Moments before a 17-year-old unleashed gunfire at Iowa’s Perry High School, killing a sixth grader and wounding five other people, the student is believed to have posted a foreboding TikTok video.
On the morning shooter Dylan Butler opened fire, a TikTok post believed to be from the shooter shows him the inside a school bathroom posing with a blue duffel bag, captioned: “Now we wait.”
The song “Stray Bullet,” by the German band KMFDM, accompanies the post, which has been removed from the platform; the student gunmen who carried out the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado also had cited the group’s lyrics, CNN has reported.
Butler – who also died amid Thursday’s horror, a law enforcement official told CNN – “made a number of social media posts in and around the time of the shooting,” said Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Iowa Department of Public Safety Division of Criminal Investigation. “Law enforcement are working to secure those pieces of evidence,” he added.
I thought they were implying that he was a copycat, not that music made him do it.
They’re all technically copycats, it isn’t exactly an original or fresh idea anymore, but if the only similarity between columbine and this guy is they both listen to KMFDM that isn’t enough to say he was copying specifically Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold imo, even if Harris was wearing a KMFDM hat. Their focus being on “KMFDM made me do it” attempts to give an air of legitimacy to the claim that violent imagery in videogames or music creates violent individuals, whether they intend that as the outcome of their article or not.
At no stage do they say in the article that KMFDM made him do it. The link to columbine and that band is not the focus of the article, it is only mentioned very briefly. It is mentioned because columbine copycats are common and people like to have information about the motivation of these killers. I see no attempt to legitimise any theory about what causes violent behaviour other than linking it to bullying.
Moments before a 17-year-old unleashed gunfire at Iowa’s Perry High School, killing a sixth grader and wounding five other people, the student is believed to have posted a foreboding TikTok video.
On the morning shooter Dylan Butler opened fire, a TikTok post believed to be from the shooter shows him the inside a school bathroom posing with a blue duffel bag, captioned: “Now we wait.”
Butler – who also died amid Thursday’s horror, a law enforcement official told CNN – “made a number of social media posts in and around the time of the shooting,” said Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Iowa Department of Public Safety Division of Criminal Investigation. “Law enforcement are working to secure those pieces of evidence,” he added.
It’s 1/4th of the focus of this post, the fact that he used it on a tik tok is the other 3/4ths, so technically it is 4/4ths. Why include it in the article at all if they don’t want to focus on it? Could have posted:
But they didn’t, they chose to push focus towards his “unsavory” music choices.