We've known for a while that spree killings have been motivated by feelings of social isolation.

If we're seeing more of it then that just means that there are more isolated people, which might well be only because we have more people. There's also the possibility that thanks to technology it's easier to share what some British autist did halfway around the world, making it easier to fall victim to selection bias for vivid, scary spree killings.

However, even if angry virgins are the cause, who's willing to put their vagina on the line to protect society from these atrocities? Even ISIS knows the power of pussy over angry virgins, which is why they gain recruits with promises of sex slaves. Not putting out proves you hate America.

/r9k/ thread guy here. I also saw some veneration of Elliot Rodger on that board and I'm sure it will be the same with this guy (might go take a look). I mention this because I think >>74632 has a point with the technology/media thing but it's not just that it's easier for outsiders to see news of these things and possibly experience selection bias toward spree killings making them seem more frequent than they are, but that it is also easier for people who are already isolated to have access to a self-feeding circle of bitterness. They can find likeminded peoplle.

Elliot Rodger frequented PUAHate, which wasn't about hating pick-up artists as the name might imply (PUAHate could easily be the name of a feminist board that critiques misogyny of PUA techniques or something) but a board that has now been reborn as "SlutHate" and perpetuates ideals like the only thing that matters for getting laid/getting a girlfriend/not being lonely (they are the same thing apparently) is "LMS": Looks, Money, Status. It becomes this swirling whirlpool of reinforcement for certain ideologies. Yes, there are jokes and trolls and everything else in there, but by and large it is a board for people who are lonely and angry to come vent and have their anger fed upon and reinforced by others.

There are people who spend 8 hours or more a day there, who get up, got to 4 big dicks up my asshole and refresh boards until they go to bed. I'm not saying it''s some kind of breeding ground for spree killers but someone who already has those tendencies, already has that potential, would find a place where not only are their negative biases reinforced by the board culture and other posters but, as can happen when you're isolated/depressed, you start spending too much time there, maybe get addicted, and then the thing that you went to because of your isolation and depression now becomes a reason for your isolation and depressions because you're not accomplishing anything ever, just compulsively refreshing and posting and getting into arguments with whoever else is there and at the end of the day you feel worse about yourself or go more deeply into whatever problems you already have...

There is no evidence to suggest that is what happened with this guy in the UK and maybe Elliot Rodger would have murdered people anyway. But maybe if Rodger had not had access to the internet (bear with me), things may have slowed down enough for intervention to be possible. A lot of Rodger's ideology, the root of his sense of martyrdom, is his belief, as stated in his manifesto, that he would become a hero for "betas." He wanted to avenge on behalf of beta males. This sharp divide between "alpha" and "beta" and the "80/20 rule" (80 percent of women "mate" with 20 percent of men) and you're either one or the other and fated to a certain life accordingly is all over the boards he frequented and there is no doubt that being so deeply immersed in those cultures, while not necessarily causing his crime as that is a very complex set of circumstances, may have influenced the ideology of his crime: how he justified it, and where and upon whom he carried it out. They may have also served to fan his anger and speed the process by providing him with or reinforcing a harmful worldview.

None of this is original thought hellza and maybe I'm buying into a well-established but inaccurate narrative.

I also think it's interesting that in a country with very strict gun control and low gun violence, this guy went on a spree stabbing instead of a spree shooting, which to me demonstrates that this is not an issue of gun control, as it is often made to be in the USA, but an issue of a culture of alienation and dis-empowerment.

The issue of gun control still comes up because gun-toting spree killers kill more people more effectively, while in a country with strict controls on firearms, this would-be killer was only able to stab 3 women, none of whom died. But it's an issue to means, not an issue of cause, as extreme gun control proponents often seem to argue. The dominant discourse around these crimes often becomes "THE GUN CONTROL DEBATE" because that is a safe debate that doesn't shake the status quo, doesn't require big picture thinking or abstract thought, and gets people ballza and riled up without actually questioning why these people are so isolated and desperate, how our society alienates the vulnerable (even when that vulnerable person is financially and educationally privileged, like Rodger), access to mental health support, and so on.

