Police say shooter’s anger over YouTube policies ‘appears to be the motive’
techcrunch.comAs someone who follows digital advertising industry, I want to add some context to this discussion.
People tend to view youtube "de-monetization" act as something out of the blue. Story goes as "evil youtube cornered the market of online videos and now acting like a spoiled child, f--king with people who were making some small buck from their videos".
This is not the case. In fact, for last 2 years large advertisers were getting more and more unhappy and angry about digital advertising, citing the lack of transparency, fraud and lack of brand safety as their main concerns. It was brewing for a long time now.
P&G, the largest advertiser in the world, and trend-setter in general advertising, cut hundreds of millions from their digital budgets in 2017. [0]
Youtube, unlike google search engine, depends on large brands doing "brand advertising", as opposed to "performance advertising". You can't force 10000's of small businesses advertise on youtube, ROI is just not here. It's P&G, Ford, Unilever and others giants who keep the lights on in youtube offices, and giants were clearly revolting. And when they cut spend, they cut it not from youtube only, but from all digital, meaning that google mothership also hurt from their move.
So, youtube tried to save the situation, clumsily. Ads are now appearing in much smaller subset of videos, which are vettoed, and youtube jacked up the prices [1] of such inventory, to make up the lost revenue from long tail of videos.
Take into account the fact that youtube is rumored to be unprofitable or making very modest profit (due to enormous technical costs they have) and you see it more like move out of desperation than anything else.
[0] http://www.adweek.com/digital/procter-gamble-cut-140-million...
[1] https://marketingland.com/report-youtube-set-raise-ad-prices...
Yes. Fascinating to watch markets form and price discovery happen. For awhile they only cared about people providing free content that would bring in the eyeballs so they could sell those ads. When advertisers got demanding they had to do something.
But I only see a loose connection between that and what happened. This was a woman driven by likes or money (hard to tell which was more important), and attempted to kill because of this.
This is more like a machine shop owner laying off people because some jobs were moving to Asia and an ex-employee shooting up the offices the next day.
Macro- and micro- economics surely played a part, but the root of the problem was in her head.
I don't get Youtube policies. Why not let the advertisers decide which channels to advertise on? Why demonetize anything? This babysitting attitude makes so many creators unhappy.
If a video is allowed on YT, why not make more money off of it?
Advertisers don't actually want to spend time picking YouTube channels individually. But they will complain if YouTube runs their ads against the wrong content. They have threatened to leave before. [1]
Picking channels that are good for advertising is a service that YouTube does for advertisers.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/why-advertisers-are-pulling-s...
Just out of curiosity how much leverage do advertising companies actually have?
All of it. It's where nearly all their revenue comes from. There's no remaining business without the ad sales.
First of all, YouTube doesn't make money.
Secondly, there are two sides to this equation. The advertisers aren't paying for ads as charity to Google. They want the billions of views that YouTube gets every day. While I don't know the exact statistics, YouTube definitely seems to be growing in influence where people who are popular on the platform are legitimate celebrities. Advertisers would be foolish to not try to get in on some of the publicity. Now I'm a bit conspiracy theory-ish on this whole thing. I really think that between the advertisers and traditional media there wasn't necessarily a concerted effort where both of them planned to do something together, they were just both acting in their self interest. So when traditional media outlets started publishing the nature of the videos that some ads would play next to, the advertisers thought "Well, this is a great opportunity to strong arm them for some cheaper ads." Meanwhile the traditional media was simply attacking a competitor. It seems to me like there were also some useful idiots at YouTube who saw the so-called terrible things that ads were next to and over corrected. Instead of saying "Okay, well, good luck reaching how many people we do." to advertisers, they rolled over and capitulated. When in my opinion, they really didn't need to. Then again, they know more about the business than I do.
But really pulling ads from too many videos hurts the business too, if ads aren't playing on a video, they are hosting that video for free. It makes absolutely no sense. There is also no evidence of any kind of long term association between advertisements and content. You don't see a coke ad before an ISIS beheading video and think "Huh, Coke endorses ISIS".
