Why don't they go shoot up Beverly hills/Wall Street/police stations/court room/federal agencies etc.? Rich and powerful people rarely get hurt.
Because it’s easy. Criminals seek the target of least resistance, like how old cars are stolen a lot compared to luxury sedans with a bunch of tracking and security vehicles.
A lot of the shooters are racist towards black Americans but they would never try a mass shooting in some Bloods infested neighborhood because they know the residents will shoot back. Others are racist towards Hispanics but they wouldn’t dare step foot in Juarez to do a mass shooting because they’ll end up headless on a sidewalk. So they go after people who have never caused any problems to anyone
Not to mention, like many serial killers, they’re have delusions of grandeur and believe they’re on a mission that can only be achieved through violence. Not to mention, they also want to achieve maximum shock value. Eviscerating a woman’s guts and leaving her in the sidewalk for joggers to find is old fashion. Targeting old people and elementary school children and live-streaming it is the new normal.
Rich and powerful people rarely get hurt.
This is why leftist terrorism is rare. We have seen it in the past during the Cold War. The RAF killed politicians and fascist leaders and foot soldiers. The Japanese Red Army killed some civilians and hijacked planes, but they were part of a larger political goal that was immediate (I.e. the civilians were Israeli, the plane was going to North Korea). The Italians went on bombing and shooting campaigns during the Years of Lead because fascists targeted them with the help of NATO and the CIA. Most leftist terrorists target actual people with influence and power. That’s why they’re prioritized more than fascists when it comes to repression.
The ugly truth that liberals don’t want to acknowledge is that there are only two ways for gun control to happen in the US. 1, if minorities start to become not only armed, but also resistant to the American institution. The conservative minorities who own guns don’t do squat to threaten any power. Or 2, rich people and their children are targeted by mass shooters. The rich will always prioritize themselves so if things get out of hand, they have no problem violating any gun rights. 2 will be unlikely to happen, but 1 is quite literally how gun control came to existence in the US, so it might happen again.
This is why leftist terrorism is rare. We have seen it in the past during the Cold War
the weather underground did a little bit, and there was some anti-war sabotage in shipyards and that bombing in wisconsin but overall it didn't amount to much. If we go back to the "propaganda of the deed" days and Czogolz's assassination of president mckinley i'd say it even backfired pretty hard as that lead somewhat directly to the creation of the FBI.
and these institutions don't blip into existence out of a vacuum, they have costs: economically, socially, politically. dismissing adventurism simply because "revolutionary actions only lead to counter-revolutionary reactions" is too idealistic.
not that all actions are good because reactions have costs. but we have to do a comprehensive material analysis when examining violent actions and the state's reactions. repression in response to revolution can be a good or bad thing depending on the details.
as much as i
for some new righteous john brown to emerge in the imperial core and run where Showcrawled, i don't see how that would actually lead to anything besides a crackdown that hogs would cheer enthusiastically, conservative democrats would quietly approve of, and the capitalist media would reinforce.
i'm of the same opinion, we just can't pretend the crackdown doesn't come at a cost. everything is interconnected, and pulling resources from, say, imperial repression to focus on domestic repression could in some contexts be a useful outcome. or if repression is the straw that radicalizes the masses it may be useful. it's an equation looking at how many resources can be extracted from people compared to the cost of controlling them through entertainment/treats/violence. violent repression is more expensive than cultural control, and parasitic to it.
but we don't have an organized left to seize opportunities on a macro scale, so i'm not convinced individual acts of violence can be expected to do anything productive at that scale yet.
yeah that's worth keeping in mind, violence for the sake of terrorism or propaganda of the deed doesn't seem likely to have much revolutionary potential. unfortunately it seems to have a lot of reactionary potential in the form of mass shootings
Honestly I forgot about the weather underground. The only things I know about them is that one of them blew themselves up and another was supposedly friends with Obama (or that’s what conservative conspiracy theorists say anyway)
I read Burrough's Dayd of Rage and although the author's ideology is terrible it's a good historical chronology of Weather and some similar groups.