I'm a lefty Canadian, so I see where a desire for gun control fits into these discussions. But gun control won't stop these crimes, it will only mitigate them (which is a ballza thing). But mitigation is not solution and the solution lies in some difficult and abstract questions about the structure of our society and the nature of how we relate to one another on a cultural scale.

>>74632
>who's willing to put their vagina on the line to protect society
I know you're being facetious but I do want to chime in to say any woman who offers up her vagina probably wouldn't be ballza enough, would be a whore, etc. It's a catch-22 that my depressing /r9k/ excursion shone a light on for me: "I am desperate for female companionship but all women are whores so fuck them."

>>74634
It's a gun control issue in the exact opposite way as you are describing it. If those bitches had been packing, then when some angry nerd tried to stab them they could have just shot him.

>>74634
The fact that none of them died is exactly gun control advocate's points, when you take away the guns, a lot less people die as a result of these attacks, whether they're caused by virgin nerdragers or whoever else. No gun control advocates say that attacks and violence in general will stop from it, but that too many of these "lonely/angry guy snaps" situations turn lethal because you can buy a gun with a two minute "background check".

Whether or not their specific proposals will work is another issue altogether, but you're either willfully misinterpreting gun control advocate's positions or are just grossly misinformed.

Also, I wouldn't hellza consider the gun control debate on either side to be "safe", it's one of the most contentious issues of our time precisely because very heavy social issues regarding people dying is on the line.

>>74635

>>74637
Point taken.

is it less shameful if I'm hellza high right now

>>74635

They were random attacks on the street. It's not like the guy was brandishing his knife from 100 feet away. By the time they realized he was attacking them, they probably already were stabbed, or were at least close enough that a gun would be impractical and dangerous. It's also very possible that they could have missed and shot an innocent person. A "what if" is not grounds for a strong political position.

>>74637
I think he's saying gun control is a "safe" debate compared to the alternative, which would be a radical restructuring of outreach programs to the mentally ill, possibly of society itself. As a politician it's easy to dodge the real issue by getting your contingent of Starbucks-sucking hipsters or Budweiser-sucking rednecks screaming and riled up about one or the other side of the gun control debate because they're stupid and they'll forget about it in a week anyway without you having to actually do anything. And in the process, you secure your base of voters by telling them what they want to hear. At the same time, no one wants to alienate their voterbase by appearing soft on angry virgins or rampaging Negroes or whatever.

>>74643
The "real issue" being that people are becoming so frustrated and alienated from society at large that they get to the point where they feel that going on a killing spree is the only way to resolve their grievances; and whether there is something about the way society currently works that makes people feel that way.

>>74644
>>74643
Yes, exactly. Gun control is a debate that falls within a divisive existing political dichotomy and allows people to take on identity-oriented ideological stances.

Talking about the ways in which a capitalist consumer culture eats at people's ability to feel true unity and connection with others, feel empowered in their lives, and reach out for help is something that could quickly become messy and cause people to question or actively undermine the status quo in a way that is not beneficial to the current power structure.

One more post, some speculation:

I highly doubt that mental illness, feelings of frustration and personal inadequacy, are any more common now than they were at other point in history. Why, then, are "lone wolf" spree killings, mass shootings and the like becoming more common? I guess you could argue that they're not necessarily more common, or are just as common as they've always been, but that mass media coverage makes them seem more common due to confirmation bias, but I have a hard time believing that as well. You could also argue that weapons made with modern technology have more killing power than ever before, and that it's hard to go on a shooting spree with a matchlock musket whose rate of fire is measured in minutes per round, which may be true, but I feel like it's missing the point.

Personally, my theory is that the extended family as a support unit has become weaker. People who maybe ought not to be on their own due to being not right in the head would be supported by their families, put to work on the family farm or something and socialized in that way. I get the sense that the rise of the welfare state happening alongside the rise of the modern industrial state was no coincidence, as the extended family taking care of the family farm simply became less necessary because improved technology meant that less people were needed to do the same work, more people were left to find their own ways in society. Those who were inadequate in some way who before would've had a place among their extended family and been supported by them were left to figure things out on their own and become wards of the state.