I'd love to see where you got the idea that YouTube doesn't make any money. As far as I know they don't break out YouTube revenue in any of their filings.
In fact, in each of the filings for 2016 & 2017 the revenue they report is an amalgamation of products that consist of search, ads, commerce, maps, youtube, google cloud, android, chrome, and google play[1][2].
[1] => https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20170331_alphabet_10Q.pdf pg 30
[2] => https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20160331_alphabet_10Q.pdf pg 28
These are fairly old, but I've gathered they don't make a profit based on articles like the following.
http://fortune.com/2016/10/18/youtube-profits-ceo-susan-wojc...
Unfortunately, neither of the links show a concrete indication of where YouTube profitability is right now.
It was approximated to be break even two years ago but doesn't have a growth factor as part of the number that is reported in the article, which is a key metric for determining revenue in the future. Revenue aside, profitability is extremely difficult to calculate as we don't know what the costs are as YouTube grows.
You would have made a better case here, but it's still far too old for any relevance in this discussion: https://www.wsj.com/articles/viewers-dont-add-up-to-profit-f...
That was the second link I posted. Either way, YouTube's profitability has little bearing on the second part of my comment. Unfortunately people decided to ignore that and focus on YouTube's profitability for some reason.
First of all, even if that's true, YouTube would leak money A LOT FASTER without advertisers.
Okay, there was no second-of-all...
Yes, but even if big names like Verizon and Coke don't buy ads, it isn't like others won't buy ads. That ad space is still valuable, and most people realize that ads and the content they are in front of are separate.
Apparently a lot? I remember reading that it truly hurt google when there was last major big deal about ads under isis videos. The ad pricesta went down a lot as nobody wanted to pay.
Ad quality I am getting (long cheap ads on companies unlikely to be rich) confirm that.
> I don't get Youtube policies. Why not let the advertisers decide which channels to advertise on?
Because then advertisers have to do more work, and spend less money; doing the picking for the advertisers in a way which keeps them happy with the results is a key part of what advertisers are paying YouTube for.
> This babysitting attitude makes so many creators unhappy
The creators it makes happy are predominantly the ones that aren't supplying YouTube with content that is valuable in its main revenue-generating function.
> If a video is allowed on YT, why not make more money off of it?
So, YT should ban videos rather than demonetizing them?
Advertisers do get to decide but advertisers don't want to have to decide between 10 million channels. They wanted a curated list with some minimum quality control to decide from.
So make it optional. Call it family-friendly, make it default, whatever.
Advertisers will stick to the safest option to avoid controversy at all costs. And for the most part non family friendly advertising is already disallowed.
And for the most part non family friendly advertising is already disallowed.
And now we're seeing an unintended consequence of that.
Of what not allowing pornhub to advertise on Youtube?
I get the free speech argument and I am 110% behind that argume at least when it comes to not banning people for saying whatever they want on what is indisputably by now a public platform.
However the monetization is another issue, if we side with free speech then the ads that run are the free speech of the advertisers they have the final say in where and how those ads run.
The problem is that for the most part there aren't that many advertiser anymore especially on the big platforms. The only times I ever get ads is when I use YouTube on my iPhone and i try to avoid using the app because of them (I didn't log into YT with my account just because I can't adblock the YT ads).
And what ads you get? the same 10-20 big brands all over, big soda, big car, big sports channel, big bank, big store chain that's it.
Regardless where you lean left or right large companies that run on essentially the most inoffensive vanilla consensus possible will rather avoid you and YT demonitizes plenty of far left (and simply weird) channels also.
But as some one who is pro-free speech as it gets as in I stoutly believe that there should be no legal limitation on speech at all including what people call "hate speech" (there will be hate regardless and no laws will ever save us from that) I can't find a single argument that to limit agency of YouTube and advertisers in any way that would improve the freedom of speech rather than diminish it.
