The New York Times has more on the Chapel Hill murders.
A motive for the shooting may never be known. But interviews with more than a dozen of the victims’ friends and family members, lawyers, police officers and others make two central points: Before the shootings, the students took concerted steps to appease a menacing neighbor, and none were parked that day in a way that would have set off an incident involving their cars.
If those accounts do not prove what kind of malice was in Mr. Hicks’s heart, the details that emerge indicate that whatever happened almost certainly was not a simple dispute over parking.
They were all parked that day in a permitted way that didn’t interfere with Hicks – one in their assigned space, one in an unassigned space, one on the street. Nobody was parked in Hicks’s space.
The murders happened at Finley Forest, a complex on the eastern edge of this city popular with graduate students at the nearby University of North Carolina. Mrs. Hicks owns 270 Summerwalk Circle, a second-floor unit in Building 20 that looks out south over the parking lot. Her husband moved in after the couple married seven years ago; it was his second marriage after a disastrous first.
The contrast between the paunchy, balding Mr. Hicks and the rest of the complex’s residents was stark. Many were aspiring professionals and academics at a premier public university. Mr. Hicks was unemployed, taking night classes at a community college in hopes of becoming a paralegal. He spent long hours in his apartment with a collection of at least a dozen guns, including four pistols and a Bushmaster AR-15. Mrs. Hicks told her lawyer that Mr. Hicks would stare out the second-floor window, obsessing over neighbors’ parties, patterns and parking.
Ah; class. The Times is hinting that that could have played a role, and who knows, maybe it did. Nobody knows, and perhaps nobody ever will.
Hicks was increasingly obnoxious to them in the weeks before the murders. There’s speculation that it may have been the hijabs that pissed him off.
There is no question Mr. Hicks had a problem with religion. His Facebook page was full of quotations and memes denigrating Christianity. On Jan. 27, he shared a graphic that may have made reference to Islam: “People say there is nothing that can solve the Middle East problem … I say there is something. Atheism.”
Well, I have a problem with religion too, and you can find masses of evidence for that on Facebook. I don’t kill people though. One of the reasons I have a problem with religion is the fact that it can be used to justify violence and murder.
I have been reading a lot of sources that quote that last quote from him. They report it as though that in itself is hate speech or threatening speech. Atheism is not a threat. Murder is a threat. Guns are a threat. Atheism is just…atheism. And yes, atheists can be murdering assholes. But the constant focus on that quote about atheism is…sinister. One article I saw talked about all the “hate speech” on his Facebook page (I can’t speak to that; I don’t do Facebook and haven’t seen it); the only quote they used to demonstrate that was the atheism quote.
@iknklast
I have Facebook, and I scrolled quite a way down his page. Didn’t see any hate speech, just some popular atheist memes. They weren’t the most aggressive memes, either.
As an American, I’m several thousand times more likely to be murdered by a pro-gun asshole than an Islamic terrorist. Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, is a supporter of “responsible gun rights” who “owns several guns.” I probably would have had much more in common with murdered American Muslims, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Deah Shaddy Barakat, than I do with either self-proclaimed conservatives, Silverman or Hicks.
Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and Deah Shaddy Barakat, sound like they were kind hard-working people who were actively making the world a better place. Losing them, and all of their future contributions, is not an acceptable price for me to pay to protect a “sacred” right.
@2: Didn’t see any hate speech, just some popular atheist memes.
Indeed. The quotes I have seen could just as easily have appeared in any number of places on FTB, Patheos Atheist, alt.atheism. That’s what’s so unsettling. His quote about “atheism” solving all the Middle East’s problems is superficial, though — there’s more going on than just “Our God wants different things than your God”.
OP: I see what you mean about a hint of classism there. But the picture it paints is also one of a socially marginal individual, with some unhealthy psychology (general anger; hostility towards neighbours, and not just the ones he wound up shooting, either).
It is true that religion can make bigotry even worse, by convincing yourself that your own pet prejudices are actually God’s will. But lack of religious belief certainly doesn’t equal lack of bigotry. Most American racists are of the same religion as the people they denigrate. The differences between Sunnis and Shiites appear laughably minuscule to non-Muslims. The root problem isn’t religious belief. It’s our eagerness to exclude people from our own special Venn circle.
That, is actually pretty deceptive quoting on the New York Times’ part.
The full quote is:
His post specifically points towards atheism as an alternative to arms, IE violence.