Oh, boy. Where do I begin?
As you probably have heard, someone decided to go to the YouTube HQ near San Francisco to shoot the place up. When the news first broke, ‘progressives’ naturally assumed the perp was white, male and conservative. Imagine the shock when it broke that the shooter was female, vegan/animal activist/extreme left, and Iranian. Even though I felt terrible about it, I couldn’t help but laugh. It just proves the point I have always made when it comes to these things. It’s not the weapons. It’s the people wielding the weapons.
So, yeah, this is going to be a gun control thing. I personally don’t like guns. They’re noisy, I hate the smell of gunpowder, and yes, they can be dangerous, so I will stay well clear if I can help it. But I don’t want to ban them. Not because I like guns, but because I think the whole act of banning things is pointless. If you take away the guns, something else will replace them. Simply because humans feel the need to exterminate other humans, and since we’re tool-users, humans will find the tools to do so as efficiently as possible. If not guns, then maybe explosives or perhaps other ways of launching projectiles at lethal velocities. Blunt trauma is pretty effective too, and don’t get me started on things that are sharp.
Anti-gun advocates like to downplay this by saying it’s not as effective as a gun, and that explosives are hard to fabricate (they’re not), but that’s just the cognitive dissonance talking because this argument confronts them directly with human nature. Every human has the potential to be brutal, savage, nasty, sadistic and innovative. That last bit is pretty important because we have large brains and we’re very adept at solving problems, especially the “problem” of dispatching other humans because of “reasons”, whatever stupid ones they are.
My point is that we shouldn’t focus as much on the tools, but instead, we should look at the tool-wielders. The question we should ask is simply “Why?”.
What I’ve read about this incident is that this Iranian girl was quite fed up with Youtube demonetizing and downranking her videos. Enough to drive her postal, apparently (although, given the content I’ve seen from her, that wouldn’t take much). There is some food for thought there though. It’s true that Google and Youtube are quite opaque when it comes to dealing with content creators. There’s little to no transparency, and also minimal feedback. I can understand that it can drive people up the wall and to become very disgruntled.
I’ve also seen the webpage of this girl (which has a nice retro 90’s Geocities vibe to it, but I doubt that’s intentional). Apparently, she’s been dealing with frustrations regarding Youtube/Google’s non-interaction and apparent practices for quite a while. There have been plenty of signals that this person was being driven up the wall to the point that she picked up a weapon to make a lethal statement.
I guess the guns aren’t to blame, but society itself is.
