A pretty f'ing sad fnord...

[elfs]

So, this morning we're all processing the news that a rental home in the Seattle Capitol Hill neighborhood was the scene of a multiple homicide: a man walked into the house, killed six people and wounded two others and then, confronted by the police, shot himself in the mouth with a shotgun.

If you read the article to which I connected, you'll see a surprising number of ill-deployed fnords. The most obvious is that the victims, while not deserving of homicide, were weird and potentially poltically undesireable. They were young, played loud music, they had a lot of piercings and wore a lot of facial makeup. Oh no! Black lipstick! Goths! The victims were chilling out from an illegal rave party, and of course the older generation is so shocked and horrified by the whole notion. Not to mention that one of the 15-year-old witnesses had an 18-year-old boyfriend! Shocking, shocking of course.

And, as a coup de grâce, the last paragraph mentions that this happened "just a few blocks from where Little League baseball games were underway this morning."

Fnord!

Comments

[tahomapagan.livejournal.com]

i kind of had the same reaction to the news coverage ... this is all gonna end up somehow being blamed on alternative life decisions of various stripes, i can see it coming. for those of us not directly affected by the tragedy, this aspect of the news coverage is going to be the worst part of what happened

[fallenpegasus]

That and guns.

The threads over the in seattle community post on the the shoots already has subthreads where the usual types are ranting about "its too easy to get ahold of a gun".

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

Is there any word on the shooter's story/motive yet? I keep wondering WTF he had against ravers; they're pretty harmless.

[fallenpegasus]

He seems to have been "one of the them", some witnesses said he had visited the house several times before.

Methhead? Picked on? Bad breakup? All of the above?

[kavri.livejournal.com]

What jumped out at me in the article in our paper (which mentioned the rave, but in a reasonable way) was the noting that the shooter was 'dressed in black'.... It seemed odd. They were younger people after all, black is not uncommon. I could see if he were wearing a three piece suit, or conversely if a 50 year old man walks into a boardroom and is wearing black. It just seemed ... strange...as if 'black' clothes were somehow ominous.

For those wanting more information, Wikipedia seems to have gathered a great deal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_massacre#_note-7

And, call me a bleeding heart liberal Canadian, but why are Americans so freaking gun obsessed. To the person who posted about those already complaining about how easy it is to get guns, perhaps you could try to realize that most the rest of the world considers the following a bit...much:

"From the truck he retrieved a 12-gauge Winchester pump shotgun with a pistol-grip and a .40-caliber semiautomatic Ruger handgun, and several bandoliers (over 300 rounds) worth of ammunition for the guns....Once the situation was under control police found that Huff's truck contained a Bushmaster XM15 E2S rifle, another handgun, several more boxes of ammunition, a baseball bat, and a machete.... Seattle Police Department served a search warrant on the North Seattle apartment that Huff shared with his identical twin brother Kane, where they found more guns and ammunition. "