This is just one. There are others:
Schoolmates who heard his violent rhetoric and threats thought he was “creepy and weird”. They avoided him. They also describe him as “passive-aggressive”, trying to be tough, and rude. Even among the school’s outcasts, he was an outcast. In fact, those who knew him the best predicted that he would turn out to be a school shooter.
He was abusive to his former girlfriend, and got into a fight with her new boyfriend. This was apparently one of the many “disciplinary problems” that got him kicked out of the school he eventually shot up.
And on a related note: Sorry, “incels”, he’s NOT one of yours…at least, not in the sense of being unable to date girls. He clearly had a problem with trying to control at least one girl he DID date, however, and that put a crimp in his efforts to maintain the relationship. As did his idolatry of Eliot Rodger, another infamous misogynist shooter. It’s no wonder that male dominance and misogyny are common factors in shoot-up violence, with guns being touted by their own manufacturers as a penis surrogate:
And yes, he did use one of those in the shooting, too. It was legally owned, to boot. His friend’s family, with whom he moved in after his adoptive parents died, made him keep it in a locked cabinet, but he had a key, so accessing it was not a problem for him. In other words: Fat lot of good THAT protective measure did.
And where could he have picked up those misogynistic, threatening, gun-fetishizing attitudes that so frightened and repelled everyone who knew him at school? Well, if you hang out with white-supremacist militias, as he did in his spare time, it’s kind of hard NOT to. The fascist group he was with, which calls itself “Republic of Florida”, is one of those “white ethnostate” groups that the Southern Poverty Law Centre keeps warning us about, even as the mainstream media keep fixating on the Antifa groups who are literally all that’s standing between mainstream society and the fascists who want to run it. No wonder his schoolmates were scared shitless of him!
Oh, and this same white-supremacist group helped him get his hands on at least one of his murder weapons, too. That makes them accessories to the crime, does it not? (Oh, and now they deny it, too. Big surprise! Pity they’re already on record as having him in their ranks.)
And I’m sure you’ll all be shocked, SHOCKED to know that, just like his hate-group confederates, he considered Muslims terrorists and was “no fan of the Jews”. And that they all consider feminism to be a “cancer”, even though their group apparently has a handful of female members. (Yes, I know. The irony is too rich for me, y’all.)
Oh, and get this: He actually posted, under his real name, on YouTube. Death threats, no less. He boasted that he would become a “professional school shooter” and planned to kill as many Antifa as he could. And while they were reported to, and investigated by, the FBI…nobody did shit to stop him.
So those who say they “never saw this coming” were clearly walking around with blinders on their eyes, their fingers in their ears, and going la-la-la-la-la. Even when it was literally staring them in the face, they REFUSED to see it for the credible threat it was. They chose, instead, to write it off as just “boys being boys”, trolling harmlessly on the Internet. Does that not make them culpable as well? At the very least, it makes them incompetent and criminally negligent. A firing offence, surely, if you’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is an anti-crime outfit as well as an investigative one.
And finally, there are those who say he “snapped” after his adoptive mother’s death. Does anyone take this seriously? I don’t. Because people who “just snap” and then commit violence tend to be a lot more random about it. They don’t go for years on end dropping creepy breadcrumbs here and there, hinting at a violent personality seething away just below the surface. They don’t brag in advance of what they’re going to do, especially not on the Internet. They don’t go to such premeditative lengths as pulling a fire alarm so as to have easy pickings for maximum carnage as the occupants exited the building, or try to blend in with a fleeing crowd after the shooting is over. No, y’all, this was not a case of someone basically good who “just snapped” when he lost his mom. It was someone who planned this. And if his mother’s death had anything to do with this at all, it was just the final match to a fuse that had been reeled out over several years. He MEANT to do this.
And there are, ultimately, no excuses for it.
