That shooting wasn’t the only sign of a fractured approach to women and girls. A teen girl told VICE News that he had contacted her on a “Tinder for kids” app, but after she rejected him, he added her on Instagram and tagged her username in a photo of guns.
In screenshots shared with VICE News, the girl, Anita, messaged the gunman, “WHAT. What your guns gotta do with me.”
“Idk,” he replied. “Be grateful I tagged you.”
In another message sent hours before the shooting, he said that he had “a lil secret,” in a possible reference to his deadly plans.
“Now people are attacking me for it and they think I'm his girlfriend, which I am not,” Anita told VICE News. (She declined to share her second name with VICE News, citing privacy concerns.) “Aside from these interactions, I know nothing about him.”
She continued, “Most people are actually very supportive and saying that it's not my fault, but a handful of people are still saying that I should have predicted what he was going to do.”
That, too, is a frequent response after a mass shooting: suggestions that a girl or woman is, in some way, to blame, especially for saying “no” to a boy or man.
After a student shot and killed at least 10 people in a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, in 2018, news outlets ran with the narrative that he had opened fire after being rejected by a girl. That same year, after a Maryland student shot two students, including one who had a “prior relationship” with him, the Associated Press dubbed him a “lovesick teenager.”
“It actually sends a chilling message to young women, which is, ‘Here is the cost of saying no,’” CJ Pascoe, a University of Oregon associate sociology professor who studies masculinity and sexuality in high school, told VICE News at the time. “What would be really great is if journalists would take that moment to perhaps highlight the expectations of masculinity for young men and to perhaps open a discussion about alternate ways to be a man.”
‘They Think I'm His Girlfriend’: People Are Blaming a Random Girl for Texas Shooting
Mass shootings in the United States tend to be committed by men with a past of domestic violence and a poisonous relationship toward women.
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