Shrouded

I spent a bit of time this morning looking for the "manifesto" that Buffalo, New York supermarket shooter Payton Gendron is said to have posted online. No luck.

The Google Document that contained Gendron’s manifesto remained online for several hours.

It was later taken down after Google said its contents had violated the web giant’s terms of service.
Buffalo supermarket shooter's chilling 180-page manifesto said 'great replacement theory' of whites being outnumbered drove him to kill - and New Zealand mosque shooter Brenton Tarrant was his inspiration

And after Google/Alphabet decided to remove the document, no one else has posted it, at least not in an easily-accessible place. It's out there. That much is a given. Several news stories I've read reference the document's contents. This doesn't mean, of course, that most of the journalists involved have actually read it; a lot of the verbiage in the news stories is similar enough that it seems clear that the same sources are being referenced. But there's enough detail that someone's read at least part of it.

But, at least for now, tracking down the manifesto would require more work than I'm willing to put into it, generally in the name of keeping other aspiring spree-murderers to seek to rack up body counts of their own from having any inspiration to do so. (Given that Payton Gendron supposedly saw Brenton Tarrant, Dylan Roof and Anders Breivik as people to emulate, I suspect that this particular horse my have long fled the barn.) Which I understand, to a degree, but it makes an assumption that I'm not sure I agree with; namely that there is no real value in having these documents readily available to the public.

There is a point to be made that people like Payton Gendron have nothing of any value to say. Which is fair enough. But how many of us do have anything of value to say? If much of the random blathering and nonsense that make up broad swaths of the World Wide Web (including Nobody in Particular) were to suddenly vanish, never to be seen again, would anyone really be worse off? Being old enough to remember when the public had no inkling of what blogs, subreddits or podcasts were, I'm pretty sure that people would find ways to fill their time.

I think that there is some value in understanding the resentment, anxiety, ignorance and distrust that drives people to drive three hours just to walk into a grocery store and start shooting people. Or, for that matter, the sense of romanticism that drives someone to help a multiple-time felon escape prison in the hopes of starting a new life with them. And the best way to understand these things is to have access to the words that these people have put down describing them. Even in a case like this, where it seems that much of the "manifesto" was cribbed from the internet or copied from others' diatribes. Sure, there are likely to be news stories, documentaries and/or made-for-television (or streaming) movies that purport to explain people to the public, but those are always filtered through the lens of the people who write and produce them, and they tend to have a specific audience in mind. And while the differences between how Fox News and MSNBC cover these sorts of things can be enlightening on their own, something is always lost in the filtering.

People of dubious mental stability who are of the impression that they and their semi-automatic rifles can hold off the fears that have been drummed into them are becoming an occupational hazard of living in the United States. And despite the outsized news coverage that they generate, they are still a very minor hazard. As a nation, the United States has made a pastime of ignoring much more serious problems. But that's not really a reason to force people into ignoring the concern by deciding that if such people are simply hidden in deep enough holes, they'll eventually go away. So perhaps it's time to set aside the fear of contagion, and allow the public a bit more access into the lives of the people who have strayed so far from the mainstream.