It seems there is always a demographic that wants to make a horrible act of murder worse. When the sad little geldings of the manosphere lionize people like Marc Lepine or like Eliot Rogers for going on a murder sprees to punish those those they blamed for their lack of a sex life and only lament that Rogers “killed too many men – and didn’t “butcher” enough “sorority girls”, or rejoice that the murder/suicide mission of German Wings pilot Andreas Lubitz adds a “little blood into the mix” of the men’s rights revolution … those people make the tragic deaths of innocent people all the more heinous because they try, in some way, to shift the blame to the victims. According to them, if feminists would shut up and return to the kitchen, and “sluts were a little less picky and a little more equitable in their distribution of blow jobs” i.e. to every guy who wants one regardless of whether or not the woman finds him desirable, then shooting sprees wouldn’t happen.
It’s bad enough when the victims are blamed for their own deaths, but the recent shooting of two reporters in Virginia by a monster named Vester Lee Flanagan (AKA Bryce Williams) has not only managed to get people willing to blame the victims’ purported racism for their deaths, but there are also racists taking advantage of the fact the shooter was black to claim sympathy for racism and spread racist propaganda. The murder spree of Flanagan/Williams has even been used to call into question the movement of #BlackLives Matter, as if saying black lives matter means that white lives don’t matter as opposed to wanting the murders of black people to be EQUALLY appalling as the murders of white people.
In truth, Flanagan/Williams was just another monster looking for the justification of murdering people so that he would feel more respected and in control. Yes, he wrote that “he suffered racial discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying at work, because he was a gay black man” but his murder manifesto also included praise for the Virginia Tech mass shooter Seuing Hui Choi and the Columbine high school murderers by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. It is important to remember that all psychopathic mass shooters are motivated by the same thing, and “what lies at the heart of their anger is victimization. Whether real or imagined, the psychopathic mass killer believes that he or she has been ruined in some way … Being the narcissists that they are, mass killers make everything about them. The entire killing is meant to highlight the wrong that has been done to them while at the same time punishing those responsible.”
He murdered his coworkers for the same reason another evil person would murder strangers in movie theaters; he was a psychotic monster. Not schizophrenic like James Eagan Holmes, but a psychopath who thought he was superior to other humans and that other humans didn’t really ‘count’. Their deaths were for his self-aggrandizement, without any concern for their suffering or the suffering of their loved ones. The only difference between Flanagan/Williams and most mass shooters is that he was black and gay instead of straight and white, and racism was the excuse he used for his rage as opposed to the lack of blow jobs by blonde sluts.
The bitter reality of mass shootings in the us is that “most school shooters are White males, with 97 percent being male and 79 percent White. Over the last three decades, 90 percent of high school or elementary school shootings were the result of White, often upper-middle class, perpetrators. These shootings are a direct reflection of White male privilege and the consequences that occur when groups like the NRA control influential conservative leaders.” However, feeling that they are not getting the privileges they deserve is only one half of the equation. The other half is the psychopathic belief that other people exist simply to be targets of their feelings of rage.
Did Flanagan/Williams experience racism? Without doubt. There is systemic racism built into the US culture and every person of color has run up against it, in either it subtly or overt forms. The victims might even have committed microaggressions without intent. Did he have to deal with homophobia? Without doubt. Are these the real reasons he killed? No. Eliot Rogers was a virgin, so his ‘complaint’ that women were having sex with him was true, but that was not the real reason he murdered people. Andreas Lubitz was rightfully afraid of losing his job, but that isn’t the real reason he murdered people. Did teenagers Harris and Klebold feel bullied? Yes, but it is not the real reason they murdered people. Did Choi feel like he was a failure and people judged him differently because of his ethnicity? Yes, but that is not the real reason he killed people. The real reason is that unholy dark triad of personality disorders that makes any life but their own seem completely incidental. Other people exist solely as props and sites of aggression.
Unlike the Charleston church shooter, Dylann Storm Roof, Flanagan/Williams wasn’t a terrorist. He didn’t seek to murder random white people because they were inherently bad because of their ethnicity and to instigate a race war, like Roof said he did to people of color. He was murdering white former coworkers because he felt they had disrespected and conspired against HIM, and should be punished for how they supposedly treated HIM. There was no distance to it. The effects of racism, either that imposed on Flanagan/Williams or his specific targeting of white former coworkers, is merely the lens that Flanagan/Williams used to view his rage and desire to ‘punish’ people for things that made HIM unhappy. It was his excuse, and should never be posited as a justification or mitigating circumstance for his murderous rampage.