The Wisconsin spa shootings: A conspiracy theory
I’m not sure how many of you have been following the story of the recent spa shooting in Wisconsin, in which an (angry, controlling, abusive) estranged husband murdered his wife and two others at a spa where she worked, before turning the gun on himself.
Unfortunately, stories like this are far from uncommon – domestic violence often escalates when female victims break off relationships with abusive men. (While dumped women often stalk male exes, they are far less likely to resort to violence.) All those studies that MRAs like to cite about how domestic violence between men and women is somehow equal don’t take into account violence that happens after the relationship is brought to an end.
I was reading this article, about the heroic efforts of Zina Haughton, the murdered wife in the spa shootings, to convince her ex to spare the lives of others in the spa at the time, when I made the mistake of reading the comments, which had degenerated into a bizarre “debate” over gun control. The, er, highlight of the discussion was this bizarre conspiracy theory:
Apparently gun enthusiasts can be as paranoid, delusional and self-absorbed as any entitled asshole in the manosphere.
Like this:
Posted on October 23, 2012, in crackpottery, domestic violence, imaginary backwards land, MRA, paranoia, playing the victim, violence and tagged conspiracy theory, domestic violence, gun control, paranoia, spa shooting, wisconsin. Bookmark the permalink. 59 Comments.
Because the important thing about yet another mass shooting incident is blaming the gummint for trying to take your guns.
I am going to deploy the emergency cookie protocol now. It’s that or start throwing things. Anyone else need some thing while I’m up?
As a Canadian, who fully supports gun control, that conspiracy is utterly ridiculous, sure Harper’s an asshole, but he’s not an *bzzt*OBEY STEPHEN HARPER*bzzt* oppressive tyrant. I mean sure he spends billions on jets that we can’t afford, *bzzt*THE HARPER GOVERNMENT IS ETERNAL*bzzt* but he’s far from brainwashing us into slavery.*bzzt*RE-ELECT STEPHEN HARPER 2017*bzzt*
In all seriousness though, what is it with Americans and guns? We really haven’t had a problem with it here, I mean sure there’s the whole second amendment thing, but seriously, what’s so great about guns? All they do is enable more violent crime with the fact that it’s easier to pull a trigger than it is to stab someone or strangle them or some other horrendously impersonal way that most sane people wouldn’t resort to.
Well, since our government was founded by a violent revolution, they decided that the threat of violent revolution was the only way to keep a government honest (which is sort of logical). Unfortunately, the net result is that crazies get access to all sorts of mass killing devices in the name of freedom.
By “they” I mean founding fathers.
Ditto to all of the above, aworld. The whole GUNSGUNSGUNS thing is just beyond me.
I’m sad now, it’s sad that people think that the threat of a violent revolution is the only way to keep a government honest. I mean, there are a bunch of countries all over the world that are essentially proving every single day that this isn’t true in a modern context. *sigh* What can you do, eh?
It amuses me that these people think they can defend themselves against government tyranny with their precious guns. Ever heard of the word “drone”, friend? Have you got any? What about “F-16″? No? Thought so.
I can just see it. Bravely marching against the US military. Good god.
The Second Amendment has its roots in The English Bill Of Rights.
We gotta start telling these guys that tinfoil hats actually make mind-control waves resonate better.
“…but seriously, what’s so great about guns? All they do is enable more violent crime with the fact that it’s easier to pull a trigger than it is to stab someone or strangle them or some other horrendously impersonal way that most sane people wouldn’t resort to.”
Marianne Kirby (who writes about fat acceptance) has some interesting thoughts about food, class, and guns: http://www.xojane.com/issues/i-have-seen-bourgeois-and-it-me
Also her take on going to a gun show: http://www.xojane.com/sports/two-tickets-gun-show
Usually, the people I know who have guns are more into 1. survivalist stuff, 2. self-protection, or 3. hunting, than overthrowing the government.
In more rural areas, an interest in guns is also seen as grooming for the military (which is one of the few lucrative careers you can take on in some places; I come from a poor state which is also seriously known as the state that gives the Army the most snipers).
Finally, my mom used to carry a gun when she lived in a city where she was afraid of being raped; her house was actually broken into twice.
@Molly
Are you from Georgia?
jose: Ever heard of Afghanistan (1980, or the present) or Iraq? What about Somalia? How about Vietnam?
The thing is, the cartridge loading rifle, means a popular force can derail the most powerful of armies. Because at the individual level, rifles are cheap,and people are the currency. Tanks, planes, artillery, etc. are expensive; and vulnerable to all sorts of things.
