Too bad Pope Francis didn’t visit America a week later. He could have used the killings at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., to denounce guns – and abortion.
The Holy Father could have pointed to the killer’s apparent hatred of religion, then – working all angles – he could have drawn a connection between Chris Harper Mercer’s lack of concern for human life and females refusing to procreate.
In the case of Mercer, nobody would dare ask his mother, Laurel Harper, if she’s sorry she had him. For all of the many conversations our politicians are forever having, that is one subject that is rarely raised.
As it is, Laurel Harper sounds as overprotective – and culpable – as the mother of the Sandy Hook killer. It wouldn’t be surprising if it turned out that Laurel Harper bought some of the guns her disturbed son used to kill his writing teacher and eight classmates. She visited shooting ranges with her son when she lived in Torrance, Calif., before moving to Oregon, according to former neighbors who spoke to The New York Times.
Neighbors also told the Times that the mother tried to protect her son “from all manner of neighborhood annoyances, from loud children and barking dogs to household pests. Once, neighbors said, she went door-to-door with a petition to get the landlord to exterminate cockroaches in her apartment, saying they bothered her son.”
Harper, who worked as a licensed practical nurse, had to know more about her son than any mandated gun background check could reveal. Did it ever occur to her that her son – her “Asperger’s kid” as she referred to him according to news reports – should not own a gun, let alone several of them?
Parental love has its limits when it is so unconditional that all objectivity is lost. The son of Ian Mercer and Laurel Harper was a creepy man-child, who spent a lot of time posting revealing comments in online message boards, such as 4chan. Did his parents have no idea how he spent his time or what he wrote?
Before you dismiss 4chan as a place where only anonymous losers congregate, note that Christopher “Moot” Poole, the founder emeritus of 4chan, has been profiled by TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Technology Review and Vanity Fair, and he was a featured speaker at the 2010 TED Conference. By one estimate, 4chan is visited by 22 million unique visitors a month.
The day before the college shootings, an anonymous commenter on 4chan’s /r9k/ board, whose e-mail address has been linked to Chris Mercer, posted that he was going to shoot up a school in the Northwest. Eavesdropping on this crowd reveals a world of beta males (as opposed to alpha males) plotting “beta uprisings” to get even with the “Chads and Stacies” and other “normies” who have rejected them. Some commenters refer to themselves as “Incels” for Involuntarily Celibate.
Among the comments urging on the shooter the day before the killings took place:
“Do not use a shotgun. I would suggest a powerful assault rifle and a pistol or 2x pistols. Possibly the type of pistols who have 15+ ammo.”
“In this very clearly hypothetical situation you actually shoot people in your high school or college, try to aim for shitty people at least. Spare the kind fools, humdrum druggies, and churchies and go for he whom really terrorises the populous: Chads and Stacies who have scorned many and yourself.”
“You’ll do the world a favour by purging part of the population that only exists to consume resources and act for themselves.”
“You might want to target a girls school which is safer because there are no beta males throwing themselves for their rescue.”
After the shooting occurred, comments shifted to:
“Holy fuck.”
“Hi journalists.”
“If only he had been consoled or had a GF then maybe he wouldn’t have went off the deep end like this and many lives would have been saved.”
“Instead of making fun of the betas or calling them creepy nerds, we should have saved then. My heart goes out to the victims but our shooter here as this thread here shows was a victim too.”
“Anyone wanna see my penis?”
“All of you who goaded him on should do the world a favor and kill yourselves. I hope Chad fucks every girl you have ever known. Every. Single. One. Bite the barrel and squeeze nice and hard.”
“LET IT BE KNOWN THAT HAVING A GIRLFRIEND PREVENTS MASS SHOOTINGS!”
“Stay mad normie scum.”
When Rory Cellan-Jones, a reporter for the BBC, posted a comment looking for information about the shooter’s posts and asking if anyone knew him and would be comfortable appearing on the BBC, replies came in. A few of them:
“Yes, he is a very close friend of mine. He is my robot friend.”
“A gf could have prevented this… state mandated gfs when?”
“Nobody ever blames the psycho… just where he posts, and the weapon he chooses.”
