Struggling to Coe to terms with shooting in plymouth

[Thomasina79]

Not an AIBU I know, I’m sure we all are. This was a misogynistic man who identified as an ‘incel’. I’ve never heard of this phrase, but this man”s attitudes to women are common enough. Ok he hated his mum, not unusual, but no reason to kill her. But why kill the others, especially the child? This is all so sad and shocking and it seems that violence against women is becoming so prevalent again.

I watched some of his YouTube videos before they were taken down. He was a desperately sad, lonely young man with clear mental health issues crying out for help, not the villain you would expect.
Tragic situation all round, that was preventable if he’d been given the correct support.

@WorldsBestBoss

*No sane person guns down their mother and several strangers.

Doesn't matter if you're an Islamic terrorist or an incel. None of these people are healthy.*

Absolutely this.

There are SO many reasons that children are either growing up with mental health issues or they are surfacing in adulthood.

Many children grow up feeling unloved, unwanted, alone, perhaps the child of a parent with unmet mental health needs, victims of bullying, undiagnosed autism, adhd, other SEN, extreme anxiety, health issues, the list goes on and on.

A very high proportion of prisoners have previously undiagnosed ADHD.

I am not in any way excusing this devastating attack, but I think if society focused more on the reasons that people get to this point then many of these atrocities could be avoided.

It's it not children, it's boys and MEN. We need to name the problem.

And it's not better mental health support, it's a shift away from a porn soaked culture which is dripping in misogyny, which celebrates mam violence against women where men think they deserve sex, where women are routinely hit during sex, and where girls are raped in school. That's what needs to change

he was an ideological extremist

What was his ideology? He was a vicious, out of control thug. Stop making excuses for him.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/05/many-terrorists-abuse-women-research-extremist-attackers-violent-misogyny

[quote supermoonrising]@Cornettoninja
but radicalisation and mental health problems coexist and are separate issues

Clearly not in this criminal case or thousands of others.[/quote]
It’s not actually clear though is it? Given the relative rarity of incidences of mass killings and the prevalence of mental health issues I would say that the link with so many instances of the perpetrators involvement with incel communities is strong enough to draw the conclusion that the motivating factor is unlikely to be down to a mental health condition.

Using the linked Wikipedia article there have been 12 instances of mass killings (including Plymouth) linked to followers of incel ideology since 2014.

Mental health provision is almost universally woeful, but that isn’t the root trigger of acts like Plymouth.

This study (link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43545-021-00220-8#Sec18 ) gives an interesting insight.

link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43545-021-00220-8#Sec18

@wherethewildthingis

Exactly Fleek I agree with you entirely. They do not need better mental health support. What they need is locking up where they will no longer be a danger to women and children.

What a ridiculous thing to say.

What a ridiculous thing to say

Sounds pretty sensible to me.

@Lockheart do you have experience in this area? Because mine is extensive. I can count on the fingers of one hand, the number of violent males I've met who had a genuine mental illness. Better mental health services will not stop these attacks, because mental illness is not the primary driver for them.
The Hart brothers, whose mother and sister were murdered by their father, have also spoken about the "must be mental illness" discourse being harmful and distressing to surviving family members. It's a simplistic view to say its caused by mental illness and it's just not correct.

@Blossomtoes

he was an ideological extremist

What was his ideology? He was a vicious, out of control thug. Stop making excuses for him.

It’s not an excuse, it’s a warning. There are many others out there in the same frame of mind existing in echo chambers and bolstering each other’s feelings of injustice.

@Blossomtoes

What a ridiculous thing to say

Sounds pretty sensible to me.

Yeah, so sensible to not want to improve mental health services so things like this can be avoided. Yeah, soooo sensible. 🙄

Jihadists don’t only kill non-Muslims. That the killing is indiscriminate is part of the terror.

It is absolutely horrifying. And could have been prevented had his mother been listened to, had his gun license been withheld, had the whole issue of incel radicalisation been taken seriously.

There will be more, I’m afraid. This is becoming a focus for alienated, violent young men seeking validation.

@Clymene

No it's not just boys and men. Please don't try and correct my post. I had to bury a close female friend of mine earlier this year as she had taken her own life. Yes she didn't take anyone else with her, but she left behind a family who will forever live with this devastation.

