrrlMN said earlier.
My favourite composite headline of the day:
“PA shooter couldn’t understand why women avoided him, despite his best efforts.”
Yeah, cuz he was one of the Nice Guys (TM). Damn women for being intuitive and not picking up Nice.
HRA
I believe more information will come out in later days regarding this tragedy. My condolences to those who lost someone. I am glad and happy anonymous reader and his wife were not among the victims.
I read where the Soldini was a member of the gym. Taking into consideration his admission of not being able to get a date and his target being the aerobics class, I wonder if he had tried to date some of those women and was unsuccessful.
I survived divorcing an angry man. I will stick to that description for it’s even painful now to admit the real one. I could write forever about the fright I experienced after the separation. Instead I am offering what I think helped me. I asked for nothing. I moved to where I could not be vulnerable. I was highly aware of my surroundings when I went to work, out to shop, etc. In fact, I had marked safe havens on my routes outside. I honestly felt protected.
I am married now for many years to a wonderful man.
Wile E. Quixote
@adamchaz
Yeah, but how did he choose to express his feelings about rejection? Well, he chose to go out and kill a bunch of women. The dude was a misogynistic fuckwit, he should be ground up and dumped into a shit pool at a sewage treatment facility.
Wile E. Quixote
Perhaps we should round up all of these dickheadsand lock them away before they go off.
Lesley
@HRA:
Interestingly, the shooter claimed working out at the gym alleviated his stress and made him less angry. Unfortunately he either quit or it didn’t last.
HRA
He went to the gym 3 times on that day.
It’s a card entry place. Sometimes one has to wonder if our modern technology is lacking in certain areas. Had there been a counter with a person signing him in as when I was a member of a gym, then maybe there would have been an alert person raising questions about those visits.
bago
I can sympathize all too deeply. Dodged a sexually frustrated right wing gun nutter by hours, killing seven in the house of some of my best friends. Not all of them made it out.
Someone needs to make a scene in a movie where it takes 5 minutes to delete a dead friends phone number in their phone. It took me 2 years and 2 phones to finally get over it.
bago
Oh, and as for the reasoning, it’s vanity.
When you know the way and the truth, yet the world does not respect your wishes, obviously it is the world that is wrong. “We create our own reality”. Going out in a fervent blaze of glory becomes the ultimate way in which to assuage your vanity. All others be damned, at the barrel of a gun.