Monday 3/22 10:00pm - Has the race / ethnicity of the Boulder shooter been announced?
I’m wondering if it’s another religiously motivated, young white male.
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Most mass shooters in this country have been white men (many of them young) so that’s likely. Religious motivation seems to be less common, but who knows? I don’t think anything has been released yet.
Is that important, to know the race and ethnicity of the shooter?
… so he’s not a Zombie at least…
Apparently it is important in some way, and that’s why the news seems to be guarded. I’m guessing it’s not a young white male.
What disturbs me is the race of those who want more of these shootings to happen.
If he is a minor they will be much more cagey about the release of personal information.
From video footage i saw of him being led away he seemed to me to be white, possibly mid 20’s or younger. Maybe10 seconds of video
Just now announced the shooter is a 20 year old white man.
10 fatalities, mostly customers of the supermarket, one of them a responding police officer.
Damn, damn, damn! You just run in to grab some milk and some idiot comes and shoots up the grocery store.
^^Most pathetic of losers these murderers.
Suspect is 21-year-old Ahmad Al-Issa. Only images are from a single video showing an overweight bearded white guy.
Information still pretty sketchy, though. Wonder if he’ll offer a half-baked motive.
The victims were Tralona Bartkowiak, 49; Suzanne Fountain, 59; Teri Leiker, 51; Kevin Mahoney, 61; Lynn Murray, 62; Rikki Olds, 25; Neven Stanisic, 23; Denny Strong, 20; and Jody Waters, 65; and Officer Eric Talley of Boulder Police Department.
I don’t know his race, I only know he was Muslim and had been in America most of his life.
They say he had been taunted in school about his name and bullied in other ways, and that possibly he had some mental illness. They alluded on the news that he was getting paranoid.
I don’t think the news is “guarded.” They justed wanted to be absolutely positive of who it was before they accused someone of murder.
It is sad, no matter what the ethnicity of the shooter is. Fact is, these kind of mall shootings and supermarket shootings happen only in America. There has to be some reason for that.
@AK It happens in other places. England, Ireland, France, Australia. Arab countries. In Japan it was poison gas. Remember what happened to Anwar Sadat?? Or don’t you watch the news??
@kritiper You have got to be kidding, right?
Anwar Sadat?
Shoko Asahara?
Respectively around 1980 and end of the nineties?
And sure, mass shootings happen everywhere, once in a, unfortunate, while.
Heck, there was one in my hometown, in ‘83.
And one in another town in 2011 or there abouts.
But they are rare.
In the rest of the world.
In the States there’s I believe a hundred people shot every day.
And mass shootings (say, more than two, three casualties) happen close to every day.
That’s DAY…
How many are injured by the way, if any.
^ Apparently there were no injuries, only deaths.
It will be interesting to hear if it was religious motivation of some kind. Social media is saying he was very anti-Trump and politically motivated before they took his down, just hearsay.
Trump will be to blame even if its anti-Trump political sentiment. The drumpf is to blame for being so bad that people kill people at random.
Oh good grief @Yellowdog , we know he was your hero but even ole orange can’t be blamed for this idiots actions.
Citing a riot at the Capital on Jan 06 YES!
This idiot shooting people at a grocery store in Boulder NO!
@SQUEEKY2 Not President Trump made people feel they can vocalize hatred against groups. Hate crimes and multiple shooting events like these are natural offsprings.
@rebbel “And that’s the way it is…”
@filmfann is right, @SQUEEKY2
Trump is to blame for a Muslim shooting random people in a Boulder grocery store because the shooter hated Trump. Trump encouraged Muslims to shoot non-Muslims.
I think you should see the obvious upside to this event:
This shooting demonstrates that even Muslims can integrate and really internalise what it means to be a colonial. Because what could be more exemplary of your “culture” than a good old mass shooting.
He did not just do it the Allahu Akhbar way, and just blew himself up inside of a crowd, no.
He did it the Yee Haw way, and went in guns blazing, the way John Wayne intended.