Now banning people because they like to shoot guns, pro trump, believe in aliens, anti-vaxxers, socialists, communists, maoists or w/e is something that I strongly believe that platforms like YouTube should not practice.
YouTube was essentially built by weird and disturbing crap that people uploaded over the years (heck for the longest time YouTube and at the time Stage6 if anyone remembers DIVX's competitor was essentially Netflix for the masses, and you can still find plenty of pirated content on YT today to watch) until it became the monster it is, after squashing all competition they simply can't just say sorry folks you have to play by our rules now despite the fact that we got where we are by essentially violating all of them.
Same result. People will get pissed off when they get categorized in a way they don't like, resulting in less money.
What YouTube needs are editors. Editors get to tell people that their content is garbage or great.
The problem with social media is that they don't have people telling the public that their ideas are crap, so everyone thinks they're important.
Sounds like what fb was doing in determining what news stories to feature. We saw how that turned out (they ended up largely abandoning the editorial team.)
They honestly didn't have to abandon that. They should have told the complainers to just suck it up, and this is how editing works.
Editing means people are going to be unhappy. You are taking a certain viewpoint, and are literally filtering out incompatible expressions. The people that get edited out, they'll get mad, but they'll have to deal with it, like the millions of other people that get edited out by various editors around the world and deal with it appropriately.
Facebook tried to have it all, but advertisers only want something specific.
> What YouTube needs are editors.
Editors don't scale.
Why not start an edited competitor?
Eh, I don't know if YouTube or the advertisers can really take the blame here. While demonetization has certainly hurt creators, there have also been plenty of channels that have worked around it through independently-persued sponsorships, Patreon, etc. IMO, the true problem here is that mental health is not being addressed in a serious way in this country. We expect mentally ill people to seek out help rather than taking a more proactive approach. To me, this is akin to sweeping the problem under the rug. To be fair, mental health is no small task to address so I'm not surprised by the state of things. But until we tackle that problem (and other related problems), we're going to continue to see events like this.
Youtube videos are getting demonetized based on advertisers not wanting to be associated with certain things.
However, watching online and TV coverage of the shooting where people were actually severely injured and someone died, there didn't seem to be a dearth of advertising. If advertisers don't mind being associated with death and destruction, I think that when push comes to shove advertisers care more about reaching people with ads than the content they are associated with.
Advertisers don't mind having their ads shown next to all violent content, only to some violent (and some "controversial" content).
Most advertisers won't mind being shown next to a major news channel, but they might mind being shown next to a gore channel, or a channel run by some more radical news organizations.
It isn't the content, it's the message. And that's a hard problem.
There's one episode of Mad Man that addresses the same problem. An employee of the ad agency ends up having to read the scripts of all TV shows in advance to select the ones that a certain advertiser wouldn't want to be associated with, for example, those referencing abortion.
I think we need to acknowledge that Nasim's content wasn't "gore" and wasn't even "obscene." At BEST it was just "bizarre" and yet I doubt similar content like Tim and Eric would get demonetized.
Those were my thoughts as well. I’d be willing to bet that nothing would happen if Google were to call their bluff.
Can’t blame them for not wanting to take the risk.
This incident has certainly turned out to be a Rorschach test of mass shootings: Whatever you feel like complaining about, tack it on. "This does highlight X, caused by people like Y, and we need to address this with Z."
[flagged]
There is some research that says the traditional tipping point for revolution is hunger. It seems people put up with a lot of shit, perhaps with misplaced optimism, until their stomach is affected.
Maybe there's an analog to other tipping points, like price of internet service, but food seems pretty emotional and primal.
https://www.salon.com/2014/05/09/real_life_hunger_games_soar...
I'm sure there's nothing that can go wrong with a population that has three hundred million guns getting short of food with an ideology that says they have a right to overthrow the government.