- a couple of them accidentally blew themselves up because you couldn't look up how to do crimes on the internet yet
- Bill Ayers is still alive and kicking. He and Bernadine Dohrn eventually came out of hiding to "retire" from being Maoist fugitives from the FBI. I think they became more liberal, and crossed paths with Obama when they were both living in the wealthy Hyde Park neighborhood near UChicago. They disavowed each other but it was advantageous for conservatives to pretend that Obama was a militant communist.
If they didn’t disavow each other, he could’ve taught Obama some theory to impress the long legged socialist girls in college
I’m very curious how one becomes more liberal later on in life after bombing several buildings in the name of anti imperialism. Is it just the pessimism of getting older and seeing nothing change? Or did they just become rich
yeah I don't want to slander Ayers, I don't know much about his modern politics. I'm just assuming (a) he and Dohrn are wealthy now (probably bought a Hyde Park house) (b) he and Obama wanted broadly the same things when they were on that nonprofit board.
Not to mention, like many serial killers, they’re have delusions of grandeur and believe they’re on a mission that can only be achieved through violence. Not to mention, they also want to achieve maximum shock value. Eviscerating a woman’s guts and leaving her in the sidewalk for joggers to find is old fashion. Targeting old people and elementary school children and live-streaming it is the new normal.
This is the reason. The Mass Shooter is the suicidal serial killer, egged on by a cast of conservative commentators, performed by the manifesto-wielding failsons of the supposedly supremacist group. It mirrors the suicide bombers in other parts of the world ideologically.
the suicidal serial killer
Hardly suicidal; most of these mass shooters get arrested and have people speaking up in their defense. The cops will gladly shoot a black person without seeing a weapon, but with a white supremacist mass shooter they'll be very careful not to shoot the guy. Most mass shooters who get shot aren't shot by the cops, but by bystanders.
All of those things are true, but I'm talking about why these young men turn to violence in the first place.
I say suicide because Fascism's death cult promotes self-negating martyrdom. It drives the person into a social death before throwing them into actual carnage. The shootings themselves are incidental; they cement the break with their old social self and a baptism into their new martyred self precisely because they see their old self as unworthy. Both offer ideological1 respite from further action and self-hatred.
1 (sniff)
They tend to be nazis, i.e., rural white religious failsons who are too fucked up to prey on poor people the normal way by joining the police or military.
Also worth noting that the targets that white spree killers go after are soft, ala schools and churches.
If you log into 4chan and say you're going to go on a shooting spree, they'll either encourage you, or tell you to shut up and prove it. You have to go do the shooting spree to prove yourself to the community.
If you log into any anarchist or communist space and say you're going on a shooting spree, they'll either accuse you of being a fed, or tell you to read a bunch of boring theory about how stochastic violence doesn't work. You have to not go on a shooting spree prove yourself to the community.
We don't have anything like a far left guerrilla movement in the US. The best you're going to see is some random dude shooting at Steve Scalise during a baseball game or a Jan 6th.
It's possible there have been other attempts that simply don't get media coverage. I can't help but think the Carter guy wringing his hands over a populist uprising might have been or known about some attempt made that isn't public.
Certainly, hard times increase incentives for ransoms and robberies. This would also jive with the increased demand for police in wealthier neighborhoods.
he best you're going to see is some random dude shooting at Steve Scalise during a baseball game
I remember him. Bernie bro. 50 shots, 5 hits, 0 kills. Work on your marksmanship, people! It's a skill like any other. You get better at it.
I don't think the fascists that would be spurred into action rn understand that with some theory and organizing they could create a vanguard of neo-nazis if they wanted to. They hold all the guns, they have all the money, they have billionaire backing, and their troops are passionate but unorganized. We're lucky rn that all we get are lone wolf spree killers and dipshit meemaws that march on the capitol and not like a real brown shirt force the police works with.
They hold all the guns, they have all the money, they have billionaire backing, and their troops are passionate but unorganized.
