What the Shooter is like...a perspective

Chicago Boyz is a great website. On of their writers is a man by the name of Shannon Love. This is so insightful, but visit Chicago Boyz for more and the comments.

From Shannon Love:

He believes himself more intelligent, more knowledgeable and more skilled than he actually is. He is incapable of accepting responsibility for the consequences of his own foolish actions. This exaggerated sense of his own worth leads him expect far greater rewards in all areas of life than he actually receives. He does not get the jobs, pay, authority, awards, social circle, romantic interest and overall social status he believes that he justly deserves.

Constantly thwarted in all areas of life and unable to accept personal responsibility, he has no other logical alternative than to presume that some sort of conspiracy exists that holds him down. In particular, he will lash out at any real or imagined source of authority or influence in both his personal life and the greater world.

(Someone suggested he was an Afghan war vet. If so, he won’t be a combat vet but rather will have been in a low-level support position e.g. file clerk, fork lift driver etc. Because he cannot submit to any authority for any reason, his military record will be filled with instances of insubordination and demotions. He most likely has a less than honorable discharge. He will, however, have exaggerated his military record when he talks about it.)

In politics, he will begin to lash out at any real or imagined political entity that he believes has influence in the world. He will hate the Federal government. He will hate the military. He will hate any long established and large religious denominations. He will hate other racial or ethnic groups. He will hate those both richer and poorer than himself. He will hate socialists. He will hate big business, Wall Street and capitalism.

He will read all across the political spectrum and cherry pick ideas from every possible ideology. From each ideology, he will select only those ideas which: (1) claim this or that group has disproportionate, unjust and often secret influence or control over the world and (2) justify significantly altering the status quo to correct that group’s unjust power. In the end, his personal ideology will be a Frankenstein-like creation of unrelated ideas stitched together by the thread of his own hubris and narcissism. He will create an ideology that purports to explain why the “ordinary person”, which he sees as himself, is constantly screwed over by the world.

He will leave behind some rambling manifesto that anyone can themselves cherry pick to “prove” he supported some political point of view the cherry-picker opposes.

In the end, we will find out that he turned to violence because he became enraged at his own irrelevance and anonymity. The triggering stressor will be something personal and probably relatively trivial. His targets will have been primarily ones of opportunity. (Those who stalk and attack specific individuals are always schizophrenics and/or have some personal connection to the victim.) He will have shot the congresswoman because he could reach her and not because he had any specific personal animosity toward her or her politics. She was just a convenient authority figure, a personalization of the unjust power and order of the world.

The left plays a dangerous and ultimately self-defeating game when in every case to date, they have immediately, often literally within minutes, of a reported act of political violence, sprung out to denounce ordinary non-lefitsts as culpable in the attack. Since it is widely known that such attackers are either seriously mentally ill or individuals with highly egocentric and idiosyncratic ideologies, seeking to link such attacks to their mainstream political opposition makes it clear that they see instances of political violence merely as chances to advance their political power. Moreover, since such attackers have a hodgepodge ideology, one can just as easily blame leftist’s rhetoric for such attacks as non-leftists.

More darkly, by linking ordinary, mainstream political opponents to such political violence, the left appears to be creating a context for suppressing or even violently attacking such opposition. They are desperately trying to create an equation in which disagreeing with a leftists is tantamount to a violent attack.