Shooters Are Online Before They Are IRL
We Need Online Activity Checks To Purchase A Gun
He said he was going to do it.
Salvador Ramos wrote, “I’m going to shoot my grandmother,” on his Facebook page 30 minutes before he entered Robb Elementary School to commit the biggest school shooting in 10 years. Minutes later he wrote, “I shot my grandmother.”
A few minutes later he wrote, “I’m going to shoot an elementary school.”
He DM’d his friend on Instagram, “I gotta lil secret I wanna to tell u,” referring to the shooting he was about to conduct.
Every move he made, he posted about it before he did it. But that was in real-time. What about before that?
There were videos of him trying to fight people with boxing gloves at a park. He posted a shouting match between him and his mom—involving police no less—on his Instagram stories. He consistently posted photos of semi-automatic rifles. He posted a TikTok video with the caption “Kids be scared IRL” (That means “In Real Life”).
These are worrying behaviors on that are available for the public eye to see.
Other mass shooters have done similar things.
The Buffalo shooter (just last week, wow) posted a 180-page manifesto espousing the Great Replacement conspiracy theory on the underbelly of the internet, 4chan.
The hive of scum and villany on the internet, 8chan, is also home to these violent and racist message boards. The 2019 Christchurch shooter streamed himself live on Facebook espousing the same conspiracy before the shooting and posted the video on 8chan.
The Poway synagogue shooter also posted an open letter on 8chan espousing his motives and cited it as a source of his radicalization.
The El Paso shooter also posted a 4-page white nationalist manifesto on 8chan before the shooting.
Today, as an experiment, it took me only 15 minutes to find an Aryan webpage espousing lies about African-Americans being subhuman. 15 minutes. Imagine someone spending all of their free hours consuming all of this extreme, hateful content with the purpose of radicalization and interacting with strangers who encourage them down the path.
These shooters aren’t the only ones to be radicalized by the internet and use the internet to express their intent to carry out a massacre.
All of this leads to this proposal: Online Activity Checks.
In addition to other measures like universal background checks, mental health checks, reference checks, closing loopholes, raising the age limit to 21, and requiring a week-long course like for our driver’s licenses, I also propose that we conduct online activity checks.
In addition to what is publically shared online, there is also the data that is kept by companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google.
There’s a difference between searching for the best way to hunt deer and Aryan manifestos. There’s a difference between posting photos of the hunting trip with your buddies and posting photos of guns with the caption “Kids be scared IRL”.
There’s the ability to track IP addresses by Internet Service Providers to find out where someone has spent the majority of their online activity.
All of these things should be considered when selling someone a gun. There should be services that are federally required and make all of this information easy to access by gun sellers.
All-in-all, Big Tech takes too much of our personal data which infringes on our right to privacy. But there are instances, such as in the post-9/11 response, where we agree that sometimes there are instances where our right to privacy doesn’t hold up to the need for public safety. I believe this is one of those instances.
If Big Tech is going to have our data, this is one way they can utilize it to protect bad actors from purchasing guns.