Thomas Wictor

As I predicted, the reaction to the mass murder at Isla Vista, California, last night is utterly pro forma. Everybody is doing everything wrong.

When families have spokespeople issue statements, I get queasy.

Alan Shifman — a lawyer who represents Peter Rodger, one of the assistant directors on “The Hunger Games” — issued a statement on behalf of the family saying they believe Rodger’s son, Elliot Rodger, was the shooter.

“The Rodger family offers their deepest compassion and sympathy to the families involved in this terrible tragedy. We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain, and our hearts go out to everybody involved,” Shifman said.

It’s not a tragedy. It’s an atrocity.

In a statement, the university said it’s “shocked and saddened” by the shootings.

Why aren’t you angry? Why do people reserve their anger for “global-warming deniers” like me, but when some absurd, disgusting creature commits a mass murder, you’re just “saddened”?

“This is almost the kind of event that’s impossible to prevent and almost impossible to predict,” UC President Janet Napolitano told reporters after giving the commencement speech at Laney College in Oakland, California.

That’s a lie.

Shifman said the family called police several weeks ago after being alarmed by YouTube videos “regarding suicide and the killing of people.”

See? The family predicted it. But then something totally bizarre happened.

Police interviewed Elliot Rodger and found him to be a “perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human,” he added. Police did not find a history of guns, but did say Rodger “didn’t have a lot of friends,” had trouble making friends and didn’t have any girlfriends.

Has any cop in the history of the planet ever said after an interview, “I found him to be a wonderful human”? Of course not. Does any of this make sense? You call the cops on your kid because he’s making videos about killing people, and the cop says to you, “I find him to be a wonderful human,” so then…what? You’re no longer afraid? The videos still exist. Why would a wonderful human make such videos?

If you thought your kid was going to kill people, what would it take to change your mind and make you believe that he was actually harmless?

Back to the theatricality of all this. Remember Ruslan Tsarni?

Wasn’t that refreshing? It used to be normal. Why can’t we return to those days?

I know a psychopath. Several idiots have told me that I’m wrong, but this is because admitting the truth would cause too many problems. It would reveal incompetence, malfeasance, indifference, and plain old evil. So the psychopath is free to wreak the havoc that he told me he’s going to. After he does, everyone will say, “How’d it happen?”

But that’ll just be the usual ass-covering and avoidance of taking responsibility. When he goes out in a blaze of feces, I won’t issue statements through a spokesman.

The family is not ready to speak publicly yet, the lawyer said, but wants to cooperate fully with police, public agencies and “any other person who feels that they need to help prevent these situations from ever occurring again,” Shifman said.

“My client’s mission in life will be to try to prevent any such tragedies from ever happening again,” he said. “This country, this world, needs to address mental illness and the ramifications from not recognizing these illnesses.”

Shifman said the family is “staunchly against guns” and supports gun-control laws. “They are extremely, extremely upset that anybody was hurt under these circumstances,” he said.

Can things get any more inappropriate? They’re not ready to speak publicly yet?

Is absolutely everything now a vehicle for self-aggrandizement? Why in God’s name would you say that your new mission in life is to prevent this from ever happening again? No particular criminal act can be wholly prevented. Today there was a mass shooting at a Jewish museum in Belgium. Do you know what the Belgian gun laws are like? Handguns are essentially outlawed, and it’s almost impossible to get permission for a long-gun license.

According to Alan Shifman, the Isla Vista killer was being treated by multiple therapists. The family was addressing his mental illness. It was their responsibility, not the country or the world’s. And why tell us that they’re staunchly against guns and that they’re extremely upset that anybody was hurt under these circumstances? Would they have felt better if he’d used a potato peeler?

“It’s just unfortunate that these kinds of circumstances occur,” said Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown in the most singularly disconnected understatement of the millennium.

The murder victims haven’t even been identified, but already the opportunistic axe grinders are coming out of the woodwork.

This is what the Men’s Rights Movement teaches its members. Especially vulnerable, lonely young men who have a hard time relating to women. It teaches them that women, and especially feminist women, are to blame for their unhappiness. It teaches them that women lie, that they cheat, trick and manipulate. It teaches them that men as a social class are dominant over women and that they are entitled to women’s bodies. It teaches them that women who won’t give them what they want deserve some kind of punishment.

We need to talk about this. The media, especially, needs to address this. We live in a culture that constantly devalues women in a million little different ways, and that culture has evolved to include a vast online community of men who take that devaluation to its natural conclusion: brutal, violent hatred of women. And I don’t mean that all these men have been physically violent towards women, but rather that they use violent, degrading, dehumanizing language when discussing women. Whose bodies, just as a reminder, they feel completely entitled to.

Nope. You’ve got it exactly backwards. The murderer said in his own final video that he’d felt this way about women since puberty. He wasn’t taught anything. What he did is what people like this always do: He went looking for groups that shared his ideas. Spree killers are losers. They feel the way they do for myriad reasons, most of them having to do with upbringing.

And what culture are you talking about that constantly devalues women? Certainly not American culture.

On a national scale, public universities had the most even division between male and female students, with a male-female ratio of 43.6–56.4. While that difference is substantial, it still is smaller than private not-for-profit institutions (42.5-57.5) or all private schools (40.7-59.3). The nearly 40-60 ratio of private schools was most surprising, though perhaps this is partly due to the fact that most all-female schools are private. Nevertheless, the female domination of higher education prevails across all types of schools. It should also be noted that the national male-female ratio for 18-24 year olds is actually 51-49, meaning there are more (traditionally) college-aged males than females.

Why are there so many more female college students than male, if the culture devalues women? And let me tell you that as a wannabe successful novelist, I can’t find representation due to my gender. Don’t believe me? Read this.

Imagine the hell to pay if male literary agents openly rejected female writers purely because they were women. This is why I have to self-publish. The major publishers and literary agencies don’t want me because of my gender. Am I going to go out and shoot anyone because of that rejection? No. I’m not a narcissistic, vapid, spoiled sociopath. Besides, the major publishing houses and literary agencies are tanking.

It breaks my heart.

The Isla Vista mass murderer is the only one to blame for yesterday’s savagery. It wasn’t due to the statistically insignificant Men’s Rights Movement, it wasn’t due to the availability of guns, and it wasn’t due to our culture. Most crimes against women are committed by domestic partners, and those are going down dramatically.

Ignore everybody with an agenda. That means ignore almost everybody.