Isla Vista shootings
I spent an awful lot of time reading news reports about the murderous rampage near the University of California Santa Barbara. Mass shootings are always upsetting (and they should be), but this one hit me especially hard both because of the where and the why.
Santa Barbara is less than two hours south of where I live in San Luis Obispo. The same public radio station serves both cities. I've visited there often. Downtown Santa Barbara is idyllic, almost improbably pretty. Isla Vista, the neighborhood where the shootings happened, is scrappier, full of party-happy students and with occasional problems of the sort caused by large numbers of drunk young people, but still seems mostly like a cheerful, low-key beach town. It's not the sort of place you would imagine something like this happening. I guess no place is, but the Santa Barbara area is especially hard to picture.
One of the victims, Chris Michaels-Martinez, was from my area. He graduated from the high school I drive past every day on my commute. I never knew him or his family, but I suspect I know people who did, because this is not a large community. Of course I mourn for everyone killed in violence like this, but the reality of it hits especially hard when it involves places I've been and people only a few degrees of separation from me.
Then there are the killer's motives. His diatribes are full of so much misogyny and entitlement that they would sound like a parody if they weren't real. But they are real. People are dead because this asshole genuinely believed that he had the right to women's bodies.
Obviously most men, even most awful misogynistic turdbucket men, have some sort of internal braking system that keeps them from deciding that mass murder is the solution to their grievances. However, this killer is just an extreme case of a much larger sickness in society. Women are treated as objects, not full people, and when we objects have the temerity to reject use by men we are vilified.
The terrifying thing is that aside from the specific details of the "retribution" plan, the killer's bitter words don't sound all that different from plenty of stuff other men post on the internet or whine to their friends. In retrospect there were plenty of warning signs, enough that the cops were asked to check him out, but at the time nobody went as far as to lock this dude up because he knew how to be polite to cops and nothing he said or did was that far outside of the norm. (The manifesto and video detailing his plan weren't released until just before he killed, and they did cause his parents to immediately call the cops and start driving up to try to get him. Too late.) Way too many men think it's acceptable to issue online threats of death or rape to women who displease them. Most of these men don't intend to follow through on their threats, but a few do, and we have no way of knowing who.
I'm grieving, sickened, angry, and scared. The only bright side is that maybe this can provoke a national conversation that might start to shift the culture a bit. But if our failure to get any meaningful gun control legislation despite the horrifying frequency of mass shootings is any indication, I don't hold out too much hope of change.
Anyway, here's a well-done article on Salon that does a better job at saying similar things to what I just did.
Santa Barbara is less than two hours south of where I live in San Luis Obispo. The same public radio station serves both cities. I've visited there often. Downtown Santa Barbara is idyllic, almost improbably pretty. Isla Vista, the neighborhood where the shootings happened, is scrappier, full of party-happy students and with occasional problems of the sort caused by large numbers of drunk young people, but still seems mostly like a cheerful, low-key beach town. It's not the sort of place you would imagine something like this happening. I guess no place is, but the Santa Barbara area is especially hard to picture.
One of the victims, Chris Michaels-Martinez, was from my area. He graduated from the high school I drive past every day on my commute. I never knew him or his family, but I suspect I know people who did, because this is not a large community. Of course I mourn for everyone killed in violence like this, but the reality of it hits especially hard when it involves places I've been and people only a few degrees of separation from me.
Then there are the killer's motives. His diatribes are full of so much misogyny and entitlement that they would sound like a parody if they weren't real. But they are real. People are dead because this asshole genuinely believed that he had the right to women's bodies.
Obviously most men, even most awful misogynistic turdbucket men, have some sort of internal braking system that keeps them from deciding that mass murder is the solution to their grievances. However, this killer is just an extreme case of a much larger sickness in society. Women are treated as objects, not full people, and when we objects have the temerity to reject use by men we are vilified.
The terrifying thing is that aside from the specific details of the "retribution" plan, the killer's bitter words don't sound all that different from plenty of stuff other men post on the internet or whine to their friends. In retrospect there were plenty of warning signs, enough that the cops were asked to check him out, but at the time nobody went as far as to lock this dude up because he knew how to be polite to cops and nothing he said or did was that far outside of the norm. (The manifesto and video detailing his plan weren't released until just before he killed, and they did cause his parents to immediately call the cops and start driving up to try to get him. Too late.) Way too many men think it's acceptable to issue online threats of death or rape to women who displease them. Most of these men don't intend to follow through on their threats, but a few do, and we have no way of knowing who.
I'm grieving, sickened, angry, and scared. The only bright side is that maybe this can provoke a national conversation that might start to shift the culture a bit. But if our failure to get any meaningful gun control legislation despite the horrifying frequency of mass shootings is any indication, I don't hold out too much hope of change.
Anyway, here's a well-done article on Salon that does a better job at saying similar things to what I just did.