The kind of injustice that has more or less always been there (e.g. the financial system favoring the rich over the poor) seems less likely to provoke this kind of sudden and violent response. The shooter’s anger was over a sudden change in policy that she perceived as unfair. Loss and loss aversion are powerful psychological drivers. If her videos had always been handled the way they are now, she probably never would have shot up their office because she never would have had the opportunity to feel she lost something she was previously entitled to.
I would suggest you take a hiatus from watching the news. Go outside and you will find that everything isn't as bad as you think.
Outside of me (NYC) there's homelessness and pollution. I guess that's not so bad? Also, it's not that I think things are bad, it's that I think the increasing concentration of wealth is resulting in increased potential for some event. What event? I don't know, but I doubt it'll be good.
Homelessness in the United States has been, slowly but steadily, declining over the last couple of decades, although it's up about 1% this year. It's not getting better fast enough, but the general trend has been slow movement in the right direction. In 2007, there were 647,000 homeless, and by 2016, there was down to 549,000 homeless.
That said, you live in NYC, and so for you the homeless rate has gone WAY up over the last year, to around 4000 people from just 2800 or so last year.
Many people really do not want to think about these things and the potential consequences. History has shown things can break down hard and quickly when there are a multitude of seemingly small bit widespread grievances. This is likely exacerbated now by mass dissemination of information and the sheer complexity of our social and economic system. I am not saying it is likely to happen soon, but I think it is worth being aware of. No society is immune.
You superimpose inequality on the national mindscape and out comes a radical extremist on the mentally unstable subset of the map, and you infer that that is a signal that the rest will cascade into an occupy style phase shift? Alarmist much?
I think the matter is subtler than plain inequality. What do you do when there's a mass distribution channel controlled by a private entity? Radio, press, they've been criticized, protested against, and in most democratic countries have ways to be held accountable to its citizens. We're largely living in a world where this isn't the case anymore. How do citizens demand accountability over a private service?
Beyond the censorship issues & lawsuits, Google regularly gets a pass when their crummy policies negatively impact people. While it is horrible that some were hurt in the process, I wonder if this will make Google start approaching their huge amounts of power with some civility.
While this was flagged to hell, probably due to insensitivity, this will become a point of discussion going forward.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Paris, follow up articles appeared on HN discussing the situation of poor communities on the outskirts of Paris. Although being sensitive is important and just plain human courtesy, and we should be civil, it is important for discourse to discuss the situations and circumstance surrounding such incidents.
Incidentally, today is MLK's death anniversary. After race riots in the 60's, he famously condemned them, but then said in his "The Other America" speech:
>But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
We need to have the intellectual courage to tolerate this discussion about the situations surrounding it. While one shouldn't martyrize the shooter here, we need to be aware of the circumstances that precipitated it.
EDIT: thanks for the vital correction!
>Incidentally, today is MLK's birthday.
Death anniversary, not birthday. His (and my!) birthday is 1/15 which is why we celebrate MLK day on the most convenient Monday near that.
> Beyond the censorship issues & lawsuits, Google regularly gets a pass when their crummy policies negatively impact people. While it is horrible that some were hurt in the process, I wonder if this will make Google start approaching their huge amounts of power with some civility.
Probably not. Whenever there's a shooting, there seems to be a strong pressure to disregard the idea of addressing the shooter's motives. If anything, I expect Youtube's demonetization policies to attract more sympathy and support, since they were victimized on account of them.
Why then is there such an obsession with determining the motive. Or classifying the act as terrorism or something else.
Honestly I can’t figure out why anyone even cares what the motive was. Doesn’t undo the harm done. The attempt to “understand” is too close to “excusing”. Which then further motivates others to use the same methods.
Isn't it obvious? To understand causes is to have a better change to predict and prevent these events, at both the individual level and that of sociological forces.
i suspect they'll sooner roll out security theater practices across their work campuses, than implement such an act of self-restraint.
Firstly censorship has nothing to do with this. Her YouTube videos weren’t taken down, just not enabled for advertising.