Another male friend of mine is a victim of his mother's suicide. Appears to be fine on the surface but dig deeper and he has spent his life feeing abandoned. Consequently feels angry at women and has lack of respect for his wife/cheats etc.

It all stems from issues dripping down through generations and the lack of support from society and/or the government.

Once again, what was his ideology?

And, of course mental health services should be improved - and that includes locking dangerous people up.

This is an interesting perspective from two family survivors, they are very articulate and they completely reject the mental health discourse around male violence:

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/luke-ryan-hart-father-murder-mother-sister-spalding-a8928471.html

@Iloveginger

I watched some of his YouTube videos before they were taken down. He was a desperately sad, lonely young man with clear mental health issues crying out for help, not the villain you would expect. Tragic situation all round, that was preventable if he’d been given the correct support.

what sort of support? support for loneliness? unhappiness?

@wherethewildthingis

Let's not latch onto the potential for mental health issues being a reason for this. That is not known, its just speculation at this point from a neighbour. In any case these "mentally unwell" violent males who take lives in this way never lose control and attack a group of large, burly men who can fight back, do they? No. They go for women and children. Or they also use a gun, like this one did, to make sure those they kill cannot defend themselves. It's internalised mysoginism that makes us leap to "he must have been unwell". No-we need to recognise that these types of men are actually common and they do what they do because they choose to. No other reason

This.

My life probably hasn’t turned out as expected. And I’m sure that’s the same for a hell of a lot of women. Funnily enough, we don’t tend to go around abusing, beating the crap out of, or killing people. Yes, I am aware that there are some cases of abuse by women - but it is nowhere near the scale of acts carried out by men. And I’m sick of the mental health “excuse” given to men.

With regards to the incel movement - it’s definitely more than just a few thousand men whinging online.

Suicide is not the same as mass murder @WorldsBestBoss and I think it's absolutely sickening that you are drawing an equivalence between people who can see no point in living and this bloke who went on a mustering rampage.

He was also someone who as well as having ADHD/other SEND, will have accumulated a huge number of traumas as a child. His father was clearly a nasty bit of work.

It's only now that we are understanding the impact of these "ACEs" (adverse childhood experiences). Some kids will have so many or have so little support that their brains are actually changed by their childhood.

So whilst I utterly condemn the guy....I also can see how this happens. And add in the awful porn culture and internet access and you get very vulnerable individuals who are indoctrinated into a way of thinking. I see it in kids I teach at school, and how even a decade ago we were not so aware of this.

CAMHS needs massively increased funding to reach these kids before they get to this point.

Better MH support is definitely needed, as well as people taking the threat of incels more seriously. Or we can just blame the wimminz:

twitter.com/janine_humphrey/status/1426266970589179913

What is major concern is how badly the mentla health care sector has been stripped of funding over the last few years.

If people could get therapists and help then this would be beneficial to everyone.

If the Plymouth shooter had help at 16 or 17 or 18, his life would not have become what it did

Clearly there’s a difference between the ideology that killers buy into, and who they actually go on to kill. I doubt the 7/7 bombers assumed there’d be no Muslims caught up in their rush hour massacre in central London. They just wanted to kill as many people as possible. Does that mean they weren’t actually Islamist extremists? Course not. Similarly Incels hate women (and also men who have sex) but most of the killings they’ve carried out have been of men and women, especially when they go on a rampage.

Anyway I doubt this is helping OP. It is very hard to think about and understand, I used to live near this attack. It’s very normal. It’s hard to get our heads round the fact that these attacks are very rare and basically senseless.

www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html

This guy is a classic case of someone utterly failed as a child, with the result he's turned into a violent killer who has had his views of the world warped.

One of the worst jobs I've done is on statistics for domestic violence, I was completely astonished, utterly terrified about how many incidents, crime and non-crimes there are even in the small area I was looking in - tens of thousands in a year in a small part of the country.

Hatred against women and girls, and violence in general, is utterly commonplace unfortunately. The Incel movement is the extreme end of that, having an actual thought out ideology, but that hatred is very real and manifest every day in everyday ways that we don't have any idea of the scale.

Of course he was a terrorist, terrorists want to create fear and terror, and are linked to an ideological movement, they often slaughter people of their 'own' groups to do that, so the fact he killed men is irrelevant- he was driven by extreme ideological hatred, which is worrying for all of us.