Santa Barbara Shooter: The Evil is in the Man, not the Implements

OK now that time has passed for the dust on this to settle I'll put in my input.

Again we got a disturbed individual in Elliot Rodger who went out on a GTA-style rampage. Several people run over, 3 dead from stabbing, 3 dead from gunshot.

Could more laws have prevented this?

In a word... no. California already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country. We have "assault weapon" bans, we have universal background checks, we have 10 day waiting periods, we have magazine limits, and getting a Concealed Carry Licence in this state is next to impossible depending on the county.

The thing with laws is they are a part of the social contract, as such they're only terms of a contract. To enjoy the benefits of a civil society and government benefits (like a fire department) you give up certain things.

Contracts are broken all the time, and the social contract is no exception.

Laws do nothing to physically stop someone from committing crime. Sure laws can set the punishment for violating the social contract, but they do nothing to stop someone from breaking the contract if they decide the punishment is worth it or they can duck the punishment. So ultimately what this means is that laws are only as effective as far as people are willing to obey them.

Words on a piece of paper do nothing to stop someone who decides to go against them no matter how much money or good feelings went into putting those words down. Anything else that happens beyond that becomes damage control. And that's what police are, they're society's damage control agents. They can't act until there is reasonable suspicion, therefore they are a reactionary unit.

Given that condition what can be done? Hide and pray until damage control arrives? Or become proactive in your own defense. Do I think this could have been prevented with more lax laws? Yes I do, this could have been stopped by a law abiding citizen with a gun. The rampage started with a stabbing.

But why won't more control laws prevent this? As I said, once someone decides to ignore those laws, they mean nothing. It's already illegal to drive like a madman and hit people with your car (didn't stop that other lunatic that thought he was the Angel of Death and intentionally plowed his car into a crowed in Santa Barbara). It's already illegal to stab people, it's illegal to carry a loaded weapon on your person in California without a CCL, and it's sure as hell illegal to shoot at people. Even without more laws this guy is already a multiple felon, looking at a life sentence and possibly the death penalty. Another law is not going to do anything.

Cars, knives and guns have no will of their own. They cannot act on their own. A car will not decide to drive into people on its own, a knife will not decide to shank someone on its own, and a gun will not shoot anyone on its own.

The Evil is not in the objects, it's the heart of Man.

Let's take a look at this kid (I refuse to reffed to him as an adult.). He has a 100+ page manifesto you can check out here if you're so inclined.

Going though this tale of sein kampf, nothing really seems out of the ordinary aside from having a rich and privileged background. Though I need to point out, for one reason or another he was a scared kid, every year of school he was scared to go. He was the kid who got bullied in high school is freshman year (yeah but who doesn't get it from the sophmores when you're a high school freshman?). There's really nothing out of the ordinary, for a teenager, though seems to be on a more intense scale. Though he singles out an event where he was bullied by a girl at summer camp.

All the weirdness really started when he was 17. He started to get jealous of people living life. Of people doing what he simply put didn't have the fucking balls to go out and do. His obsession over sex drove him into hating people that were getting laid because he wasn't. He pretty much started turning into Lil Adolf at this point, talking about wanting power just to impose his own warped ideology and what not.

It's just one story of being friendless after another with a generous heaping of sex obsession. Eventually we start to see things like this.

It's not fair. You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls have never been attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime, because I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentleman.

And things like this:

On the day of retribution I will enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB, and I will slaughter every single spoiled stuck up blonde slut I see inside there. All those girls that I've desired so much, they would have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them. While they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes. I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true Alpha Male.

To sum it all up he was an entitlement mind little bitch, who essentially shot up a part of Santa Barbara because he couldn't get laid. Why couldn't he get laid? Well as I mentioned this guy was scared of his own shadow. He was scared of going to school, he was scared of interacting with people. He mentions sitting around in a Barns and Noble just hoping people would come and talk to him. He just expected things to just happen to him, and that just ain't life. It also seems his mind was poisoned by images portrayed by the media since he had this idea that he was entitled to sex. He talks about punishing women. Punishing for what? For not sleeping with him. Sorry kiddo but you got to make thing happen.

A good friend of mine had her take on this over a text convo she gave me permissions to post up.

Fuck those guys, who say that they deserve a woman's body, why say that because women deny a man access to our most personal selves we are souless succubuses, who demand that women be tools for their amusement because they want us to be. Fuck those guys so much. And if they do get sex it should be a dildo to the ass.  

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And you know what drives me nuts about those guys? They have literally nothing appealing about them, but when they aren't appealing to women it's the woman's fault. Instead when women get turned down, they blame themselves, and it's still the woman's fault. What the fuck is that 

And you know what? She's right. What did Rodger have to offer a girl, or to anybody when he isn't even willing to go out and for himself, live the life that he wants to live?

Do I think he's an evil person? Yes I do, not evil as in born with malice, but evil as in corrupted. His own fear is what stopped him from living the life he wanted. This is by his own admission. Sure life as a teenager is hard, I've been there, we've all been there at some point. But for one reason or another (I say upbringing) he never really developed the skills to deal with life after that girl bullied him.

Speaking of fear, considering he claims to be a big Star Wars fan, how did he not take what Yoda said about fear to heart:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

What happened here is exactly what Yoda cautioned against. His fear of others, lead to anger over his inability to do the same thing. This Anger and envy of people living life lead to hating them for doing what feared to do. And hate lead to this. He went from an insecure kid who became warped and twisted. There was evil here, but that evil was not in the car, millions of cars out that haven't been involved in crime. There are billions of knives out there that haven't been involved in crime. It is said that private gun owners in the U.S. is one of the world's largest standing armies. That's millions of guns that haven't been involved in crime. The evil wasn't in these objects, but in his heart.

Now to bring things full circle.

Do you think this guy, and other like him care about what the laws are? No... hell no, they don't care. So what would passing more laws to do stop this? How can we stop this?

The ones who can stop someone like this are people, not words on a piece of paper. People with the will and the means to stop someone when they go off the rails like this. You can't prevent behavior when a person decides the law doesn't apply to them.

He became a monster when fear corrupted him and he went out and acted out in malice, without giving the laws a thought. And so I'll leave on this quote from Alucard/Vlad Dracula (Hellsing) if you want to know what would prevent this from happening again somewhere:

It takes a man in order to kill a monster!