Not surprisingly, it turns out that Mercer left behind a typewritten manifesto. He was angry and bitter about, among other things, not having a girlfriend.
“He did not like his lot in life, and it seemed like nothing was going right for him,” a law enforcement official told The New York Times. “It’s clear he was in a very bad state of mind.”
How could his mother, who lived with him, not notice? Perhaps her life was equally miserable. I’ve never had kids, but I try to imagine living in a one-bedroom apartment with a guy like Mercer. I think I might have been tempted to take him to a bus depot, buy him a one-way ticket to someplace else and send him off: Go forth and try not to multiply.
What options are available? We no longer institutionalize many people who are clearly mentally ill. (You can visit them downtown on the streets of Portland.) We certainly aren’t going to lock up people who merely act strange.
Even mental health experts now warn that there is little they can do to prevent mass shootings. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed a couple of months ago, Dr. Matthew Goldenberg of the Yale University School of Medicine, said the mental health system cannot know who is going to be dangerous.
“In order to prevent one mass shooting, how many innocent and harmless people would we feel comfortable institutionalizing, perhaps indefinitely?” Goldenberg asked.
Then he suggested that curtailing gun ownership would be a less dramatic restriction than institutionalizing the wrong person. He doesn’t explain how banning gun ownership will ban guns or keep guns out of the hands of the wrong men. Goldenberg is a psychiatrist; certainly he has to know that laws alone don’t change behavior.
Making the situation worse, we are now in the midst of a crusade to “end mass incarceration.” The major media have been practically giddy this past year with the bipartisan efforts – even the Koch brothers are on board – to open up the nation’s prisons and release “nonviolent offenders.”
At first, this magnanimous gesture was going to free marijuana smokers from prison. Then it turned out that nobody was in prison just for smoking marijuana or, for that matter, just using drugs. People who end up in prison are either chronic felons (serial burglars, for example) or they have committed a violent crime.
In order to pursue this crusade to “end mass incarceration,” there will have to be some tinkering with definitions so felons who have committed “violent” crimes can be reclassified as “non-violent.” Among the violent crimes proposed to be recast as non-violent are home-occupied burglaries, drug dealing (substance abuse never leads to violence, does it?) and – weapons violations! Being an ex-felon in possession of gun is apparently no big deal.
It would help if the politicians who are serious about preventing the wrong men from arming themselves, would stop embracing those very same men and making excuses for them.
It scares the normies, rightfully so.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
I think the 4chan links might be gone. Thanks for the excerpts.
The worst boss I ever had was a woman who liked to say “I’m a mom.” Anytime we questioned a decision she made it was explained away with “I’m a mom”. I never got how being a mom had anything to do with it.
The shooter’s mom sounds like someone who thinks because she’s a mom she has extra smarts. I’ve had male bosses and not one of them said “I’m a dad” to explain a decision they’ve made.
I’d bet this mom played the special needs card. Her son had special needs, and she helped him get a bunch of guns to make him feel better.
Thanks for the comment. Yes, the site attached to those links has been taken down. It seems that initially they were willing to claim a connection to Mercer, and then they weren’t.
I understand what you’re saying about the I’m-a-Mom response. Mercer also had a father. He says he didn’t know his son had an arsenal, which says something about his lack of involvement. Granted, the ex-wife moved out of state, but did it not occur to the father (especially after Sandy Hook) that maybe he ought to check in on his son once in a while since he had behavioral problems.
I’ve spent the last two weeks thinking about what I would do differently if I were still in the classroom. I don’t know. It was anoter world when I started teaching.
I remember thinking when gun-free zones started that it would help reassure students. A former colleague who still teaches tells me some students don’t want the school called “gun free” anymore. They think it’s bad luck.
Political correctness will prevent the schools from having a real discussion about guns.
Here’s the right way to deal with incipient crime:
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2015/10/man_accused_of_threatening_wom.html
A man discusses committing acts of violence with an acquaintance, and she calls the cops. They arrest the repeat offender for carrying a gun illegally, and he shows remorse by threatening the woman who turned him in, warning her not to testify against him.
