Smoking Guns Abound
How I learned to stop worrying and love the politicized rifle shell casings.
While there is no recorded first instance of a message being scribed onto munitions, I would wager that the practice has existed for as long as bullets, bombs, arrows, and grenades have been in use. It is part of human nature to express our feelings through writing, and the most human of these feelings is anger. Quite the match made in heaven.
As of late, a worrying pattern has emerged in the “American political violence scene”, which seemed to start with the internet’s favorite (alleged) assassin. After the shooting in New York City that forcefully extracted the soul of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, three spent cartridges were located on the scene, emblazoned with the words “delay”, “deny”, and “depose.” This is in reference to similar phrases used by the insurance industry to deny care, and clearly stated the shooter’s goals in a simple three words. I know many of you are asking, “three words, that’s way too many, can we cut it down at all?” The answer, dear reader, is no, actually, as the next widely publicized killing that utilized the old sharpie on a spent round trick was the killing of former Toilet Paper USA founder, Charlie “Prove me wrong“ Kirk. Now, we have the assassin in custody, Tyler Robinson, and, in traditional fashion, he is an enigma of immense proportions. Robinson might be the most average person ever, raised in a deeply republican household in Utah, surrounded by guns his entire life, and radicalized at his electrician apprenticeship. We might never know how he became so violent, but we do know that he was a massive loser, and one thing losers LOVE to do is copy.
So the crack shot Mormon put his best engraving work into what motivates him most, that just happened to be the most shallow internet memes possible, I will admit, watching the Governor of Utah try and say “Notices, bulges, OwO what’s this?” might make up for the fact that Kirk died in the first ever Reddit assassination. But even before the Utah Valley shooting, the United States was rocked with another tragedy in Minneapolis, the 23-year-old attacker targeted a catholic school (the same school they had attended as a child and practiced as an adult) and had an unhealthy obsession with mass shooters, because, of course, they did. Now, attentive readers might see a connection to the two cases discussed so far, and our new individual, so what did they write?
You guessed it, more internet gibberish. So, where are we heading as a nation, Years of Lead anyone? All these little internet freaks are dragging us in one direction, and after such a short jaunt, we have arrived at our final destination. Joshua Jahn was another nobody, apparently radicalized by his love of Reddit, marijuana, and his deep red hometown of Allen, Texas. This deeply troubled individual climbed onto a roof overlooking an ICE facility and either tried to shoot agents working at the facility and missed or had so much hate in his heart that he shot three detainees. Either way, the motive of the shooter is incomprehensible; the background that we know amounts to never graduating from college, but spending four years on and off at Collins College, never holding down a job for more than a year, and the only prior criminal mischief was marijuana possession. So obviously, this criminal genius would write some stupid rhetoric on his bullets, and he did. “ANTI-ICE” in sloppy blue marker on one of the unspent cartridges, posted by our dear FBI director, minutes after reports of the shooting. Now I am not one for conspiracies, but if I were a very literal FBI agent, and my immediate boss told me to “put some anti-ICE messaging on the round,” even I don’t think I would be stupid enough to write “ANTI-ICE.” It is close enough to parody that it almost makes sense that Jahn wrote it.
It is obvious that our current news apparatus is woefully unprepared for the insanity of doomer internet bad actors. For those who haven’t spent an unhealthy amount of time in a game, hearing anchors talk about 6,000 hours in Rust as a motive is going to get old fast. Calling Tyler Robinson a furry solely because of a message he wrote on a bullet, which could either be joking about the furry culture online, as an insider, an outsider, or even completely unaware of any connection to the folks that dress up as dogs. Everything is wrapped in multiple layers of irony, and attempting to unravel them is impossible. Every group online has its own jokes, co-opted from other communities, the meaning changed and shifted, and Fox News, CNN, and NBC’s reporting is drawing many parallels with the video game moral panic following the Columbine shooting.
In the end, the messages scrawled onto bullets and broadcast online are less about a single coherent ideology and more about a desperate need for attention in a world addicted to spectacle. We may never truly know what drove Robinson to shoot Kirk or Jahn to fire upon ICE detainees, but it is good at distracting us from the real danger of the shift towards violence in the US, and as long as we are distracted, no work will be put towards figuring out how to pull these young white men back from the brink, before its too late.