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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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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.

Police believe the shooter used a B&T Station Six, known in Great Britain as a Welrod pistol, according to police sources. The gun doesn't have a silencer but does have a long barrel that enables the 9 mm to fire a nearly silent shot. The gun requires manually cycling ammunition from the magazine.

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.

Police believe the shooter used a B&T Station Six

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.

known in Great Britain as a Welrod pistol, according to police sources.

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.

The gun doesn't have a silencer but does have a long barrel that enables the 9 mm to fire a nearly silent shot.

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.

The gun requires manually cycling ammunition from the magazine.

C-c-combo breaker! This is the only sentence in this paragraph that is not egregiously wrong.

As for the rest of your post:

Why an insurance exec and not oil?

For the same reason that hundreds of thousands of people are publicly celebrating the murder right now. Health Care costs are peak culture war.

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?

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.

Or why not use a bomb like the Red Army Faction and Alfred Herrhausen?

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.

There's no objective, no real victory, and that applies to revenge

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.

The target and method say vendetta, not politics.

Then why are people who have no possible connection to this vendetta openly celebrating its execution?