Gun Issues

The shooter who killed two children and injured 21 others at a Minneapolis church was seen on video visiting a suburban gun shop the weekend before the attack.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) September 5, 2025 at 12:30 AM

… Krause stressed that nothing in Westman’s conduct raised any concerns among his staffers, who he said are trained to watch for warning signs.

“This person said all the right things, they checked all the right boxes, asked all the questions, they were friendly, talkative, making jokes, laughing, knowledgeable about guns, handled a lot of guns that were not the type of guns you would think are of the interest of somebody looking to do a mass shooting,” Krause told the AP.

Krause said his employees have extensive experience in picking out bad actors, straw purchasers, people who are homicidal, suicidal, mentally unstable or under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He said nothing stood out with Westman.

“We’re still going over it,” Krause said. “We’re still scratching our heads thinking, ‘What did we miss? What could we have done?’ But it always ends with the answer of ‘nothing.’ There was just nothing there. And that’s what makes this situation so unique.”…

The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another www.theatlantic.com/technology/a…

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— Jennifer Ouellette (@jenlucpiquant.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 5:04 PM

Charlie Warzel, at the Atlantic, suggests “The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another” [gift link]:

Last week, a 23-year-old opened fire outside a church at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two children and injuring 19 other people before dying by suicide. Just a few hours later, the shooter’s YouTube videos began to circulate online. In one, the shooter shows off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a bed. The killer laughs and offers a stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I didn’t ask for life,” they say, the camera focused on the shooter’s vape. “You didn’t ask for death.”…

… The video was picked apart by people looking for some hints as to the shooter’s motivation or politics. Some right-wing influencers and MAGA-friendly news outlets seized on the killer’s gender identity, insinuating that the shooting had something to do with them being trans. Others fixated on the message about killing Trump and suggested the killer was a deranged liberal. Some left-leaning commentators seized upon the anti-Semitic scrawlings and racial slurs and said the killer was clearly a neo-Nazi.

But the rush to make sense of the shooting based on these messages and symbols is misguided. As incoherent, unhinged, or even cringey as the Minneapolis shooter’s videos might seem, they are part of a familiar template of terroristic behavior—one that continues to spread in online communities dedicated to mass shootings and other forms of brutality. In these morbid spaces, killers are viewed as martyrs, and they’re dubbed “saints.” Really, they’re influencers.

These disaffected communities live on social networks, message boards, and private Discords. They are populated by trolls, gore addicts, and, of course, aspiring shooters, who study, debate, and praise mass-shooting tactics and manifestos. Frequently, these groups adopt the aesthetics of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—sometimes because they are earnestly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and sometimes because it’s the look and language that they’re cribbing from elsewhere. It’s always blurry, but it usually amounts to the same thing. In an article published by this magazine last year, Dave Cullen, author of the book Columbine, summed it all up: “As you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!”…

To understand the dynamics at play here, I spoke at length with Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies online extremism. He told me that the “proximate goal of these attacks is to entrench the shooter in the broader legacy of violence and propel the legacy further.” The idea, in other words, is to motivate someone else to become a shooter—by creating a public manifesto, leaving a trail of digital evidence, and even livestreaming attacks in some cases. “The more frequently the template shows up, the more likely it will repeat,” Newhouse said. “It’s not ideological in the sense that we tend to think about it. There may be anti-Semitic or fascistic elements therein, but the real incentive is the self-reinforcing legacy of these shooters.”…

Much more at the link.

Meanwhile… speaking of ‘trolls, gore addicts, and… aspiring shooters’:

Inside the gun absolutists’ bold plot to repeal one of America’s strongest firearms laws

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) September 5, 2025 at 12:05 PM

Weird Times: Who Are the Audience for ‘Spree Killers’?Post + Comments (59)