@ragingloli John Wayne and the cowboy code is protecting innocents with force if needed.
@kritiper I watch news and THAT’s why I said it happens only in America. An odd instance of mass shooting in another country is no excuse for a monthly ritual mass shooting in America. You have armed crazies there in the States. Maybe you should watch the news and see what the world thinks of your mass shootings and their justification shenanigans man.
I still have no idea what his race is. Not that it matters to me, but that was the Q. I guess Muslim counts as an ethnicity? I always think of it as a religion. I think it’s more like Christianity than Judaism when it comes to classifying the whole group as an ethnicity. The Muslim faith is so large across so many countries.
I thought the cowboy code was herding cattle and shoveling shit?
I read he’s a 21 year old Muslim who apparently has show extreme signs of paranoia for over 2 years. Not paranoid necessarily over race but paranoid that people were out to get him and were spying on him and following him and would do him harm. Family says he went from a cheerful regular person to paranoid after he was beaten by several people in High School. I don’t know how bad was the beating but my guess is that he needed therapy after that and unfortunately for himself and 10 other people, no one got him the help he needed.
@Pandora Did those kids go to jail? He was gang beaten with probably no justice and no therapy afterwards. Such a horrible situation. Where did he get the gun?
@JLeslie Oh, I misread that part. He punched someone. Newweek actually gives better detail about the guy than Fox. Fox News tries to paint him as an angry monster when his friends say he was actually a really nice guy but he had a hair-trigger temper that you wouldn’t see coming and was often paranoid. Believing he was being followed. Though it really seems the family shouldn’ve seeked help for him it really is hard to say when it’s easy sometimes to talk away odd behavior. Especially if you don’t believe that person will harm themself or others.
I wonder if he has schizophrenia – he’s at the right age for it to present itself and the paranoia certainly fits, as well as going downhill the last couple of years.
And: “Exposure to disturbing news events or potentially false information on the internet and social media can provoke extreme reactions in the vulnerable.
“They misperceive what’s happening in the environment and develop delusions,” she says. “They may not make sense or become too aggressive.””
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/the-warning-signs-of-schizophrenia-what-you-need-to-know/
^That crossed my mind, too.
Everyone keeps pointing out that he’s Muslim, but is he white?
If appearances matter, he looks about 65% European Caucasian and 35% White Middle Eastern.
He is Muslim, but his actions don’t seem to be religiously motivated, or terrorist motivated.
He DOES look, in my opinion, a little unbalanced or paranoid in his countenance, but not enough to predict something like this.
@smudges What you are quoting is exactly what I see in that guy’s face.
“They misperceive what’s happening in the environment and develop delusions,” she says. “They may not make sense or become too aggressive.”
I’ve worked with people like that over the years. If you don’t want them tagging along, or you otherwise reject their friendship (me myself being a loner who prefers lots of time to myself for reflection) they tend to read far more into that and become angry / aggressive.
The problem with a case like this and gun control, is, that there are a lot of people like this in the world. They may show some delusional or aggressive tendencies, but does that mean they are dangerous with a deadly weapon? There is really no way to predict an outcome like this.
@Yellowdog They may show some delusional or aggressive tendencies, but does that mean they are dangerous with a deadly weapon? There is really no way to predict an outcome like this.
Exactly. And while people with schizophrenia (who are not taking medication) are often delusional, there are several types of schizophrenia, only one of which is actually dangerous. That’s the paranoid type. It’s not that they’re aggressive, it’s that they’re afraid of people who may be out to get them (in their mind) and they’re behaving DEfensively rather than OFFensively.
While I condemn his actions, I feel bad for him, also. If he IS schizophrenic and IF he had gotten help, his life could have been completely different. As it is, he’ll be found guilty, spend 10–15 miserable years on death row, then eventually be put to death. The prison psychiatrist might prescribe meds for him, but I don’t know which would be worse – not being on meds and experiencing delusions, hallucinations and paranoia, or being on meds and having my brain become “normal”, at which point I would have a full understanding of what I had done and could visualize a different life if I’d been medicated for my mental illness.