I’m really familiar with guns. I’ve been shooting them since 1972. I spent a career in the Army. Rifles are the ultimate destabilsing element. They make gaining access to all the rest possible. If you have a populace which supports the people fighting the army in question, winning require oppression; to the level of extermination.
I wish guns didn’t exist, but since they do, I believe in the 2nd. amendment. Bad people will always be able to get guns no matter what the laws are so I think it’s a good thing for law abiding citizens to be able to arm themselves.
It doesn’t seem to be working.
My dad owned a gun for a while, then one day we were burglarized, they stole the gun…
@ Aworld, your brainwashed message is excellent. I’m jealous that I didn’t write it.
In other news, I once surfed past Politically Incorrect, when they were talking about gun laws. The panel that time, all urbanites, came to the consensus that everybody should have a handgun for safety, but nobody needs a rifle. I’m in a rural-ish, hunting-centric city in Canada, and was flabbergasted. The opposite is true. Rifles are useful. Handguns are masturbatory.
People kill people, but they do it more often and more efficiently with guns than with a brick of Velveeta.
This story makes me so sad. She did everything she could to save her own life, and then when he showed up with a gun she tried to save everyone else.
Fuck the NRA.
And Ruby, have you any idea how rare gun crime is here in Australia? It is possible to have good gun control without leaving regular people vulnerable.
Yeah, guns don’t kill people…except for the several hundred children killed by accidental gun discharge every year.
Ah, the ‘bad guys will get guns anyway’ argument.
I… do believe people should be allowed to have guns if they want them? I know a lot of people who are into guns as a hobby, and I don’t think that’s a necessarily bad hobby. But on the other hand I do support evidence-based gun control.
I’m pretty sure that most agents, if told that they’d have to kill a bunch of innocent people and then die for the sake of gun control, would instead tell the news media. I mean, they couldn’t even keep drones secret.
@ozy: Plus, if they’re really so corrupt that they’d publicly kill people to get paid by the Government, why wouldn’t they just make a lot more money by telling the news media about it afterwards? Same thing with just about every other conspiracy theory.
Cthulhu’s Intern: Well, that’s why they kill them, duh.
Do they teach conspiracy theories in schools now or something?
The fact that they never talk shows just how insidious the agency in charge of it is!
The government covered up the St Velveeta’s Day Massacre, y’know.
::adjusts tinfoil hat::
You gotta teach the controversy, let the kids decide.
Personally, I’m all for the second amendment: if you want a gun, you can join a well-regulated militia and practice using a musket for the day the British drop by and demand to be stationed in your house and you know they’re gonna eat all of your brisket you just know it
As for legal gun rights as they now stand, I really wish all these allegedly vigilant gun owners would do something about the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex and make the U.S. government stop shitting on the rest of the planet. Right now, though, they only seem prepared to rise up and oppose the government’s tyranny if and when the government seems posed to move to take away their means to rise up and oppose the government’s tyranny; the rest of the tyranny, they let slide. Seems a bit useless and circular, frankly.
In a sense, the Gun Control Discussion is an extremely popular crutch that helps the public to quickly hobble past matters that would require some serious soul-searching otherwise.
@Kakanian
I agree. The question shouldn’t be about guns*, it should be ‘WHY the hell did this happen, and how do we prevent someone choosing to do this again?’. In this case the ‘why’ is obviously ‘because some evil doucheface thought he was entitled to be given another human being on a platter and couldn’t handle being told he wasn’t’. If he hadn’t had a gun, he’d have used something else - there was a case in the UK a couple of years ago where a woman was stabbed to death at work by an ex-boyfriend. Arguably gun control could have prevented the killing of the bystanders, but a better way to prevent all the deaths would be to teach these people they’re not entitled to fucktoy/maids. And, you know, believing people when they are concerned about a violent partner. The police’s role in not protecting this woman and her colleagues (and all the other people they don’t protect) needs to be strongly looked at.
(*For the record, I am firmly in the camp of those who live in countries with strong gun controls and can’t understand why people wouldn’t support that)
so my spousal unit is interested in target shooting? we had guns in the US
and in the UK guns are rigidly controlled and handguns are illegal and ohmygoodnesshowdoesitwork?!!?!eleventy
so do you know what
you can still practice target shooting
on account of it being a legitimate, social and enjoyable sport that you should practice with friends at a safe and well-designed range anyway.
there are also pheasant shoots and such for those rich people in tweedy jackets.
YOU CAN HAVE STILL HAVE FUN WITH YOUR GUNS IN PLACES WHERE THEY ARE CONTROLLED
I read it as “The perpetrators are all pasties” and got really confused about nipple coverings passing anti-gun laws.
(first ever comment!)