Secondly, how negatively effected? They stopped paying her for her content. So what. If you buy a Google phone, does google have a right to expect you will buy the next model, and if you don’t you are ‘negatively affecting’ them?
The amount of first world entitlement in this and many other comments here is appalling.
Yet another licensed and legal weapon.
There was nothing to indicate she should be denied such. Self-defense is a valid and widely-exercised human right. Just because Policy X has problems doesn't mean Policy Y doesn't (and may unleash the Pandora's Box which Policy X was imperfectly controlling).
Even were guns nationally banned, that she decided to proceed with mass murder - showing enough signs of danger far enough in advance that she was reported to & interviewed by police - there were a multitude of ways of carrying out the attack, including by buying contraband weapons. Other products are completely illegal in this country, with enormous suppression activity, yet are widely available; no reason to believe a ban would somehow render guns unobtainable via a few hundred dollars discretely exchanged in the wrong side of town.
What's pity is the victims were[0] specifically denied a right to armed self-defense, under threat of harm. She was the rare one who snapped, and in doing so violated a plethora of "reasonable restrictions" to cause grave harm; nobody seems to notice the enormous numbers likewise armed yet never harm anyone - a few happening to stop such attacks early.
[0] - summarizing, details beyond a mere comment.
99.9% of people obtaining a weapon legally don't use it to commit atrocities, but for entertainment. Why should the majority suffer the consequences from the tiny minority of unstable individuals?
Not just for entertainment, but a great many for legitimate self-defense. Why should those rationally feeling need to prepare protection be denied by laws which ultimately do not stop the unstable deliberately acting to harm?
I recommend looking at the data on this before leaping to the conclusion that guns are effective at protecting their owners from lethal injury.
In a Philadelphia-based study, "individuals in possession of a gun were 4.46 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not in possession" and that grew to 5.45 times more likely if the assault victim had a chance to resist. [1]
Successful defensive gun use happens, but it's the exception to the rule: guns escalate conflict, especially when both parties have them.
I've reviewed many relevant stats. Even the CDC concluded guns save far more lives than they take.
Remember: "defensive use" includes simply raising doubt that an attacker will survive, deterring even the consideration of assault. Home invasions just don't happen in my area, because assailants are likely shot and their demise celebrated on the news (further deterrence).
I would like to see your sources.
The CDC itself.
https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/1
“Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed. Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”
It was also discovered that when guns are used in self-defense the victims consistently have lower injury rates than those who are unarmed, even compared with those who used other forms of self-defense.
> Successful defensive gun use happens, but it's the exception to the rule
Reliable studies show defensive gun use in 100k-1 million incidents per year in the US.
https://fee.org/articles/defensive-gun-use-is-more-than-shoo...
That's not "exception to the rule".
“This data is from the 1990s and is based on people’s subjective views of what would have happened if they did not use a gun.”
These are not hard stats, they’re self reports from people who had occasions where they felt safer carrying. Peak confirmation bias. Of course we can find 100k people whose guns made them feel safer once.
But that’s not the question we are trying to answer. We want to know if you are actually protected by owning a firearm. The evidence suggests it has quite the opposite effect.
Did you read the paragraph directly above the one you quoted?
Your quote is referring to the study where - "used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone “almost certainly would have been killed""
In context the sentence you have quoted simply means the researchers could not be certain that the participants would have died if not for the gun defence.
It is in no way suggesting that they were not legitimate uses of self defence with a firearm.
> In a Philadelphia-based study
I finally had the time to read the study and it's got plenty of problems. Painting it as more legitimate than the dozens of studies showing hundreds of thousands of defensive firearm usages is inane.
For example the differences between the case and control groups:
"compared with control participants, shooting case participants were":
- "more frequently working in high-risk occupations"
- "had a greater frequency of prior arrest."
- "significantly more often involved with alcohol and drugs"
- "more likely to be located in areas with less income and more illicit drug trafficking"
Because guaranteed right to gun ownership enables the unstable to cause that harm in the first place.
