Today's Mass Shooting

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OK, we have an ID and photos of the juvenile now.

Heavy said:
Alec McKinney has been identified as one of the students accused in the shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Douglas County, Colorado that left one heroic teen dead and eight others injured. McKinney is identified in Douglas County court records as Maya Elizabeth McKinney, but Heavy has learned that McKinney goes by Alec McKinney and identifies as male.

The Denver Post has confirmed that McKinney is the juvenile suspect in the shooting. Authorities gave the name of the adult male suspect as 18-year-old Devon Erickson.
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https://heavy.com/news/2019/05/alec-maya-mckinney
 

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theprestige said:
What's the inconsistency?
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He complains about Christians being hateful to gays and is upset with Donald Trump, but also follows Chuck Norris and PewDiePie, both of whose present-day fan clubs are decidedly anti-SJW. Norris particularly is a quite outspoken Trump and Roy Moore supporter.
 
No motive announced yet.

I do wonder if they thought they would still be alive right now. Was it a suicide mission with chicken-out, or were they supposed to die in a police shootout? There is no chance to run away and hide in Fantasyland. Did they decide that life in prison would be just fine?
 
I've been reading about the dead victim a lot. He was a FIRST Robotics student, and his father was Lead Mentor for the team, so there's quite a bit of tributes going on over on the unofficial First forums. (There are no official First forums, but there is a blog, and they posted it.) The kid lunged at the shooters, who shot him.

Of course, early reports are always fragmentary, but there were a couple of differences between this one and some other shootings. First, there were two shooters. That's rare, although of course Columbine was another example. Second, they didn't start killing right away. They burst in and told the students not to move. That was when he was attacked by other students. Reports say that three students jumped one of the gunmen, but that it was the police (or security guard?) who actually subdued the shooters. Is it possible that their motive wasn't murder at all? Or maybe they were after someone specific as opposed to a random killing spree? Is it possible that they only fired as a reaction to being attacked?


Well, the kid who died, Kendrick Castillo, still gets hero status in my book. They were probably there to kill people and there certainly was good reason to assume so. Praise should go to the students who did what they could to stop them, and especially so to the one who died trying.

And finally, you have the person who was called a boy, and now is being called a girl, but there might be an asterisk involved. It seems that part is subject to some interpretation, and is not officially decided.
 
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Meadmaker said:
Of course, early reports are always fragmentary, but there were a couple of differences between this one and some other shootings. First, there were two shooters. That's rare, although of course Columbine was another example. Second, they didn't start killing right away. They burst in and told the students not to move. That was when he was attacked by other students. Reports say that three students jumped one of the gunmen, but that it was the police (or security guard?) who actually subdued the shooters. Is it possible that their motive wasn't murder at all? Or maybe they were after someone specific as opposed to a random killing spree? Is it possible that they only fired as a reaction to being attacked?
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These are some good points. The reports I read said that the other kids had effectively disarmed the shooters, but that there was still an active general struggle underway when police arrived. I suppose those details aren't tremendously important and we can wait patiently for the truth of the matter to work itself out.

That is a very good idea about the possible targeting. To my knowledge, every random-mass-shooting at a school has begun with the attacker doing just that - suddenly pulling out his firearm and shooting at whomever was close by. If it's true that these assailants when they first entered the classroom started out by ordering everyone to remain still, and not just shooting...it does indeed suggest they had a specific target in mind and didn't initially plan to shoot just anyone.
 
Reports say that they had three handguns and a rifle. All were stolen from Erickson's parents who legally owned them. A fellow student said that Erickson had talked about doing this kind of thing.

None of that is confirmed.
 
Meadmaker said:
And finally, you have the person who was called a boy, and now is being called a girl, but there might be an asterisk involved. It seems that part is subject to some interpretation, and is not officially decided.
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Born as a biological female with a vagina.
 
So, he's a loon. Left, right, up, down, doesn't matter. All that matters to the NRA is that loons can get guns. Unless they're black loons, which would be bad.
 
Another thing I've noticed is that there are two suspects in custody, but all the eyewitness accounts I have heard have spoken of "the shooter".


It's not all that important, and more detail will come out with time, but in these things we always have some sort of desire to find out information about why the people do what they do. The nature of the relationship between the two is part of that.
 
Meadmaker said:
Another thing I've noticed is that there are two suspects in custody, but all the eyewitness accounts I have heard have spoken of "the shooter".
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Both may have been armed but only one pulled the trigger. Maybe.