That’s what we need: the “normies” have to take responsibility when they see sullen betas starting to make concrete plans to inflict harm, and tell the authorities. This isn’t about being an “informer,” it’s all about becoming a full member of the clan of honest citizens. It’s harder for a parent to do so, but remember that it was Mohamed Osman Mohamud’s own father who called the FBI. Courageous parents do exist.
Thanks, Nelson, for the excellent point about Mohamud’s father.
I saw the story in The O about the woman who called the cops. The man’s sentence seemed too light. One way to improve gun laws is to lengthen the sentences of repeat offenders who carry guns illegally.
This past Sunday in The O, there was an item buried in the story, “Warning signs are usually there,” about a Grants Pass man named Raphael Amoroso who was arrested in 2011 after plotting a sniper attack at a football game. He was found outside a stadium “with a loaded gun, ammunition, binoculars and a book about a stadium sniper attack.”
Now he’s free and is under “post-release supervision,” which doesn’t sound very reassuring. It takes a village to keep an eye on guys like that when the state won’t.
[…] ‘Stay Mad, Normie Scum’ […]
In regard to Pamela’s post, I grew up with Raphael. the last remark about “it takes a village. . . ” is so off the mark. In this case, the “village” knows this young man, and the village knows that the charges were trumped up beyond all belief. There was no plot of any sort, and most of the press releases are sensationalized. There wwas a local news camera outside his moms house while the police were conducting the search warrant. The anchor interviewed one of his neighbors for 10 minutes. “Used to give my son rides home from school when it was raining, help me do yard work,” etc. The one excerpt they aired was, “He was quiet and didn’t bother anyone” Seems like the neightbor your want, as opposed to some loud partiers. In addition to that, He lived in Eugene at the time but was in Grants Pass helping his mom because she had hip replacement surgery. Another article (from the Sneak Preview, I believe) says “Nieghbors say he was strange, and would disappear for months at a time.” Really? You mean he’s 18 or older and moved out, possibly to a different town, and comes to visit once in a while? Any article about him is one sided.
He smoked pot two or three times a month and collected WW2 era rifles. Big deal. There’s far more dangerous criminals that never see the inside of a prison cell because they turn other people in or know how to play the system. Raphael is not one of those people and never has been. The entire “sniper plot” scenario was cooked up by the local police department to get press. He was charged with “manufacture/possession of a destructive device” because he had a pound of gunpowder and a 5 gallon bucket full of .308 shell casings to reload. The county dropped the charge because the was no “desctructive device”, it was reloading material, but they knew it would get press.
The circumstances of his case are laughable. It should have been a duii, poss. of marijuana charge, and poss. of a firearm in/on a public building charge. Instead it morphed into 3 years in federal prison, 5 con air flights, and god knows how much tax payer money wasted by the federal government to get the point across about “possessing a firearm while being a user of a controlled substance (18 usc 922 (g) (3)), which is one of the most obscure gun laws there is on the books.
You sound like a friend of Raphael’s. Sorry, but I don’t trust your version of events. I don’t find the circumstances laughable, either. How many people take a pound of gunpowder with them to sports stadiums?
Far from being obscure, the law about possessing a firearm while being a user of a controlled substance is a law that should be invoked more often considering how much violence is committed by people under the influence. It makes no sense to keep passing more gun laws when we don’t enforce the ones we have.
If you consider yourself a friend of Raphael’s, don’t encourage him to feel like the victim here.
I’m sure you’re right that there are more dangerous criminals who haven’t seen the inside of a prison. That’s hardly reassuring, nor is it an excuse for Raphael to get a pass.
Yeah, as I said I grew up with him. He did cub scouts and received his Arrow of Light. He was on year round swim team from the time he was 8 til a senior in high school. Honor and AP classes all 4 years in high school, plus holding down a part time job from his sophomore year onward.
I think the point was is that for the federal government to get involved in charges so mundane is waste of taxpayer money.
Anyone can selectively edit someone else’s life to fit whatever mold is necessary, and that’s exactly what happened here. Facts were skewed and were deliberately vague.
