This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Looks specifically like a pistol with an integrated suppressor and manual action, in the vein of the B&T Station 6, and 9mm casings were recovered at the scene.
Video demonstration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n8XHxUlg0F8
The shooter in the video manipulates the back of the barrel (rather than racking a slide) after each shot and makes the same sort of jerking motion required to eject spent cartridges from the Station 6. He also does indeed appear to clear a misfire, but not a serious one as he was able to eject the cartridge and chamber and fire another.
I don't know about a paid hit. When was the last time an American exec was killed like this? I asked Grok for examples from the last 40 years, it pulled only the 2001 murder of Federal Prosecutor Thomas Wales. Other than it being suspected as a paid hit, I don't see these as exactly analogous, and on that note, today, isn't every online-classified-tor-bitcoin-assassin a fed? Who has the means to find a guy like the shooter but lacks the means to, say, cover their wife's cancer treatment? Major league corporate shadowiness also doesn't feel right, again I'd wonder where are the other examples, and I'd think at that level they just have the guy killed on his yacht and that sends whatever message they want.
Revenge seems simplest. Tech, energy, banking, all those could have myriad motives. Health insurance CEO, revenge crushes everything else on probability. So ex-SF guy loses his wife to cancer after she was denied coverage, decides to kill the CEO of their insurance company. As ex-SF he would have the skill, and to have made it through SF selection for whichever branch, he'd have outlier motivation and resolve. Everything necessary to coldly decide to kill another man, and then kill that man in such a manner as we see in the video. And probably get away with it.
Screwing a home-made suppressor onto the average semi-auto handgun turns it into a manual action. Most handguns use a delayed-blowback system where the delay is provided by tilting the barrel to disengage some form of locking lug. Adding an extra pound or so of weight to the front of the barrel throws this system off, causing the gun to fail to cycle properly, which means you need to cycle it by hand. But don't take my word for it, here's Gun Jesus making the same point. The video alone should be sufficient, though, since on the first shot you can clearly see the slide moving and the large puff of gas exiting the ejection port as the gun partially cycles. Manual actions like the B&T do not do this.
Factory suppressors generally incorporate a Nielsen device, a small spring-loaded device that bypasses this issue, allowing suppressed semi-auto fire. Dedicated suppressed pistols sometimes use a slide lock to disable the semi-auto function completely. But what we see in the video is highly consistent with a semi-auto pistol mounting a simple, home-made suppressor that is compromising its semi-auto function.
My bet is that this is left-wing terrorism by a competent, motivated individual. No particular bet on a military or law-enforcement background; nothing here screams super-special operator to me.
The only definitive point I see in the video is the visible gas on first discharge. The Station 6 demonstration video shows it releasing gas only when the bolt is cycled, but that video is in daylight and what appears to be warm weather. There is a moment where it's possible he was racking the slide, but there aren't enough pixels to say that definitively, same with when he first fires and it's possible the slide was moving back, or it was just recoil. In the typical circumstance I would trust Ian's assessment, here I don't know what he sees in that blur to call speculation about it being a Welrod-type "conclusively wrong." He just says he watched the surveillance video, and maybe he's seen the actual source video, that would still leave an explanation needed for why the NYPD thinks it's a Station 6.
Leftist terrorism seems very unlikely. Why an insurance exec and not oil? Why either of those and not a politician? If he had the patience to learn a gun, make a suppressor, go in with a plan, not freak out — why not do all that with a rifle against a comparatively hardened target? Or why not use a bomb like the Red Army Faction and Alfred Herrhausen? There's no objective, no real victory, and that applies to revenge, but the widower motivated by the death of his wife gives us something specific, the leftist looking for someone who "needs killing," why would he ever start with insurance? The target and method say vendetta, not politics.
re: the gun, your train of thought seems reasonable, but goddamn do I hate the media.
I can believe that a police officer said this to a journalist at some point. I have no reason to consider this as having any weight until they explain exactly why "police" think that. Unique extractor markings on the cases left at the scene? Witness testimony? I do not believe that "police" generally know more about guns than I do. Many of them know considerably less, and the journalists passing the message know nothing at all.
I call bullshit, completely off the cuff. I do not believe the B&T Station Six is "known in Great Britian as a Welrod pistol". I do not believe that there are enough Station Sixes in Great Britian to be "known" as anything. I am confident that what is "known in Great Britain as a Welrod" is the Welrod, which was developed there in WWII. The S6 is a modernized version of the concept built in Switzerland.
This statement is a perfect example of why you should never, ever listen to journalists about anything to do with firearms, or indeed on any technical matter, or indeed in any way at all. But at least it's not a lie, RITE GIYZ!? The S6 does have a silencer. Moreover, a barrel long enough to act as a silencer for 9mm parabellum would be... impractically long. At a guess, a couple dozen yards long at least, and that's a very conservative guess.
C-c-combo breaker! This is the only sentence in this paragraph that is not egregiously wrong.
As for the rest of your post:
For the same reason that hundreds of thousands of people are publicly celebrating the murder right now. Health Care costs are peak culture war.
Because this is easier and far more survivable. The part where he does this and gets away with it makes it incredibly effective from a propaganda perspective.
To put it a bit reductively, bombs are much harder on a whole variety of axes. This was very, very, very easy to do, and required resources that are a rounding error even to someone working minimum wage.
The last several years are best understood as a massive, distributed search for the best way to hurt the outgroup without getting in too much trouble. This is a search result popping into the hopper. That's the objective and the victory, when you get down to it.
Then why are people who have no possible connection to this vendetta openly celebrating its execution?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link