So as you have all probably heard about the Shooting at Youtube Headquarters.
Of course the NRA was blamed for this while the blood was still wet on the ground.
But as usual this was not a right-wing NRA member doing the shooting, turns out it was a lady from Iran who lived in Southern California and ran a youtube channel on animal rights, the vegan lifestyle, exercise, and the politics of Iran.
Also she had contact with police just before the shooting
He [the shooter’s father] also said she had been reported missing on Monday after not answering calls for two days. Police later found her sleeping in her car in Mountain View, 25km (15 miles) south of the YouTube offices in San Bruno and reported this to her family, but did not detain her.
REDACTED father then warned police that she might go to YouTube as she “hated the company,” local media said.
Still early to go off exactly what the police did or didn’t do, sounds like, from this single report, that she was reported missing, and police found her sleeping in her car, and reported back to her father that she had been found. They didn’t detain her because she hadn’t done anything wrong, and is a grown adult and had every right to be there. According to how this report is written (but again this is speculation) it was THEN that her Father suggested she might be heading to Youtube to enact some sort of revenge.
If this is how it played out in reality, and not just how it reads in the report, then what did police do? Did they contact Youtube? Does Youtube have any security, and did they take any further actions?
Obviously Youtube and Alphabet in general is an anti-gun company, and given that, and that this is in the San Francico Bay area, we can assume that they have a policy against employees being armed, not that it would really be possible as San Mateo County simply does not issue carry permits, so an armed employee would need the direct blessing of Youtube management to be lawfully armed there. So once again a crazy person seeks out a gun free zone to shoot people.
Also here’s an interesting part that I’ve been seeing a lot of.
Her father, Ismail, told local US media she had become angry because YouTube had stopped paying her for uploading videos.
The platform “stopped everything and now she has no income,” he told NBC news.
This is a VERY common phenomenon in Youtube, when they first introduced their partnership program content creators started making VERY good money, and many of them quit their day jobs, starting working for Youtube full-time, and in many cases, started hiring employees….then the “Adpocalypse” happened and a LOT of channels (not just gun channels) suddenly lost either ALL or a huge portion of their revenue stream. Some managed to switch to a different method of earning and kept the channel going without a hiccup, others quit the game, some, I suspect, but don’t know, managed to play ball and get their revenue stream re-instated.
One person got her hand on a gun and shot three people, who hopefully will recover completely, and then turned the gun on herself.
This is VERY bad ju-ju! Here’s a great video on this subject from Lloyd at Lindybeige, who talks about medieval weapons and history.
Personally I think Youtube figured out that people upload videos (or post to blogs, or upload podcasts) because they are expressing their creativity, and not because they are expressly being paid for it.
And of course they do it all with bots.
Youtube, and certainly their employees don’t deserve this violence, but they are being right bastards.
**UPDATE** looks like Police did say they would “Keep an eye on her”, this doesn’t strike me as Parkland levels of incompetence, but it still goes to show you that the role of police is to arrest the criminals, not protect us from them.