Gun owners and their families are so much more likely to be harmed by a gun they own than be protected by it that it’s apaling. How can you possibly justify promoting that, knowing the balance of risks you are advocating people expose themselves and their families to?
That claim is massively wrong.
See my above comment.
Ah, your comment that guns prevent more deaths than they cause. So you’re expecting us to believe that compared to 33,000 gun deaths, more deaths are prevented, therefore you’d have over 66,000 annual deaths by other weapons and this is only prevented by massive levels of gun ownership? As claims go, that really is extraordinary. It’s hard to envisage what a gun free society with those levels of lethal violence would look like.
Of course the flaw in your argument is that the only significant reason people need to have guns to protect themselves, is because other people have guns. Take away everyone’s guns, and the absurdity of your argument dissolves itself. And yes, it is possible to remove most weapons in criminal hands. Many countries successfully do this. The high levels of access to guns by criminals is only enabled by a pervasive gun culture.
Why should tens of thousands of people die every year for the sake of a hobby? Imagine if every year 30,000 D&D players stabbed themselves or someone else to death with a Longsword.
How about drivers? Pilots? Boaters? Drinkers?
We all do something dangerous and fairly antisocial. But only one of those things tends to be demonized.
All of those activities have to justify themselves on the basis of the social and economic benefits they provide, and the associated risks. They are also very highly and well regulated activities. Drivers, pilots and sailors all must have licenses and operate within strict limits. If your point is that firearm ownership is of a similar kind and, if allowed at all, should also be subject to similar strict controls and proficiency checks, then I completely agree.
Agreed.
> We all do something dangerous and fairly antisocial. But only one of those things tends to be demonized.
Smoking? Skateboarding outside of private or dedicated places? Heck, even drinkers, from your list, are often demonized.
So, no, your “only one” is not accurate.
Not sure it's the same thing as the ranting, foaming condemnation that I see even here on HN for shooting sports.
Because most forms of entertainment do not dramatically increase the likelihood of death by suicide, homicide, and accidents all at once. If you can name something else that does so, for both the participant and those around them, I can promise you it's well-regulated.
Alcohol.
Why should the minority suffer the consequences of death, so the majority can keep being "entertained"?
Also, if you find shooting guns entertaining, you can keep doing that even in the countries with the strictest gun control laws. I lived in Australia post-1996 and still shot guns on a number of occasions.
Same reason we have driver's licenses.
Yet another mentally ill individual who did not get the treatment they so clearly needed.
Why not both?
With everyone hyper-polarizing anything with guns and/or mental health its hard to remember this is an option
I never implied the two were mutually exclusive.
Mental Illness and Social Media do not seem to mix well.
Not every shooter is mentally ill. In fact, most mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators. Most shooters are just shitheads, not mentally ill, and to constantly conflate the two is to add additional stigma to mental illness.
In addition, if this truly was a mental health problem, Congress could increase funding for mental health treatment by the end of the week, Trump could sign it by the middle of next week, and we could see an increase in people getting treatment by the end of next month. The fact that we're not seeing that leads me to believe that most know this isn't as much of a mental health problem as people think.
A very common factor in such mass murders is the use of antidepressants. Having seen up close what happens when someone on such medication misses a few doses (extreme & systematic rage), I'm stunned that there has not been intense investigation into the correlation.
People always mention mental illness, but other things are more common: being male; having a conviction for domestic assault; having a drug or alcohol addiction; having a TBI.
Other countries prescribe anti-depressant medication in similar quantities to the US, and those countries don't have the same problems of violence that the US does.
> having a conviction for domestic assault; > having a drug or alcohol addiction; > having a TBI
I know the YouTube incident, specifically, was not a mass-shooting incident (4+ casualties, not including the shooter) but the comment you replied to specifically mentioned mass-shooting.
That males are overrepresented seems fairly self-evident, but is there a noted link between DV, TBI, and addiction(s) with mass-shootings? I've never heard that angle.
