Tuesday night a man by the name of George Sodini entered a gym in Pittsburgh and opened fire, killing three women and wounding ten more before turning the gun on himself and ending his life. CNN reports that he was a member of the gym and that this blog details his outlook on women and society as a whole.
From the CNN article, “In the note found at the scene in Sodini’s gym bag, he complains he had never spent a weekend with a woman, never vacationed with a woman and never lived with a woman, and that he had had limited sexual experiences, [Police Superintendent Charles] Moffatt said.” The online blog also detailed Sodini’s bitterness at having not slept with a woman in nineteen years. He also stated that he had read forums and found out that “many teenage girls have sex frequently.” This bothered him because a sixteen-year-old girl having sex three times a day with her boyfriend would be more sexually experienced in a month than he was his entire life.
There’s just no limit to the wrongness of this whole tragedy. I could write a thesis based on his actions alone and yet I wouldn’t feel like it accomplished anything in getting the misogynists of the world to even blink an eye. Sodini, like several murderers do I suppose, blamed his target for his actions. He believed that because women wouldn’t sleep with him, because they wouldn’t go on dates with him, or whatever else he felt he “needed,” that he was entitled to do something about it. I can’t believe that we’re on the verge of the year 2010--a time in history that sounds like we should be driving flying cars and traveling to other planets for vacations--and yet we’re still dealing with the very visceral conundrum of entitlement.
No one owes you anything simply because you exist. You exist, therefore you have free will. They exist, therefore they do, too. It shouldn’t be rocket science, but it seems some people have a harder time grasping or even considering this than others. I’m in the process of looking for a car right now. Does it suck? Yes. Do I wish someone would give me a car and/or help me get a car? Very much so. Do I have the right to go shoot up a car dealership because they won’t give me the car I “need” because it’s their fault I don’t have a car? Fuck no. And I'm talking about vehicles which are non-sentient objects. These are people. Living, breathing, thinking, feeling human beings. It sucks that Mr. Sodini wasn’t hitting it off with anyone and that despite several first dates here and there, he stopped trying and decided to focus his efforts on a boiling hatred against half the world’s population because he hadn’t found the One. But maybe the reason none of these women would go back for a second date is because he exhibited the warning signs of someone that might someday, oh I don’t know, walk up into a gym with four guns and open fire on a bunch of women?
This guy was seriously warped, but the fact that there are others like him out there is what scares me the most. These woman did nothing to him, his only motive was that they were women and therefore evil/wrong/deserved to die because they--or more likely others who shared their gender and possibly had nothing more in common with them--didn’t live up to his expectations. The legal definition of a "hate crime" is "a criminal act motivated by prejudice." Sodini's actions certainly fall under this category, but will the story be portrayed as such in the news? It's hard to say when others justify his actions. If at some point in his life he’d seeked the right kind of help, he might not have been a lost cause, but this late in life it seemed like his mind was pretty well made up and he was determined to make a statement. As a general rule, I don’t condone suicide, but if the only two options for this guy were “misogynist massacre ending in suicide” and “suicide” I think the world would’ve been a better place if he’d just locked himself in his house and fired one into his brainpan.
I’ll close with this, the Slideshows sidebar that is to the right of the ABC news article about the shooting.
What I wouldn’t give to be back in college and in a Women’s Studies course again.