As for gunpowder and whatnot, it was not on him, it was discovered in the search of his house(10/12/11), which was days after the stop for the initial DUII (10/7/11) that got the ball rolling on this bs. I’ve talked to him numerous times since this happened. “You scared a lot of people with what you did” is the official line when he’s addressed with the fallout of this debacle. Really? He didn’t call the local news crew and ask them to be there with a camera crew to spew this trash all over the airwaves. He didn’t write the headlines. let alone give any sort of interview with the media. He was arrested at gun point (4 cops with pistols and one cop with an AR-15) while a block away from his house, on the way to the city courthouse to deal with an unpaid ticket no less.
This smear campaign, which you are buying into, was fomented by GPDPS in order to manufacture fear in the community for a night of drinking and a bad decision.
You say, “don’t encourage him to feel like the victim here.” He was not a victim, he was a target. I could bring up any topic of American history, let alone 20th century political history, with him and have a deep conversation about the meanings and implications of decisions, from the Treaty of Versailles to the current happenings in Iraq/Afghanistan (which is interesting, because we both know people that are in the service, and have been there because they signed up with promises of the GI Bill, and aren’t armchair quarterbacking like so many others).
Here’s one for you: How many violent crimes are committed while someone is under the influence of marijuana? And I don’t mean a DUII (which usually also involves alcohol while a car is wrapped around a telephone pole. . . ), I actually mean how many people smoke marijuana, then go out and commit a violent crime (rape, murder, burglary, stolen vehicle, etc.). How many people that smoke marijuana go out and rob houses/cars to fuel their addiction?
He did something wrong. Namely, a DUII and a pistol in the glove box of a car. Okay, let there be consequences. Nobody (let alone him) has ever denied that. But for what happened to have happened the way that it did was completely inappropriate, and the police knew exactly what they were doing when they offered their press release.
There was no plot. There was no plan. There was no nefarious actions on his mind, that I can tell you, as I talked to him two days after he received the initial DUII, and the only thing he lamented was “Shit, I got a DUII, going to lose my license for a year, how am I gong to run a landscaping business if I can’t drive a truck to haul leaves to the dump?” Oh, did I mention he was in Grants Pass taking care of his mom because she had a hip replacement surgery, and put a term of college on hold because of it? Maybe you didn’t read that in the Daily Discourager press releases, which were no doubt directly from the mouth of GPDPS, or see it on the news. Oh wait, I know why, because nobody with a pen and paper with access to a printing press ever asked him what really happened. If you continue with this post, I’m sure he’d love to talk to you to put to bed any slander that you continue to spread.
He laughed when I told him I put a post in regard to his case, because people like you believe everything you see on tv, trust the government 100%, and never question anything that comes from the mouth of “officialdom”, and can usually not be convinced even with facts an inch from your face.
Stop beating a dead horse when you know nothing about the case/person in question. I guarantee he is the exact opposite of what he was portrayed as.
Mr. Boone:
I don’t know if you read my bio, but most of my professional life was in newspaper reporting and editing.
You write: “This smear campaign, which you are buying into, was fomented by GPDPS in order to manufacture fear in the community for a night of drinking and a bad decision.”
I’m not buying into any “smear campaign.” I understand that media pile-ons can be unfair. Ask any cop who has shot just an “unarmed” black man. (I put “unarmed” in quotes because I know that unarmed men can be dangerous.)
Do you not read the news? There’s a reason why your friend is not being given the benefit of the doubt. His school record, etc. can be taken into consideration during sentencing. However, it has little bearing on the crime, which you dismiss as “a night of drinking and a bad decision.” Do you have any idea how many homicides and aggravated assaults are the result of an alleged “bad decision.”
Sorry, but a bad decision is making a credit card purchase you can’t afford or having a baby when you can’t even take care of yourself or racking up a large debt for a college degree that turns out to be worthless. Illegal weapons are against the law. Had your friend been the victim of a crime, and had he reached for that gun in the glove box and used it to save himself, he could argue that he made a good, life-saving decision to have an illegal weapon. That’s not the case here.