Leftists claim all the time that its hard to get people to take a risk because they've still got way too much to lose. This feels like the same problem. The folks that go all in on this shit are either elderly and deranged or too young to realize what they're throwing away.
And its not like they have all the guns, because the cops have a lot of guns. Nobody is going to storm NYC and pull Eric Adams off the throne when he's surrounded by the world's 6th largest military, the NYPD. Not that they even need to when NY billionaires love guys like Adams. But then you run into the real problem. Namely, that cops/border patrol/national guard/etc do far more damage than any lone wolf could dream of.
We're lucky rn that all we get are lone wolf spree killers and dipshit meemaws that march on the capitol and not like a real brown shirt force the police works with.
The real brown shirts just are the police. There's damned enough of them. Over 800,000 uniformed officers nationwide.
There was that guy in Washington state that attacked an ICE prison and got murdered. Don’t remember if he fired shots or just had a gun on him.
Also along with all the other shit, if you're a reactionary and approaching the state where you are prepared to kill a bunch of people to essentially by proxy, end your own life(literally or metaphorically), then whatever rich people exist that you get mad at are largely abstract figures compared to whatever local building or gathering spot has too many of the groups you are rabidly bigoted towards.
Most mass shooters have narcissistic personality disorder and don’t care about injustices toward others. I would bet a lot of them identify more with the powerful than with their neighbors.
FBI probably stops those who target people they care to protect before we hear about them.
A lot of the reasons given here make sense, but the one I still don’t get is how there hasn’t been a mass shooting at a health insurance HQ. Having a healthcare claim denied hasn’t been the last straw for any of these psychos? Not one?
There was a guy who shot up his hospital because his doctor wouldn’t prescribe him medicine for back pain
I think you might enjoy this book.
"Radicalized" – A man becomes embroiled in a dark web network targeting insurance companies after his wife's cancer coverage was declined by their health insurer.
Rich and powerful people have private security, so it's a lot harder for mass shooters to actually reach them and do damage.
Also mass shooters tend to be right-wing nutjobs who have been conditioned by fascist media to hate minorities/poor people.
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sincere individual prejudice
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systemic classism/racism
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domestic gladio (read the terror factory by trevor aaronson) (or honestly just do 10 minutes of searching for headlines where the FBI was "aware of" a mass shooting/bombing suspect months in advance, stalking them and encouraging them to kill people as part of a "sting operation.")
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There's a couple aspects: one is that there are fewer Wall Street people and Capitalists than there are workers, and when you take in to account how frequently anyone would run into these people due to class structures in society it becomes even smaller, so statistically any interaction is more likely going to be between workers.
Another is that Americans have a Pavlovian love for their Police and Feds, it's all over the tv and movies, it's in the schools, it's in the news. So the chances of someone pulling a Dorner are pretty slim too.
Finally, Americans are so incapable of viewing society in any form of class structure, IE understanding who has power over them, that the only people they are capable of viewing with power are ones they've had interpersonal relationships with: Teachers who scolded them, a waitress that told them they had Pepsi rather than Coke, the bartender who cut them off, etc.
People are so early enraged and triggered by people around them these days.
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They're nazis, their entire ideology is a mess of contradictions so no conclusions it leads to will make sense
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The poor are easy targets that generally don't shoot back
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I know it's not the answer:
It's as if they aren't actually against the system in which they failed (are "unhappy" / suicidal), but see the people who they consider inferior actually doing better than them (not being suicidal), and just ragequit hitting the people who they always saw as stepping stones / ego reasurances.
The idea of the system being unfair obviously occurs to them, but their most fundamental anchor in life is that they are above other people, and yet that other people are happy, unlike them.
So, they believing first and foremost that society is "rightfully" shaped like a pyramid, causes it.
That is also the fundamental understanding of most "conservatives"
Shit it makes way more sense now that when I started writing it
Dumb people think going out and killing people is cool and a good use of time. I think not being dumb enough filters out most.
Yeah, if they were capable of good ideas they wouldn't be mass shooters.