I have a liberal co-worker who talks like this all the time. She claims the outing of Violentacrez is to get public support for government control and censorship of the internet. The Sikh shootings were conducted by the government to silence the truth about aliens (the temple leader’s son apparently is a filmmaker who has a project about aliens….and the government killed his father to silence him or something…). The US government caused the Japan earthquake with our HAARP weather weapon. It’s so bad I don’t even discuss these stories with her, because I know she’ll have some ridiculous conspiracy theory attached to this one, too.
I’m in favor of gun control. But I think there is still something else going on in our culture that leads to these mass shootings. There is a bizarre sense of angry, resentful entitlement, and the idea that violence is not only appropriate but is also justified to solve any issue.
Zina’s 20 year old daughter was at the spa and witnessed her mother’s murder. They leave behind a 13 year old daughter who is now an orphan. And for what? So this guy could say, “I win” before he killed himself? What a terrible monster he was.
And closely related to this is the Spearheads take on TRO’s.
As far as that lot is concerned, well, we have one dude advocating for more violence so women don’t get the TRO in the first place, because her fear is real.
Price is advocating the idea that a womans fear for her life should have proof backing up that fear so the courts can be impartial. Also, the guy should have the right to defend himself in court. Which means that unless an aggressor has already attempted to take the victims life before and it can be proven that the aggressor wasn’t “provoked”, TRO’s will be practically non existant.
The rest seem to think that the TRO’s are the “provacation” that sets men off (and rightfully so as it denies them the ability to see the kids) and that until TRO’s are banished, this type of violence will increase. Essentially, they believe that its the governments fault that men are “being forced” to kill their former partners.
The conspiracy whackjob up above is obviously completely round the bend. That said, I tend to take a pragmatic view-and overall, the most common and reliable analysis of the data indicates that the truth is counter-intuitive: Altering gun laws does diddly to affecting crime rates. Complete ban? No effect. Permit concealed-carry? Still no effect. (Or at least, both effects are completely lost in the wash when you account for economic factors and the like.)
I’m not a libertarian-no “That which governs least governs best” attitude here. But I do tend to feel that where the government can do no good, it should do nothing at all. We’d be better off with focusing on improving the economy, better education (including a focus on teaching pro-diversity and equal rights positions as part of a broader ‘good citizenship’ curriculum) and so forth.
When you say crime rates, do you mean numbers of crimes committed? If so, that misses a significant point.
If a case of assault with a baseball bat which leaves someone in hospital for a week counts for as much crime rate as a lethal shooting, the version where the victim is badly injured but lives seems preferable to me.
My problem with the lack of effective controls is what happened with the Fast and the Furious-the agent in charge did the best job he could but the weak and lax gun control laws basically made it completely pointless to even bother with investigating. And now his career is ruined because of the hysteria that the Right has over even the merest hint of stopping the bad guys from getting guns because somewhere, somehow someone who is “law abiding” will get their guns taken away by jack booted thugs.
A sitting congresswoman was nearly assassinated for heaven’s sake and even that did not stop the right wing from going ballistic at the idea that maybe their toys might need a little bit more scrutiny.
The lack of sense when it comes to guns is what really bothers me more than the actual guns themselves.
I’m talking ‘broken down by category’-so a murder is a murder, a non-lethal assault is a non-lethal assault, and so on. Outside of a few very showy instances, such as Columbine, the numbers really do seem to hold constant (and even those showy cases often happen in areas with strict gun laws).
Part of the reason for this is that guns are efficient, but only for certain types of violence. Consider the case of the Colorado theater massacre (another genuinely horrific event). As bad as it was, the guy could probably have killed MORE people just by using the money he spent on guns and ammo to rent a Hummer, and plowing into the round-the-block line waiting outside the theater before they started letting people in. Gun laws, for the most part, are pretty much security theater-they allow the authorities to be claiming to be “doing something”, even if nothing gets done. (See also: TSA.)
And I do want to stress that I’m not taking the opposite argument that the NRA types are fond of-there’s just as little evidence supporting the notion that lax gun laws reduce crime, either. It’s just a functional irrelevancy.
Because, clearly, strict gun laws requiring people to be licensed, have training (and sense), and keep their guns locked up would be pointless, just like requiring the same of drivers.
Wait, what?
NWO has stated thar requiring drivers licenses is totalitarian, I think.
That Spearhead post on TROs + comments has shaken my faith in humanity. Those are some hateful people.
Cloudia we stand in agreement. I think that if someone is genuinely frightened or harrassed a TRO is needed, if only to signal to police that more urgency is required if they get called. I don’t care if its the woman or the man, a victim of harrassment or potential violence needs help and a TRO is a very good way of advising the agressor that people are aware of the situation and that society does not approve of the behaviour.