So if this gun were obtained illegally this wouldn't be a tragedy?
Luckily it was just a handgun. If it were an AR-15 it might've been a different story, as this radiologist who treated Parkland students noticed: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-...
I think you meant to say, if it had been a rifle. AR-15's don't posses special properties... anything shooting a .223 or 5.56 round will have similar properties.
The damage truly depends on the type of ammunition used (as well as caliber). FMJ (Full Metal Jacket) ammunition, what seems to be described in the article you referenced, is a non-expanding type of ammunition, typically causing less destruction than expanding types such as HP (Hallow Point), which flatten and expand on impact.
Muzzle velocities from a rifle are significantly higher than handguns, which does translate into more kinetic energy. The additional energies in a rifle cartridge will cause more shock damage to organs, as described in the article, however.
HP ammunition (not commonly used in rifles) is designed to be devastatingly lethal - specifically designed to leave very large wounds in the target, which have little hope of closing/repairing the wound.
To add one other note, HP ammo has the additional (generally beneficial) property of penetrating significantly less than something like FMJ. Through its design it imparts the bulk of its kinetic energy on the first obstacle it hits, which greatly reduces the chances of it doing damage to something unintended.
Yes, but she was able to inflict much less damage with this weapon, a handgun. And with the slower discharge rate and muzzle velocity of handguns, the victims in this case appear to have all survived (other than the perpetrator's suicide).
In the spectrum from full rights to all weapons, to absolute gun control, allowing access to these handguns (where most wounds are survivable, there is less range, and lower magazine capacity) but restricting assault rifles (high muzzle velocities create injuries that are nearly impossible to survive, high magazine count, sometimes higher discharge rate) seems like a reasonable point to draw the line, and also complies with existing case law around the second amendment.
This would have been much, much worse with an AR15 type weapon, with likely far more deaths.
"We know that she was upset with YouTube; whether that rises to the level of terrorism will hopefully be determined in the coming weeks.”
I was really shocked that she is not labeled terrorist yet! and here it is!
Each of us is free to classify this act however we wish. The obsession with how the states chooses to classify something unnecessarily gives the government too much credibility, control, etc.
With her being from Iran, I'm also surprised the right hasn't already spun it that way, as a distraction from the gun control questions.
Not saying she should though obv, she was angry at YouTube for demonetizing her videos. That's regular YouTube drama taken to the extreme by a crazy person, not someone part of a group waging jihad on the infidels.
There's no "gun control" question, she was already in the most restrictive anti gun state.
the fact that she can get a gun from any other state makes it a question. gun control laws work when you can't just super easily go to another state to get a gun, the proof being in the much lower number if gun crimes in every other industrialized country where the gun laws are tight in the whole country. That's pretty much every single other industrialized country.
Interesting that those low-restriction states have such low violent crime. In fact, those US counties with zero murders (about half) have the most lax gun control laws.
Were the premise of your comment true, those other states should be the ones with outlandish murder rates. We have guns, we don't abuse guns; what's up with the high-gun-control areas being so prone to such violence that when guns are available they're so readily abused?
> what's up with the high-gun-control areas being so prone to such violence that when guns are available they're so readily abused?
Your reasoning doesn't add up because the factor you are using (lax gun laws vs strict between states) is far too coarse to make any reasonable inference from.
California has tight gun restrictions. But high income cities, counties, and neighborhoods in California (i.e. Palo Alto, Marin, Pacific Heights) with intact community structures have very low gun violence rates by US standards.
Low income areas with a significant illicit drug trade, high rates of intra-community trauma, historical abuse by police, and a frayed community structure, have high rates of gun violence.
The availability of guns, purchased legally or illegally, has a more pronounced impact on the latter sort of area than the former because the latter type is more likely to produce interpersonal conflicts which escalate to the use of guns, because other means of dealing with the conflicts (police, the court system, community structures) are often less effective or available for them.
