Elliott Rodger, the UCSB Shooting, and 5 Rules for Coping with Tragedy

As law enforcement, the media, and the larger Santa Barabara
community deal with the aftermath of last
Friday’s shooting rampage by Elliot Rodger, it’s also worth
keeping in mind the “5 Rules for Coping with Tragedy” outlined
above in a Reason TV video originally released in January, 2011 in
the wake of the shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) and what
Reason ultimately came to call “The Loughner Panic”
(after the response to the gunman).

Among the points:

1. Early reports may be wrong.

2. Don’t politicize a tragedy.

3. Don’t blame heated rhetoric.

4. Put the tragedy in context.

5. Legislate carefully.

More on those rules here.

As
noted over the weekend, Rodger left a long playlist of
chilling, disturbing videos. He also published a long,
rambling, and alternately racist, misogynistic, and thoroughly
misanthropic text he titled “My
Twisted World,” in which he explains his anger at a world that
did not conform to his demands:

Humanity… All of my suffering on this world has been at
the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me
realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I
ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst
humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an
existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the
females of the human species were incapable of seeing the
value in me.   

This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be.
This is the story of my entire life. It is a dark story of
sadness, anger, and hatred. It is a story of a war against cruel
injustice. In this magnificent story, I will disclose every
single detail about my life, every single significant experience
that I have pulled from my superior memory, as well as how
those experiences have shaped my views of the world.

There’s no question that he was seriously deranged, though it’s
far from clear what the larger social import of his worldview
really is. I’ve already seen long essays about how Rodger
exemplifies all Millennials, or all men, or all Asperger cases—the
list will only keep growing. But taking mass shooters as
representative of the society that supposedly produces them
(through violent video games, too much parenting, too little
parenting, too much sexy on TV, prudish attitudes towards sex,
etc.) is always a dicey proposition, especially in the first flood
of information.