As of this writing, it has been about 48-hours since Elliot Rodger went on a murderous rampage at Isla Vista near UCSB. Among those Rodger killed were two male roommates and a third man whom he stabbed to death in his Santa Barbara apartment, along with two Delta Delta Delta sorority sisters at UCSB and a 20-year-old man eating at a deli. Six lost their lives on Friday night for no reason, leaving a community — and the country at large — to ask a question that no one will ever logically answer wake of a deliberate mass shooting: Why?
There is no answer.
It’s important to note that a few more details have emerged about the shooter, Elliot Rodger, in the last 48-hours. The shooter, son of a Hunger Games assistant director, left a haunting final message to the world via a YouTube video about “Retribution” for his sexual frustrations. He also wrote a deranged, rambling 141-page manifesto called “My Twisted World” which took aim at sorority girls and women in general, in addition to “popular” guys and annoying roommates.
In the manifesto, he blames an obsession with World of Warcraft for a lack of social development in his middle and high school years. Obsessed with the idea that wealth = “getting laid,” he also claims he played Megamillions Lottery after going to college with the hopes of getting a girl. He also apparently became active on PUAHate.com, an anti-pick-up-artist site where they “confirmed his theories about how wicked and degenerate women really are.” He got drunk at a party in the fall of 2013 with the hopes of losing his virginity, but he wound up getting in a fight and trying to push people off a ledge. He wound up getting beat up instead, breaking his leg after taking a fall. This apparently left him even more humiliated and bitter.
The document was e-mailed to local news station KYET. The news station has offered a breakdown of takeaways after combing through the it. The manifesto includes Rodgers laying out his plans for a “Day of Retribution” based out of sexual frustrations and misogynistic viewpoints towards women. It lays out Rodger’s sociopathic worldview of male privilege, which apparently was a world where he felt women owed him sex.
It’s terrifying, containing ramblings like this:
“…endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.”
Rodger claims he was bullied in high school:
“Some boys randomly pushed me against the lockers as they walked past me in the hall. One boy who was tall and had blonde hair called me a “loser”, right in front of his girlfriends. Yes, he had girls with him. Pretty girls. And they didn’t seem to mind that he was such an evil bastard. In fact, I bet they liked him for it. This is how girls are, and I was starting to realize it.
A major chunk of the manifesto obsesses over his sexual frustrations with women:
I developed a very high sex drive, and it would always remain like this. This was the start of hell for me. Going through puberty utterly doomed my existence. It condemned me to live a life of suffering and unfulfilled desires. Even at that young age, I felt depressed because I wanted sex, yet I felt unworthy of it. I didn’t think I was ever going to experience sex in reality, and I was right. I never did. I was finally interested in girls, but there was no way I could ever get them. And so my starvation began.
He also lays out how he thinks no one should have sex because he can’t have sex:
I began to have fantasies of becoming very powerful and stopping everyone from having sex. I wanted to take their sex away from them, just like they took it away from me. I saw sex as an evil and barbaric act, all because I was unable to have it. This was the major turning point. My anger made me stronger inside. This was when I formed my ideas that sex should be outlawed. It is the only way to make the world a fair and just place. If I can’t have it, I will destroy it. That’s the conclusion I came to, right then and there.
And then Rodger mentions inflicting the horror he inflicted on Friday night:
“My orchestration of the Day of Retribution is my attempt to do everything, in my power, to destroy everything I cannot have. All of those beautiful girls I’ve desired so much in my life, but can never have because they despise and loathe me, I will destroy. All of those popular people who live hedonistic lives of pleasure, I will destroy, because they never accepted me as one of them. I will kill them all and make them suffer, just as they have made me suffer. It is only fair.”
You can read it below, but just a warning that reading the manifesto of a severely mentally ill sociopath might make you sick to your stomach. via Uproxx:
CBS in San Franscio has some details about the timeline in which Rodgers wrote the manifesto. It apparently happened after the police paid him a visit to check on his mental welfare following disturbing social media posts. Had they searched his residence at the time, it sounds like they might have found details of his plans:
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown says deputies checked on Rodger after being called by a concerned family member. The officers left after determining he didn’t need to be locked up for mental-health reasons.
Rodger expressed relief that his apartment wasn’t searched because deputies would have found his weapons and his writings and would have foiled his plan.
Brown says he won’t second-guess his deputies’ decision-making in the encounter.
Police found Rodger in his car after he opened fire at a group of pedestrians and struck bike riders with his BMW, apparently dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Police recovered three 9 mm handguns inside the car, along with 41 magazines loaded with ten rounds of ammunition for each.
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department has had three prior encounters with Rodger: Once once when he called the police claiming he was assaulted, but an officer claiming it was his fault, another time when he accused his roommate for stealing three candles (the roommate was booked for petty theft after Rodger made a citizen’s arrest), and just a couple of weeks ago on April 30, 2014, when deputies went to Rodger’s apartment after being asked by his family to check in on him. The family says they contacted police after discovering social media posts about suicide and killing people. The family also says he was being treated by multiple therapists and had been diagnosed as “a high-functioning patient with Asperger syndrome.”
Via CNN:
So disturbed that someone from a mental health agency, after consulting with one of Rodger’s relatives, requested police check on his welfare April 30, Brown said.
Rodger’s family contacted police after discovering social media posts about suicide and killing people, family spokesman and attorney Alan Shifman told reporters Saturday.
Brown said Rodger told deputies it was a misunderstanding and that he was not going to hurt anyone or himself. Rodger said he was having troubles with his social life.
“He was articulate. He was polite. He was timid,” Brown told CNN on Sunday.
There was nothing in his behavior to suggest he was violent, and the deputies “determined he did not meet the criteria for an involuntary hold,” Brown said.
Rodger wrote that a wave of relief came over him when the deputies left. “If they had demanded to search my room … (t)hat would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds, I thought it was all over.”
There’s a lot of people passing blame around for who should have been responsible for what to avoid such a terrible event. But all that just seems like an act of futility put in light of the monstrous acts.
But let’s have Richard Martinez, the father of 20-year-old UCSB shooting victim Christopher Martinez, have the last word here. At a press conference yesterday, in tears, he exclaimed.
When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, “Stop this madness!” Too many have died. We should say to ourselves, “Not one more!”
He’s right. Mass shootings like Isla Vista has become too common these days.
When will this insanity stop?