@Unimaginative
Coming from a rural area myself, I get people having rifles, but I’m also very happy that we have gun control laws as strict as we do. Also I’m voting NDP in the next election, does this make me bad, I mean it probably means I’m wasting my vote unless I do the whole vote swap thingy that they did for this election, but does it make me bad?
Aworld, you can’t possibly be bad for voting NDP. Just ignore the fact that I’m a demonic creature and focus on the fact that I’ve been voting NDP for several years now.
@pillowinhell
But I live in New Brunswick, apparently we’re a very conservative riding.
In an objective view, sure I can see why people should have guns when they want them. But then I look at how the countries *without* so many guns have fewer gun deaths and if you are a gunowner and that gun kills you, the most likely person it’s going to kill is you, not a ‘bad guy’ and…I just can’t support it. Sure it’s great to have a fantasy where someone invades your home and you defend it with a gun, but it’s pretty unlikely you’re going to be able to actually *do* that against a criminal who is prepared, maybe has guns themelf, and could also take yours. In which case if they *didn’t* have guns, the situation just got a whole lot mor deadly.
It’s true in that if someone wants to kill, they will, regardless of method. But guns make it much more likely to be able to do it *right away*. I dunno, man, I’m Canadian, I don’t think I’ve even *seen* an unholstered gun up close.
Someone invades my home, I can defend it with two objects: a stick and my local police force.
Probably also means the person in my home is less likely to have a gun, so there’s less danger of it all escalating, right?
@Mork
Whats the average police response time in your city?
Y’all know that confronting a burgler, even armed, is a terrible idea, right?
If somebody is in your house, they want your stuff. LET THEM HAVE IT. If a burglar is armed with a gun, confronting them is the most dangerous thing you can do.
I don’t understand why the home break-in is one of the most common pro-gun arguments. If somebody has broken into your house to take things, call the cops and get out of the house if you can. Otherwise, hide.
Twomoogles: The problem is that we’ve tried that, in many states, and it didn’t work. States that tried to regulate guns had pretty much the same shifts in crime rates as the ones that didn’t bother, or even loosened gun laws.*
The crime rate stems not from gun ownership, but from social conditions. On the one hand you have economics, and on the other, you have culture. American culture is violent, often shockingly so, and the economy is in the toilet. This is where the problem is, not the ownership of guns.
I think there is room for a middle ground on gun control debates. I don’t mind people collecting rifles, shotguns, pistols, or revolvers. I like that Missouri is a conceal carry state, too. You have to have a permit to for it anyway. My dad and brother have guns and hunt deer, quail, squirrel, and rabbit. My husband has gone to gun shows, but he doesn’t buy any, because they’re expensive and I don’t want them around our kids. That said, I think the NRA is way too extreme in their views. It’s not like people need tanks to kill deer. The NRA was also too harsh in their grading of Claire McCaskill, giving her a D even though she is firmly in support of the 2nd Amendment.
It’s also gross how the NRA tries to use tragedies like this from the OP for their agenda.
Thebionicmommy: Oh, hell, yes. The NRA is filled with whack-a-loons. They actually make it more difficult to argue for sane and rational gun ownership, and of course, they are big into the conspiracy theories (the spokesmen don’t spread the rumors like the one in the OP here, but they sure as hell don’t try to stop them from spreading, either).
@AWorld
You could live in Alberta where voting PC is your most lefterly (it’s a word!) choice.
We’d vote NDP at Chez Halite if we could, even though the thought of an NDP majority makes Mr H (an ex-farm boy from Saskabush and current oil worker) have heart palpitations. (They’re comin’ fer my oil! And mah wheats!)
Do we know anything about whether this guy was an MRA or anything like that?
Hey, NWOSlave, have anything to say about HAARP? We could use some amusement.
I’m in Alberta. I voted NDP. I despaired when Our Tyrant got a frigging majority government with a minority of votes.
I think too many of us lefties worry too much about voting strategically, and don’t worry enough about being strategically politically active. My current hypothesis is that, as compassionate human beings who are aware of the real human impact of conservative ideological policies, we get bummed out and have to back away from politics. (Said hypothesis based on the fact that I’m bummed out and have had to back away from politics a little.)
Conservatives get all righteously energized by people who aren’t following their One Right Way of Doing Things and just keep going and going and going. They vote and we don’t. It makes me sad.
If it came down to me and my buddies from the shooting range vs the 1st Marine Division supported by a tactical air wing - I’d put my money on the Marines.
Feel free to ask any surviving residents of Fallujah (if you can find any) or Misrata (prior to NATO air support) just how well civilian militias stand up to modern military forces.