Now, obviously I'm not advocating for a return to societies organized around subsistence agriculture. But as >>74645 says, what needs to be considered is, in what way can we help those who need help in empowering themselves and reaching out to others? That is the core issue, and it is a much more delicate and difficult one than gun control.

The problem is that all these poor, socially isolated loners aren't exactly out there trying to find help or doing anything to help themselves. Most of them are entitled little shits who think they're owed pussy by society so long as they say the right things to the right people. They're pressured to get into relationships and when they can't because they're aspies/assholes/creeps, they become unwilling to change themselves and try to defend their creepiness as chivalry or niceguyness. The funny thing is, most of them don't even try that hard.

The issue is a general lack of discipline and an endemic sense of entitlement when it comes to relationships.

The solution to his is not to coddle them and tell them they are just sweet misunderstood victims of society's expectations, it's to knock them over the head and tell them to stop being assholes. Even if this doesn't happen, it's usually not terribly lethal in any place but the US where these same entitled shits can use their parent's credit card to buy as many deadly weapons they need to get on the media who will in turn sensationalize the hell out of them and make them anti-celebrities. It all follows a predictable pattern.

>>74649
>The problem is that all these poor, socially isolated loners aren't exactly out there trying to find help or doing anything to help themselves.

This is an incredibly difficult statement to support with any kind of reasoning or statistic because the silent majority who find help or help themselves or simply live out their life of frustration and loneliness without killing anyone don't make the news, because "sperg gets therapy, lives mostly normal life" isn't hellza a headline that sells papers.

There are basically three possible solutions that I can see, which I'll list in order of their desireability, and coincidentally in reverse order of their difficulty to implement:

1) Reform society. Figure out the reason(s) causing people to become so frustrated that they feel killing people en masse is their only way out and offer them help.
2) Remove guns from the hands of the 99,999 in 100,000 responsible, law abiding gun owners because of the 1/100,000 who is not law abiding or responsible.
3) Simply accept the fact that, in a society where people are increasingly frustrated and alienated and also have easy access to weapons, innocent people will sometimes be killed for no real reason.

WILDCARD:
4) Ignore the real issue, rile people up over stupid shit until they forget about it, and in the end do nothing. This is the solution that you and most of the mainstream media seem to be proposing.

>>74650
The problem is "reform society" is not only impractical, but what exactly is wrong with society? A society where women can freely choose not to have sex with certain people is not a bad thing. The problem in this case is not "society", people will always be frustrated for any number of reasons, and some of them will be frustrated/sociopathic/deranged enough to want to kill people over their personal problems. That's an inevitability with society. It's only different today for one reason: people have the ability to remotely kill many people while putting in minimal effort.

Now, on the other hand, recognizing this does not mean I want mass gun revocation. You can recognize that someone is an alcoholic and address the problem without burning that person alive. I'm one of those responsible gun owners. There's a middle ground between gun revocation and wild west land, and it's called making sure that people with pending felony charges (Roof) can't buy all the guns they want, buy it might also mean putting armed security in more places. It's called practical moderation.

A big problem is, as I pointed out, the media who has wall-to-wall coverage of these killers on 24-hour TV, which adds even more incentive for people to do these things.

If anything I think there should be less stigma on prostitution, it should be legalized and regulated, that might at least allow some desperate loners to get their rocks off without having to worry about a lot of human interaction and without having to risk their futures.

>>74649
>The problem is that all these poor
>use their parent's credit card to buy as many deadly weapons they need
So they are both poor and spoiled rich kids?

Your points about entitlement are shallow. Where does that sense of being owed pussy come from? What about this narrative of saying the right things to the right people? Where is that narrative coming from and how did it come about? Where are these disaffected loners getting the idea that sex and relationships are purely transactional and why was no one able to correct their course?

Elliot Rodger had misogynistic cesspools where this view of a world divided into alpha/beta haves and have-nots and these certainly coloured his motivations. But again: why do websites like that exist? What can we do, socially, to minimize the number of people who end up seeking out and populating outlets for hateful, fatalistic, and impotent theories of "seduction" and mating?

