Garrison Davis (33:51)
Yeah. I mean, as I was reading this, this reminded me a little bit. There was a shooting a few years ago at a fourth of July parade. The Highland park mass shooting. The sort of like writing that Jesse did in his post reminds me a bit of the writing done by this other mass shooter. Talking about getting sucked into violent content or this idea of it beckons you further into the concept. It's almost hypnotic. Very similar writing done by this other shooter. So one other post, a reference that she made on this forum was a video of a father hanging himself in front of his children. And she claimed that her stepdad attempted the same thing, trying to kill himself in front of her when, you know, she was just a little kid. And she wrote, quote, I wish his bitch ass would have died on the noose then and there. Probably better than beating your kids, unquote. So obviously, you know, this person had like long standing issues that at certain points seemed like, better, right? Like around 2021, they seem to be doing better, right? They were making, you know, YouTube content about, about guns and hunting and felt like they had some more of, like a, had more of a stable social outlet. And then around 2023, with, you know, this, this like abuse of psychedelic drugs leading to this mass shooter obsession, it's like a pretty, a pretty clear picture of like a mental spiral. Two months before Jesse's own shooting, she did visit the watch people die profile for Samantha Ruppenow. And if we're gonna talk about like causal factors, right? And especially like in reference to, you know, this, this idea that, you know, parents have where, you know, there, there has been a sequence of, of trans people doing shootings. You can argue about, you know, the per capita percent rates or like stats again, but that doesn't go so far. But at a certain point, I mean, we have to all be comfortable or maybe comfortable is the wrong word. But we have to like, you know, realize that like, as more people, you know, transition, right? Gender is not this like immutable thing. As more people attempt transitioning, there's going to be some trans people who do bad things. This happens with every social group of people. To borrow from sociologist Mark Worrell, who wrote about the social phenomenon of mass shootings, like destruction of others is the means towards another end. The desire for self destruction that the self was incapable of inflicting in isolation. A lot of mass shootings end with suicide or trying to get the police to kill you through suicide. Like public shootings like this have a very strong suicidal component. And some people might not be able to do that themselves. They need to create a social context in which they feel like they can. And at least in terms of the states and to a smaller degree in Canada, like these shootings like exist as like this like cultural ritual. This like ritual of destruction of the self. And destruction of the self can include the social apparatus that makes up the self. And for like a young person, that's what, that's, that's their family in school. The two things that were targeted in this shooting, right, this, this network that makes up like my sense of self as a 17 year old, 18 year old, it's going to be my family, which is, you know, for Jesse, that's, that's her mom, she's been separated from her father for for a while, as well as her stepbrother and then also this school that she used to, used to go to. Right? That, that's, that's like the sort of, that's the network that makes up your idea of the social. And like I said before, like, as the trans community grows, there's going to be some overlap between antisocial, you know, mentally unwell individuals who act out a mass killing as a suicide and disintegrated and socially under regulated people who try transitioning as a way to ease tensions both internally and externally. And if anything, I think transitioning can often be maybe one of the healthiest ways to, to attempt to relieve some of these tensions. But like, being trans is like a marginal position in society, right? And the people who commit school shootings and suicide through mass shootings are at like the very, very extreme end of social dysregulation and like marginal isolation. And some people in those latter categories will also try transitioning as a method of social regulation. And in Jesse's case, like, considering all their posts about like mental health and drugs, never once is being trans cited as like a point of their distress. Like, that's the thing that's causing them the distress. It is, it is a method of relief. At least according to like, their own writing on Reddit. Like, the cause of the distress are all, these are these other things. And like, people can blame mass shootings or mass killings on like any number of specific factors, right? Such as access to weapons, whether that's, you know, knives, firearms, bullying, substance abuse, mental health and lacking mental health services and like mental health oversight. But like the common base factor across, you know, most of those things is that there's like social disintegration and deregulation happening. That, that's like a failure to balance like egoism and altruism, right? A healthy individual sense of self as well as a place of belonging within a larger social group. Like, we need a mix of freedom and available, structured paths for social life. Ritualistic outbursts of suicidal violence against society happen when these things are extremely unregulated and someone falls out of the social fabric. And like marginal classes like trans people can be particularly affected by social disintegration and deregulation. And like, it's important to note here, like, this isn't caused by some like, vague medical condition like gender dysphoria like that, that's, that's not causing the violence, right? Prescribed estrogen is. It's not a causal force in this. We don't even know if Robin Westman or Jesse was even on estrogen. We don't know. But these things aren't causal. But you know, these are social positions that include, you know, these larger social factors that affect large populations. One of those populations can be trans people. There's a lot of social disintegration that affects CIS men currently. They do a lot of shootings and majority. Yeah, the overwhelming majority. You can also graph these things on class lines. Lots of people who go and do public shootings, either themselves or their families, are suffering from economic instability. Or people in like the middle class as well, which has this other problem in like Durkheim's methodology of suicide, which I'm kind of pulling from a little bit here, is like this sense of like overregulation can also produce an unhealthy balance. So it's either, you know, very overregulated people, you know, like, like Elon Musk has too much freedom, has too much, too much like, access to like money and possibilities that he's then a very dysfunctional person. This can happen, you know, with some probably like, you know, like middle class kids as well, that can produce violent outbursts. But a lot of the time it's, you know, lower middle class or lower class conditions that can lead to violence. And sometimes, sometimes it does not go to the extreme of doing, you know, a mass killing. It can often just result in like petty crimes, which is arguably a more healthy method of regulation compared to something like a mass shooting, which is like, you know, the most desperate, the most marginal, like, act of suicide that we could like envision as a society.
