Prior to many mass shootings, such as the one in Uvalde, TX, there are warning signs. The problem is that far too often, people don’t realize what they’re seeing are warning signs. In others, they’re reported, only to get a cursory examination, at most. In Buffalo, the killer there brushed off his comments as a sick joke and people just accepted that, for example.
Now in Uvalde, it seems that someone may also have picked up the warning signs and reported them, only no one seemed to listen.
A female gamer reported a fellow online player to the FBI after he threatened to ‘shoot up a school’ when he lost their game – just hours before 18-year-old gunman [name redacted] killed 21 people in a Texas school massacre.
The woman, who has not been identified, was playing horror survival game Dead by Daylight – with four other people online where they are only known as their ‘gamer tag’ on Tuesday.
In the game, four players are assigned the role of ‘The Survivors’ who must hide and survive another player: ‘The killer’. If caught, the survivors are impaled on hooks and sacrificed.
But she became disturbed when she recorded a male gamer playing the ‘killer’ launching a furious tirade when he lost and ‘started saying they were going to shoot up a school’.
The ‘killer’ even claimed they would use an AR-15.
…
After the male gamer began making the threats, the female gamer recorded them an sent the audio to the FBI, along with the creators of the game, Behaviour Interactive.
‘They mentioned they had some type of gun and kept saying it was going to be all of our fault,’ said the player on Reddit.
Now, before we get too excited about this, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, we don’t know that it was the Uvalde killer. People say stupid stuff in games all the time, trying to be edgy and stuff. We don’t know definitively that this was the killer.
Further, the Daily Mail hasn’t actually talked to the gamer who claims they reported it. They don’t know if this is a troll or not.
However, considering pretty much every other way it’s looking the police response was botched, I can’t rule anything out.
If it is legit, though, that leads to other questions, such as how much lead time there was between the threat and the shooting. It sounds like it was the day of, so there was not a lot of time for the feds to dig into just who had that gamer tag, find their location, go and talk to them, and make a determination.
In other words, there’s a very good chance this isn’t the FBI dropping the ball.
Yeah, I hate to say it since I haven’t been particularly enamored with how the FBI has handled things of late, but I refuse to blame them for something that may have well been out of their control.
Now, that said, if it turns out they did have time to look into it and they just ignored it, well, then there are going to be still more questions asked. Then I don’t think I’ll be as interested in playing fair.
I’m sure the FBI gets a lot of tips of people who threaten to do horrible things, especially in video games where some people have the social skills of a rabid wildebeest, but you take them all seriously in case one of them is actually legit.
If that didn’t happen, heads need to roll. Whether it’s figuratively or literally, I leave it to your imagination, dear reader.
But make no mistake. I have a preference.