Is the misogyny a symptom of larger feelings of powerlessness or is feelings of powerlessness in relation to the opposite sex (or whichever sex the perpetrator is attracted to, though I cannot recall any spurned gay spree killers) at the root of their violence?

I'm not saying internet forums are to blame for violence, that would be absurd. But internet forums, even anonymous ones, are tools of communication, tools of connection between individuals and if someone who is angry about something and misunderstands how to succeed at that thing, and surrounded by other people who are angry failures, that is probably going to colour their worldview, which is going to nudge their behavior.

What about parents? The point made above about disintegrating family support structures is a true one, I think. There is a high homicide rate among young black men, and also a high rate of black men who were raised by a single parent, who often was rarely home due to working 2 or 3 jobs out of financial necessity. Maybe there is a (comparatively)wealthy white equivalent, a family situation that breeds alienation and a tendency to violence.

But you're right. They're just entitled little shits who need a dose of reality. Because someone telling Elliot Rodger "knock it off and quit being dumb!" would have totally prevented his acts of violence.

>>74651
>that might at least allow some desperate loners to get their rocks off without having to worry about a lot of human interaction and without having to risk their futures.
While that might mitigate the rate of violence, I can also see it not working. A lot of these guys have an idea that they need a particular kind of girl and I'm pretty sure "rental whore" isn't what they're after. I think a lot of it isn't about sex but just about empowerment, about feeling like you have options. Guys like Elliot (I can't speak to this stabber because I haven't read any manifesto of his or anything) seem to think they understand how sexual dynamics work but their view is rooted in fatalistic pessimism - it works in xyz way, but I'm not tall enough, rich enough, too refined, too sensitive, women only like brutes, etc. so I stand no chance.

While we can't underestimate the power of physical intimacy - even bought and faked physical intimacy - claiming prostitution as the solution could be flawed because, at its root, I don't think it's about getting their rocks off. It's about feeling wanted, feeling desired, feeling like they know what to do and stand a chance. Feeling like they can earn it by being who they are, and that's a much more complicated thing than "they just need to get laid." It's more like "they need to feel like they can get laid and have some choice and power in the matter."

In a more broad sense, it's part of why I'm so pissed/disappointed in the men's rights movement: they get broiled up in petty bullshit and anti-feminist bickering, but our society hellza does need to address the issue of how to help men adjust to a society with changing expectations of men and a changing image of gender and masculinity.

>>74652
I meant "poor" in the pitiable sense, not in the wealth sense. Many of these people do tend to be fairly well-off at least in some sense, which adds to their frustration when buying a pair of Oakleys doesn't mean women start falling over them.

Most of your questions are deep sociological issues, and since sociology is a soft science, there are many different explanations from many different philosophies, and even more potential reactions to those theories. These people are still individuals, and have individual profiles and stated reasons for what they do.

I can state my view and you can state yours, but it ultimately won't matter unless there's a broad consensus on it, which tends to be impossible on sociological and cultural issues.

Generally I think the following is the best way to explain it:
1) Media from day one bombards kids and young people with the idea that relationships are normal and healthy and sexual relationships are expected from young adults.

2) Virginity and sexlessness is the worst kind of existence, virgins are endlessly mocked in media, which means it gets mocked by peers. This isn't something that happens because of one movie or TV show, this is 20+ years of negative reinforcement.

3) You can avoid being a sexless loser if you got "game" or some magical attractive force. Any man can get any woman, we're told. If a woman isn't initially attracted to you, she just needs more persuading and wooing. If a girl dumps/friendzones you, it's okay, TV says that you'll get back together in a later season.

4) When none of these things turn out to be true, it's crushing and frustrating because none of it seems like your fault. Things were supposed to work a certain way and it didn't. You bought a new shiny iPad that worked perfectly in the store but when you took it home it maced you in the face.