It's not all that important, and more detail will come out with time, but in these things we always have some sort of desire to find out information about why the people do what they do. The nature of the relationship between the two is part of that.
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Erickson may also be non-typical with his sexuality, making them both feel out-of-place and maybe feeling persecuted.
 
It sounds like the two gunmen must have split up. I've read a lot about the fight that involved Kendrick Castillo, and in all the descriptions there are only mentions of one gunman, and it seems when that fight was over, the gunman was disarmed and subdued. I've seen reports that a security guard disarmed a gunman, so that must have been in a second, separate, fight.


It's also not clear which of the two gunmen were involved in which skirmish. It sounds like both of them did fire shots, and both of them did injure students. No word on motive yet. I've seen very little description of either gunman.
 
William Parcher said:
From the beginning it was reported that the gunmen were in two different places.


Physical description? I've posted photos of both of them.
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Right. Yes, physical descriptions have been out there, especially of the older one. I meant to say that there hasn't been much about the motivations or behavior of the two. The younger is trans. The older had antisocial dirty words on his car. Beyond that, not much.
 
Meadmaker said:
Beyond that, not much.
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There are both of their social media writings published now by Daily Mail and Heavy. So you can read quite a bit of what they wrote.

Also classmates have talked about each of them.

It seems to me that their angst is that society does not properly embrace LBGTQ. They may have special angst towards Christianity for this. I suspect that Erickson is also in that spectrum and is not decidedly straight hetero.
 
Investigators probing whether private STEM School guard shot a student and fired upon deputies

The Denver Post said:
Detectives in the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting are investigating whether a private security guard shot a student or at a Douglas County sheriff’s deputy responding to the scene of the mass shooting, ABC News and other news outlets are reporting.

A top law enforcement official told ABC News that detectives are trying to determine if a round from the security officer’s firearm struck and wounded an innocent student, the news organization is reporting. The source said the investigation is in its early stages and authorities are speaking with the security guard to learn more...
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https://www.denverpost.com/2019/05/09/stem-school-shooting-security-guard-colorado
 
Very few student-perpetrated school shootings seem to have definitive political motives. This is probably because it's hard to nail down what schoolchildren's politics are, because they probably don't have any strongly-defined politics and flip-flop on their opinions several times as they mature. The older shooter's eclectic social media interests seem to illustrate this point, showing him following a mix of liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning pages. The pro-Obama meme that much hay is being made of, was shared by him over four years ago, when he was 14 and still in middle school. And Heavy.com highlighted the fact that when he was 11 years old, he dressed up as Slender Man for Halloween. It strains credibility to imagine even the slightest relevance of such a fact.

Taking an unscientific poll of school shootings where motives are known or have been reasonably deduced, the common thread seems to be always age-relevant social issues. Bullying or the perception of it, peer acceptance, bad grades from teachers, and spurned advances or romantic rejection seem to be the order of the day.
 
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Checkmite said:
Very few student-perpetrated school shootings seem to have definitive political motives. This is probably because it's hard to nail down what schoolchildren's politics are, because they probably don't have any strongly-defined politics and flip-flop on their opinions several times as they mature. The older shooter's eclectic social media interests seem to illustrate this point, showing him following a mix of liberal-leaning and conservative-leaning pages. The pro-Obama meme that much hay is being made of, was shared by him over four years ago, when he was 14 and still in middle school. And Heavy.com highlighted the fact that when he was 11 years old, he dressed up as Slender Man for Halloween. It strains credibility to imagine even the slightest relevance of such a fact.

Taking an unscientific poll of school shootings where motives are known or have been reasonably deduced, the common thread seems to be always age-relevant social issues. Bullying or the perception of it, peer acceptance, bad grades from teachers, and spurned advances or romantic rejection seem to be the order of the day.
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And that seems to be the case here, although it's too early to tell. Apparently Devon broke up with a girlfriend recently. Alec had family conflict. Both of them seemed to be seething with teenager-y style "hate everything" vibes. (Information came from the web, especially heavy.com)



Meanwhile, there's some investigating whether the heroic security guard actually may have shot a student by accident, and it's still not clear exactly who apprehended whom. The guard still gets bravery points for being willing to fly into danger, but might lose a couple for being a little twitchy on the trigger. Again, time will tell. I
 
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