Regardless of the mental state of the shooter, those ten people are just as dead.
@smudges What’s really sad is all the preventable murders still to come, because mental illness still has such a stigma.
This shooting has really touched a nerve, since both my wife and I dash into a store for a quick item or two often (probably like most people here).
If the shooter first the expected profile of a white supremacist, his identity and motivation would have been announced immediately. However, since he is a Muslim, the authorities had to establish whether he had been radicalized before announcing to the world that the guy is a Muslim.
In any case, I believe the dead were mostly white, so the act seems fairly random, except for the fact that he drove 20 miles from his home and apparently picked out his targets and shot to kill.
Only muslims can be radicalized? Not sure about that.
White supremacists (Oath keepers and their ilk) fit the bill too.
@elbanditoroso I agree with you that most white shooters that we know of have had different motivations. However, in today’s political climate, if a shooter is white, he is assumed to have just one motivation – racial hatred (even if all the victims are white!)
@crazyguy: “However, in today’s political climate, if a shooter is white, he is assumed to have just one motivation – racial hatred (even if all the victims are white!)”
Nope.
I don’t claim any special knowledge or insight, but I don’t think religious beliefs or radicalization had anything to do with why this guy did it.
He is likely just an overly sensitive, delusional, paranoid schizophrenic—I don’t mean that as an insult, but as a mental illness and personality type. There is no way to tell what is going on in the mind of such a person (who is mentally ill and not taking meds) or what that thought means to them. I know that they take rejection, firings, virtually anything, on a very deep, personal level.
Since there is no way to force anyone to take meds and since meds sometimes make people feel worse (antsy, unnatural) this guy needs to be institutionalized. No one can rely on his taking meds.
Prison would probably be the worst place for him and for other inmates in the prison,
I’m not sure if institutions for the criminally insane still exist, due to a powerful and unwholesome stigma and lack of funding—- but that would be the right environment. Anyone who kills so many people, insane or not, needs sentencing—but to a facility equipped to deal with this kind of behavior.
You can’t count on ANYONE to take their medication. Some people get better, think they don’t need it and get off of it, and its not as easy as just starting up again. Others think the meds make them worse.
But once proved that such an individual will kill when off their medication and they refuse to take it, they need to be institutionalized for their own protection and that of others. Yes, he committed a crime—five murders and many attempted ones. But he is also insane so not completely responsible. Somebody else needs to be since he won’t or can’t
@Yellowdog Is the death penalty completely off the table?
I don’t know—depends on his mental capacity.
What SHOULD be done is a life sentence but in an institution for the criminally insane. It’s for everyone’s protection but it would be punitive, too.
I am not sure such places exist now. Like most institutions that require residency, there seems to have been such a stigma about them that they were eliminated.
@crazyguy Is the death penalty completely off the table?
On March 23, 2020, Colorado became the 22nd U.S. state to abolish the death penalty, as Governor Jared Polis signed legislation repealing the state’s capital punishment statute.
Do you really think the Death Penalty would really stop any of these nut jobs?^^
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In the history of human civilization the death penalty has never been a deterrent.
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@SQUEEKY2 @Darth_Algar Whether the death penalty is a deterrent or not, I’ll leave to the so-called experts. However, if the laws were slightly modified to allow speedier enforcement in cases where there is zero doubt about the perpetrator, we would save a ton of money and second thoughts.
@crazyguy
If they have been convicted then there is zero doubt about their guilt. That’s how our system operates, and has always operated.
@Darth_Algar I thought our system operates on “beyond reasonable doubt”, not zero doubt.
@crazyguy “This shooting has really touched a nerve, since both my wife and I dash into a store for a quick item or two often (probably like most people here).“
Imagine what it feels like as a grocery worker. We’ve had the worst year of our working lives because of the pandemic, now this.
…And now, two weeks later, the thread is silent!
“cricket chirps!”
What else is there to say?
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