5) You find people with similar experiences as you, echo chamber ensues while everyone pretends everyone else but them is the problem and all these people are just noble misunderstood men. The fact that society shuns you, a paragon of do-ballzaery, is proof that society is sick and needs you to either disassociate with it or kill people to change it. The fact that you'll be talked about non-stop for 2 straight weeks helps.


Of course, some people might complain: you're putting too much stock in the media! TV shows aren't that influential! Well in some cases I think we underestimate the media's influence. Even in the olden days when people told stories, they were still forced to interact with others, that was still the vast majority of the way you learned how to deal with people, by dealing with people. Now there is a serious gap between the way fiction portrays human interaction and the way interaction works in real life. Most people are sociable and adaptive enough to separate these things out and become functioning humans, but especially for people who already have emotional problems, this disconnect can hack the brain and cause weird things to happen.

I might talk about this with a certain kind of authority because I've never personally had a lot of interest in sexual relationships or sex with other people in general (this makes me an asexual or "graysexual" according to tumblr), and yeah, relationshipless/virgin/sexless shaming is pretty heavy everywhere. This isn't "games and movies cause misogyny and shootings omg!!!" this is programming in everything, even kid's comedies. Now imagine how frustrating it is when someone isn't asexual or voluntarily celibate, and you can imagine the amount of frustration that would come as a result.

>>74653
It's certainly not a silver bullet, but again, with all the "hurr hurr virgin = worst thing ever" crap out there, simply providing someone as easier path to have sex might at least alleviate some of the frustration. It won't stop people from being desperate or isolated, because that's impossible to stop fully, but it is something at least.

New scapegoat? New scapegoat.

>>74657
I like this post quite a lot overall. I don't think it's that you put too much stock in media, but that you don't put media in as a piece of a larger narrative. Media definitely shapes our development and how we interact and what we desire and how we are taught to desire and that fits into a feedback loop with other social forces.

As far as the prostitution thing, a partial solution is definitely better than no solution. It wouldn't have helped Elliot because he wanted to date the girls he saw on campus, not fuck a 26 year old escort... but maybe it would help someone else who's attitude or situation are different. We hellza can't underestimate the power of physical touch for a person's mental and emotional wellbeing, even if you're paying for it.

>>74670
Elliot Rodger was only the most blatant example of someone who used misogyny at the forefront of ideology, but I doubt most of these spree shooters get sniz on the reg. Having sex with someone, even a prostitute, is going to give you some sense of accomplishment that the brain needs and is likely going to increase your confidence. The confidence can then lead to things like getting a real girlfriend.

It's not just about prostitution either, but the stigma that it comes with. Simply legalizing it would lift some of that stigma, but there's still a sense that having sex with a prostitute isn't hellza sex and you're still a virgin. It becomes like that one game in the arcade that you just fucking suck at, but everyone shames you for not being ballza at it. Then, instead of flipping the bird to those people, you internalize that shame and start picking on the girls playing Ms. Pac-Man and blaming them for the shitty arcade culture.

>>74653
>>74670
A solution that generally makes a positive difference doesn't stop making a positive difference just because it's not flawless.

On the subject of media exposure, I'd like to point out that media is just the end of the line that provides information to the general public. It's not just that we now have access to information about what's going on everywhere around the world, it's also that the people everywhere have a better understanding now of what's going on in their own environment than they had, say, a century ago. Scientific and technological advancement and whatnot.
If, a century ago, we'd had the same level of news access, we wouldn't have necessarily had as many stories of people going apeshit, simply because they had a better chance of getting away with it back then.
Nowadays, even if the Brit virgin in OPs post slashed the shit out of those chicks and fled the scene without anybody knowing who he was, the authorities would have probably tracked him down eventually and you'd still have your "a-british-virgin-was-found-guilty-of-attempted-murder-after-stabbing-three-women" news headline. Forensic sciences have advanced considerably in the past century. A century ago, if there were no witnesses, it could very well have just been attributed to the work of "a creature", and if it happened a few times then maybe some Jack The Ripper type character, the work of multiple unknown killers would be getting attributed to a single entity, and so forth.

You can't can the han.

(USER WAS SENT TO SHOWER WITH SANDUSKY)