You write: “The police knew exactly what they were doing when they offered their press release.” I suspect the police were responding to public inquiries when they produced their press release. There was no reason why your friend could not have responded by contacting the media and giving them his own version of events. Reporters love jailhouse interviews. I never turned down an interview with a criminal suspect, and I accepted all collect calls from jail and prison.
You bring up marijuana: “How many violent crimes are committed while someone is under the influence of marijuana?” I don’t know. I would hate to be a victim or a witness or a bystander to a crime and be under the influence of marijuana because it would likely render me less able to be of use.
After Measure 91, I am well-acquainted with the marijuana faithful who preach the gospel of pot. Now that’s it become a money-maker for the state, don’t be too shocked if your beloved herb is tinkered with to produce the highest THC with increasingly negative consequences. I don’t use marijuana, but I keep any eye on the business and read reviews of marijuana strains. A few months ago I saw a review of a strain that was referred to as “Green Crack.”
Nice. Just what our substance abuse-loving country needs.
What weapon was illegal? None were stolen, None had filed down sears or were fully automatic. All were purchased legally. Hell, the M1 Carbine he had was the one his father carried when he was in the Army in that fun filled conflict referred to as a “police action” in Korea.
I asked him the same thing about talking to someone to tell his side of the story. The federal public defenders advised him against it, so he didn’t do it. They know best, they’re lawyers, right. . ?
It is illegal to have a gun on school grounds. That’s what your friend pleaded guilty to. He was also under the influence of drugs and alcohol at the time he had the gun, which is also a violation.
It’s standard for defense attorneys to advise their clients not to talk to the media, but ever notice how many do anyway?
Pamela,
so owning guns is now a crime worthy of incarceration? Is also smoking pot? I would like to remind you laws are arbitrary. Since this man’s arrest [Amaroso’s] Oregon & WA have legalized marijuana. While it is illegal to drive under the influence (an act which many still do) and while it is illegal to bring arms on school ground, I’d argue that the severity of the Amaroso’s actions were highly polemicized and sensationalized. It’s not wrong to own arms or collect them, nor is smoking pot the criminal offense it once was: if it were illegal then every pot smoking veteran would be a criminal. Amaroso pleaded guilty to possessing guns and being intoxicated while driving in a school area but arguably this could have happened to nearly anyone. The treatment of his case was a misuse of our laws and a blatant twist of justice perverted for the benefit of others, namely the police force in Medford/Grant’s Pass, who have since used this incident to justify getting millions of dollar’s worth of SWAT gear and high grad military paraphernalia that no small town, let alone metropolis, needs to police their people.
While your underlying concerns about gun safety are good you are clearly pushing the limit of what is just in your reasoning. Yes, Amaroso was guilty of DUI & arms possession on school grounds but this does not make the man a killer, a would be killer, a criminal worthy of Federal incarceration or a man who has to, forever, bear the burden of defending himself for crimes he did not commit merely because of the circumstantial appearance.
Owning guns can be a crime depending on who owns them or where. Ex-felons, for example, are not allowed to possess guns, and even law-abiding citizens who have a legal right to own guns may not be allowed to take them in certain places — school grounds, for example.
Same with drugs. Under some conditions of probation, a subject is prohibited from using alcohol and other drugs or associating with people who are using drugs.
Was “the severity of the Amoroso’s actions … highly polemicized and sensationalized?” Possibly. That does happen, especially if there has been a recent high-profile crime.
In Amoroso’s case, his crime occurred close to the same time of shooting attacks in Colorado and Wisconsin. He didn’t just have multiple guns, he had a camouflage sniper’s suit, sniper manuals, a ballistic helmet and 2,000 rounds of rifle ammunition.
I hope Mr. Amoroso is doing better. He seems to have friends who care about him.
[…] ‘Stay Mad Normie Scum’ […]
I’m curious as to whether you have ever interviewed Rafael? It seems the John Boone fellow knows him/grew up with him, etc., yet you “don’t trust your [his] version of events.” Do you only “trust” the version put forth by GPDPS? Articles about this seem to always say “suspected”, which leads me to believe that there was no plot, especially since there was no conspiracy charges filed.