There's plenty of low-income areas in flyover country, with high gun ownership - used fairly for defense & provisions. That they can own guns at high rates responsibly points to cultural choices; don't punish them for bad behavior of strangers far away. STOP SHOOTING PEOPLE.
> Interesting that those low-restriction states have such low violent crime.
Not all that surprising. The low restriction states also tend to be low-urban-population proportion; many types of crime increasing in urban environments is a long observed thing across pretty much all human societies, for which density, relative anonymity, and Stark and omnipresent socioeconomic contrasts have all been suggested as contributing factors.
> In fact, those US counties with zero murders (about half) have the most lax gun control laws.
Well, sure, they also mostly have populations below (often by an order of magnitude or more) the level at which the expected number of murders at the national rate would be 1.
If someone owns a gun in a lax gun control states, do they take it to work?
Up to the employer, and whether they know about it ("concealed means concealed").
I've worked places where several employees (owners included) were known always armed. No big deal. Safety was assured precisely because they were.
Fun fact: Kodak's headquarters had a rifle range in the basement.
Buying a gun across state borders is already a federal felony. If buying out of state you must use an FFL in your home state as a middle man.
There's also no evidence she did obtain the gun from out of state, so that's a bit of a straw man to begin with.
It appears that the right is most interested in her anti-censorship motivations behind the attack.
While what this lady did was atrocious, it does highlight a big problem inside Youtube. That their completely biased, unfair demonetization system is costing people enough money in ad revenue to ruin online careers. Smaller channels and politically incorrect channels get flagged pretty much every video, while bigger, white listed channels that post clear ToS breaking content are still allowed to rake in ad money. This woman didn't have that many followers in the respect to what others do, she wasn't making millions of dollars. Here's someone who was making a few dollars here and there, trying to act like it was her livelihood that was at stake, like most medium sized content creators with no real world skills do.
I should follow this up by saying I believe Youtube careers are pathetic, and shouldn't exist. Just as with Twitch, Youtube has become nothing more than a money making opportunity that is getting flooded with people who would rather deceive people than get a real job. Just people who want an easy ride begging for money. However, for those who do decide to take that route, the way Youtube flags videos absolutely impacts them. If I were making money, and my income were to be suddenly cut due to something that was entirely out of my hands yet fixable, I imagine I would be pretty jaded as well. Losing a few dollars is no reason to shoot people, this woman was just psycho. You can tell from one look at her on her site, she has the look of one.
I should follow this up by saying I believe Youtube careers are pathetic, and shouldn't exist. Just as with Twitch, Youtube has become nothing more than a money making opportunity that is getting flooded with people who would rather deceive people than get a real job.
I agree that these careers are very problematic - the point and the problem is that these are typical of many gig-economy schemes at this point and this is a problem of the whole economy, not individuals choose these activities.
The great thing about YouTube is precisely that, in theory at least before questionable policies are applied, ANYONE can publish their video to the world and monetize accordingly. Understandable that anything less than standard "common carrier" conventions are expected by producers, and seemingly arbitrary/bigoted restrictions are distressing.
"Shouldn't exist" implies others having undue power over the destiny of others. You may not like certain content, but none of your business deciding that others shouldn't see it (beyond the likes of child porn). If what one does is sufficiently valuable to others, enjoy the career.
And the murderer has enough going against her legitimately (starting with being a murderer) without disparaging her looks. Not everyone is blessed with something better than "resting bitch face".
Bold talk from anonymous coward
Unless you’ve cured cancer or unlocked new physics, odds are you’re just peddling skills millions of others have and are not contributing anything terribly unique.
Just looking to get the right people on your side to scrape together a living in a different context
What does 'anonymous coward' mean in this case? We aren't on El Reg.
The relevance of your opinion of ones life choice as pathetic is relevant how?
"Youtube has become nothing more than a money making opportunity that is getting flooded with people who would rather deceive people than get a real job."
Would you say the same for anyone who works in video production? How about someone who was making TV shows?