It's more so me trying to prevent malice being assumed of myself. As you said; I'm pretty much the only left leaning person on this board anymore.
You're definitely not. I can think of at least two more, of which one is, like you, highly respected here because he can hold rational and thoughtful discourse on issues like this. You're also not someone to whom most people here would ascribe malice in your posts. I certainly don't.
The incel angle is interesting. I could think of only one major incel-specific mass shooting, which was
probably the one that most folks think of when they think of incel violence (in fact this is how I learned "incel" was a thing; prior to that I thought that "not getting laid" was "a pretty normal condition for a lot of men when they were young, including me").
I didn't spend a lot of time looking it up, but I didn't find a lot of things that supported the incel argument for a lot of mass shootings. I found a couple, but I also
did find an article that tries reeeeaalll hard to shoehorn incel into motivations in other crimes. Example:
Or take the
Buffalo shooter’s recent manifesto mentioning the Great Replacement Theory, the idea that the White Race was being progressvely replaced by the Brown and Black Races. While he clearly espoused a racist ideology, the young man was also sexually and socially frustrated, felt marginalized from his local community and so searched for and found acceptance in extremist online forums.
OK. So the Buffalo shooter was racist, when we want to use that for political purposes. But in an article about incels, suddenly he's an incel? I mean, I followed that story because I live in NY, and I think it's pretty clear the guy was an outright racist. And of course it's possible to have more than one motivation for a crime. But maybe the reason he had social and sexual problems was because... he's a racist and all-around shitty human being? Correlation does not equal causation...
But even assuming that incels are committing a lot of mass gun violence, "young men who can't get laid, and are mad about it" probably eclipse, by orders of magnitude, the number of trans men in the US. And assuming that the claims in the "trans shooter" meme are also true (I didn't fact-check them), then it seems likely that trans/non-binary men are committing mass gun violence in great disproportionality to their relative numbers, at least over say the last 6 or 7 years.
Inasmuch as correlation does not equal causation with incels, the same should be said for trans perpetrators. It used to be way easier to purchase and keep firearms. I mean, I've bought guns from Wal-Mart in the past, and
you could literally order guns through the Sears catalogue. Yet, we had far fewer mass shootings in the past. I think? So if that's true, what has changed? I'm not expert, but I think a combination of a steady rise in mental health issues, a decline in shared values, disintegration of the family unit, a culture of self-indulgence and self-victimization, and mass social media have brought us where we are today.
I don't know what is causing all of this violence. I don't know if incels or trans folk or anyone else is more likely to carry it out (other than to note that most mass shooters are young and male, and most mass shooters you read about in the news are white). I do know that in addition to the enormous grief and suffering these attacks inflict on the families and victims involved, they also give bureaucrats the ability to negatively affect my life and my ability to protect myself, my family, and my property with firearms.
We are all losers in these attacks, no matter if they target a gay bar, a recruiting center, or a Catholic school. My deep empathy for the victims and their families.
