UK's First Mass Shooter In A Decade Is Trump-Loving Incel Who Claims To Be American
They give us 80,000 BBC murder mysteries, we give them actual murder.
In the span of six minutes yesterday, a 22-year-old Trump supporter who was angry about being a virgin and not having a girlfriend killed six people, including a young girl. It's a story that we, unfortunately, have heard many times before — but this time there is a twist. This shooting happened in Plymouth, England.
It's a rather unusual occurrence — there are literally more British murder mystery series available to watch on Britbox (137!)than there were shooting deaths in the UK in 2019 (33) . There hasn't been a mass murder in the UK since 2011's Cumbria killings, and the country has had strict gun control laws since the Dunblane massacre — a school shooting in Scotland that left 14 students and three teachers dead — in 1996.
And yet, this is going to make a whole bunch of Fox News, NRA types start talking about how this is proof that gun control doesn't work. Although the fact that this is the UK's first mass shooting in a decade and the United States has had 506 mass shootings so far this year, with 593 people killed and 1,965 injured, does seem to suggest that it is at least somewhat helpful.
Via BBC:
[Devon and Cornwall Police Chief Constable Shaun Sawyer] said Davison "murdered" a 51-year-old woman who was known to him, with police believing there may be a familial relationship.
He then went out on to the street, where "he immediately shot and killed a very young girl. He also shot and killed the male relative of that girl", who was aged 43.
Davison then shot another woman, 53, and a man, 33, on Biddick Drive who remain in hospital with injuries "not thought to be life-threatening".
He next went into a park, where he shot a 59-year-old man who died at the scene, and then moved to Henderson Place where he shot a woman, 66, who later died at Derriford Hospital.
"Eye witnesses have told us that then Mr Davison turned the gun on himself taking his own life," said Mr Sawyer.
Jake Davison, prior to killing those people and killing himself, made YouTube videos about how he was too hideous to get laid, about how his friends had success in life and with women even though they didn't deserve it like he did, but also how women didn't need any men anymore, and how all of the women his own age who he'd want to date were already "broken and torn apart by 'Chad.'"
Via Metro.UK:
In one video where he speaks directly into the camera, he says 'most women are very simple minded and ain't all that bright'.
Ranting about women not having sex with 'average' men, he says: 'Why do you think sexual assaults and all these things keep rising and women talk about it? Because the reality is, is that women don't need men no more.' [...]
He says: 'Let's say I get with a woman my age, she's had a million relationships. She's likely been destroyed and broken and torn apart by fucking Chad…she's probably incapable of loving anyone like she did when she was 16, 17, 15, when she got with that first fucking Chad.'
Davison said he was blackpilled, a fatalistic incel term meaning that one has accepted that nothing would ever get better in their live because women are horrible, shallow creatures and none of those horrible, shallow creatures would ever love them so they may as well LDAR — lay down and rot. One of the primary beliefs of this brilliant theory, which Davison also bought into, is that because incels missed out on "young love" when they were teenagers, even if they did ever find girlfriends it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't be like that .
In one clip, he speaks to the camera and says: 'There's something special about being young, I don't know what it is, you just have that drive, you have that fresh bounce to you you know…maybe it's just depression, maybe I'm just going through some health issues, I don't know.'
Davison also subscribed to non-incel related conspiracy theories, claiming that people in the government are pedophiles and devil worshipers. He talked about how much he loved Donald Trump. He claimed to be from Arizona, despite his very obvious British accent .
Via Daily Beast:
In one post from 2018, Davison shared a Trump quote and, when his friends ridiculed him in the comments, the suspect hit back: "You may not agree with his political views (I do) but he is different from the scum like Hillary or the people running our country like the neo-con sellout that is [then-British Prime Minister] Theresa May."
Elsewhere in the comments, Davison wrote about conspiracy theories that sound similar to those pushed by QAnon believers. He wrote: "Scepticism of government is key and everyone should be ready and prepared for anything bad that could happen. I am aware much of the government is deeply flawed there are many paedophiles and even reported devil worshipers people that sell us out to foreign countries."
While the number of incel-related mass murders had been dying down for a while, it may be on an upswing again. Back in July an Ohio man was indicted for plotting a mass murder at Ohio University to pay the world back for women rejecting him.
I get why people think that we shouldn't put too much focus on beliefs like Davison's and focus on the victims rather than the manifestos of people who killed them. I get that. But this is an ideology that is killing people. Right now, on the incel message boards, men just like him are either cheering for being so "based," calling him a "hERo" (a reference to Elliot Rodger) or complaining that he was actually better looking than they were and therefore shouldn't have even been complaining in the first place because he could have just lost weight. A few are disappointed that this will make them look bad. No one is suggesting, however, that those six people did not deserve to die.
"based and blackpilled"
I have been writing about incels and online misogyny since well before Elliot Rodger and honestly I really don't know what the solution is. I really don't. In Italy a few years back they had such a problem with young men killing their girlfriends that some schools instituted mandatory "Don't kill your girlfriend" classes . Perhaps something like that is the answer — a class that teaches young men social skills and helps them to understand that women are human beings before they end up getting into these hateful ideologies online.
Teenagers these days don't have the same opportunities for in-person social interaction as we did, and not just because of COVID. They're more isolated to begin with, which only makes them more socially awkward, which then leads to more isolation and anxiety, which then makes them easy marks for any group that will have them. It makes them vulnerable to radicalization. Being alone makes everyone vulnerable to radicalization — thus the COVID-era nonsense about Wayfair sex-trafficking children in overpriced storage cabinets. The less you interact with people, the easier it is to not see them as human. The easier it is, frankly, to believe entirely ridiculous things about them, to assume incredible competency and incredible evil.
And yeah. We could just ban guns or institute gun control — and that would be the great, sensible thing to do — but it wouldn't actually address the root causes of this shit, and that is something we need to start doing.
It seems a lot more likely that the United Kingdom will try to do something about this than we will, so perhaps we can see what they come up with and try it if it works. Or we could always go our traditional route of watching other countries address a problem successfully and then completely ignoring it.
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Yeah, there is one or two, that were so nasty with the Hilary hate, I actually called them a misogynist, and I do not use that word lightly. I won't block them, though because someone needs to call them out on their bullshit. A couple of others I did block, because they are just nasty, and not in the fun way. I'm always surprised when others engage with them, because I can't imagine they have anything to say that should be taken seriously.
Oh, I have done the same I assure you, I have trouble distinguishing snark when it gets very dark, especially if it is an unfamiliar poster, then they say something like duh, snark, and you feel silly for thinking they were serious.But since snark does not always communicate itself and if you spend time on WaPo and other sites where you encounter the people who are serious about their hateful posts, you have a different reaction. So truly it is the responsibility of the poster to make clear their point.