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Comment by jbullock35 | Hacker News Reader

> People like to scapegoat 4chan when these things happen, presumably because it's at the top of the pipeline for a lot of these people, but in this specific case the shooter barely used image boards

From the shooter's diary:

> "I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts that they were intellectually and emotionally inferior," he wrote on May 5, referring to Black people.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/buffalo-shooting-supermarket-67.... See https://archive.ph/0Nnj7 for a non-paywalled version.

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I don’t think shooter diaries are terribly authoritative when the shooter is crazy. We definitely have an unreliable narrator.

If the goal is to prevent future shooters, I think log files of the shooters behavior is more important than what they say is most important.

There's no evidence that the shooter is crazy.

Don’t you have to be at least a little bit more detached from reality than the median person (“crazy”) to shoot up a supermarket?

I don’t think crazy in a blank check to get away with whatever you want, you can definitely make yourself crazy in entirely foreseeable and avoidable ways that are your responsibility. This can still render you unreliable when it comes to your own motivations.

> Don’t you have to be at least a little bit more detached from reality than the median person (“crazy”) to shoot up a supermarket?

I would say, "yes," but this is crazy in some type of modern-day social sense of the term. If we're to consider the long, rich history of human violence it looks a bit pedestrian.

He's not a member of your tribe, your tribe attacks his tribe, he attacks yours.

He played by an older, darker, less civilized rule-book.

So he's not "seeing things schizo crazy" and so in some sense, no, he is not crazy.

I take your point. I think I was just reacting to various flavors of “he’s not crazy” as having a potentially normalizing effect but that may not be what was intended, or what other readers focused on.

> as having a potentially normalizing effect

I find virtually all mainstream discourse around mass-casualty attacks to be either normalizing or to just simply sweep the issue under the rug and ignore it.

There is no deep discussion on the topics, just further fiddling.

The perpetrator in events like this is almost always written off as "crazy." Often the purpose of that is to dismiss the premise that any systemic factors may have been at play. If he was just some random loon, there's no need for the society that created him to examine itself, much less attempt to resolve its own issues.

This is what a lot of people are afraid of in the US, because these shootings exist at the nexus of first and second amendment rights. The first allows people like the shooter to be radicalized using the most powerful communication platforms ever created. The second allows them to be armed to the teeth. And then there is the systemic, deeply rooted racism in American culture that feeds the hatred behind these events, and intersects with the US Constitution, government and society in numerous ways the country still isn't capable of discussing rationally.

So "he was just crazy" starts to sound like "nothing to see here" after a while. Because if it's true, it's weird that so many people seem to be crazy in the same way. If they aren't crazy then there is a pipeline of radicalization and violence - an "extremist industrial complex" if you will - that's working as intended to maintain its own status quo... and a lot of Americans are fine with that.

His motivations may be horrible and his logic may be flawed but that doesn’t make him crazy.

Good point, but it's not like there's a diagnostic definition of "crazy" anyway. Replace that language with "deluded, ignorant, and sociopathic" and the statement you replied to makes more sense.

> Replace that language with "deluded, ignorant, and sociopathic"

I really wouldn't call him any of those terms, he simply has a completely different "tribe," value system, and morality than yours.

To simply throw some high-brow insults at him and walk-off is intellectually lazy, and blinds you to someone becoming what Buffalo boy became.

I live down the street from a pre-Revolutionary fort, a real facet of the settlers lives was dealing with Indian raids. They would sneak in and, under cover of darkness, kill as many as they could. This attack, ultimately, makes me think of a modern raid.

>Indigenous groups breaking into the forts of literal colonialists, for whom racism was a matter of religious doctrine, to try to force them away before they perpetrate another massacre

>A white supremacist walks into a public space and shoots the descendants of people brought to this country in bondage by, get this, the aforementioned colonialists

The situations seems somewhat different. Less a modern raid than a modern massacre.

He was previously put on psych hold after threatening his classmates: https://nypost.com/2022/05/15/payton-gendron-was-hospitalize...

That’s a good point. I’m assuming he’s off his rocker because he killed 10 people. He doesn’t seem to be acting rationally in the sense that having such deep-seated racism as to plan and execute a mass killing is insane in and of itself. So anything he says is not trustworthy.

But I guess he is very different insane than the Son of Sam guy who thought God spoke to him.

That's exactly what I said, no? The top of the pipeline. Millions and millions of people from all over the world browse 4chan. The number of people who sit in Discord chats actively discussing plans for how to efficiently kill others is much, much lower. That's what I'm getting at.

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