I guess I should've read the thread before posting that response.

If the ISIS claim were true, there would be confirmatory evidence. Unless and until law enforcement finds evidence that this guy was watching jihadi videos on his computer, somehow exchanging messages with known Islamic radicals, etc., anyone who entertains this ISIS theory is a conspiratard nutter. And we are rapidly approaching the point where we would have heard about confirmatory evidence if it existed.

I find the ISIS link very odd. Many ISIS experts are giving the claim a fair amount of credibility though.

What's confusing to me - happy for others to point out the flaws here - is that suicide bombers are not afraid of death. It's part of the martyrdom, where any relatives on earth get rewarded by a higher power and they themselves go to some special place and get credit. Also, ISIS want the association, so why would someone motivated by them make finding this link hard?

Edit: I'm assuming that there is something to claims made a while ago that the shooter did want to escape, or at least he thought he might. This may have been dismissed, not sure.

Dude of his age and bio being ISIS is ludacris. Even if he did talk to ISIS it was a symptom, not a cause.

my gf and i were also victims of a home invasion in the middle of the day about a year or so ago. i was out of town fishing at the beach and came back a couple hours after they had broken in (gf was at the hospital/med school for the day). they kicked in the door, stole a bunch of electronics, and in the process one of my 2 dogs got out (that's what pissed me off the most, i thought she was lost and was alternating between sobbing and fighting back tears all afternoon). thankfully we found her later that evening, she ran down the road and found a yard with a golden retriever puppy and spent the evening on a play date, basically. as relieved as i was to re-locate her, i was ****ing furious. furious doesn't even describe the rage that i felt.

we got new locks on the doors and we always had an agreement that we would never keep guns in the house, but i definitely found myself battling the urge to go buy one in the aftermath. believe it or not, its more common than you think for burglars to come steal all your **** and then come back again once you've replaced it all. i found myself staying up late at night, seething with anger, keeping a knife nearby and waiting for them to come back (i know, it's so silly in hindsight). i didn't want to leave the house and an empty driveway for any amount of time during the day and felt anxiety whenever i did. whenever i'd go outside, i was super alert and observant, and i looked at anybody who came near the house with an extra skeptical eye- neighbors, lawn crews, delivery men, etc, anybody. didn't matter who because i trusted no one.

after a few weeks of this (and sleeping very poorly, obv), the emotion began to die down and life returned to normal- i lost the urge to arm myself and i still have no desire to purchase a firearm. the point of the story, i guess, is that it's crazy how your brain can get hijacked by emotion in times of stress/peril and logic just kinda goes out the window- that's why elite military units have and require so much training to prevent that sort of thing. i can definitely say tho that the solution to crime/gun violence/etc isnt to have a bunch of emotionally charged yahoos arming themselves to the teeth with guns because those emotions override logic in the untrained mind, mistakes will definitely be made and lives will be lost as a result. happens every ****ing day already. not to mention, home invasions are a crime of opportunity and virtually nobody breaks into a house where they think people are actually home (all the cars were gone when they broke into ours). im not destitute as a result of losing a couple televisions and computers and certainly stuff like that isn't worth somebody losing a life over. pretend i was home when they kicked in the door and any gun that i owned was put away somewhere, unloaded, just as any responsible gun owner should keep it...what good is it to me then? suppose the home invaders stole my gun, what good is that doing for society?

i've battled anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, etc at different points in my life and i cant say 100% that everything would be the same today and i'd be sitting here posting this if i had owned a gun all that time. even being unlucky enough to have had my house broken into, i still never would have had the opportunity to use a gun to defend myself. ultimately it's just not worth it, and the desire to arm oneself to defend/protect ones property is purely emotional, not rational.

In the immediate aftermath of ISIS claiming responsibility, I would have put the odds on an ISIS connection at no better than 1 in 100. And with each passing day with no confirmatory evidence, the odds of an ISIS connection go way down.

Also what are the odds that this dude was:

1) affiliated with ISIS
and
2) federal law enforcement/CIA/NSA whoever knows about it
and
3) they briefed briefed Trump
but
4) he didn't immediately run to Twitter to blast that out

You have to conclude the fact chain stops with a false before #3 because once it gets to 3, we would all know.

Good post replol. Must be pretty traumatic in that kind of situation.

I also was the victim of a home invasion. Some guy did a Spiderman up the side of a brownstone and crawled through a window in our third floor apartment that my wife and I had mistakenly left open while we were out. Cops speculated that the perp was probably some guy who was looking for stuff he could steal and then sell or exchange for a fix, which sounded about right to me. (And when I asked whether there was any chance that our stuff would be recovered, the cops laughed out loud.)

It was a little creepy, but I slept just fine, even that night. I certainly didn't feel the need to buy a gun.

Obviously. There is a better chance that Trump makes up evidence of an ISIS connection than there is that he sits on evidence of an ISIS connection for more than twenty minutes.

and thats the thing, everybody's brain is wired differently. i am definitely more prone to emotional hijack than others and i recognize that. i still believe i'm more rational than most people, so i cant even imagine how far off the deep end some other people could go in a "fight or flight" response type of setting. we see cops blowing black motorists away on video for absolutely no reason ("i was scared!!!") and hear stories all the time about homeowners mistaking loved ones for intruders and killing them. the fetishizing with guns in this country is basically just peak insanity and it's well past time to do something about it.

Minor nit: a home invasion is when someone breaks in while you're home. If you're not home it's burglary.

who gives a ****

I do, I guess.

#priorities, amirite?

Indeed.

Further to this point, we are probably in a situation where government officials sometimes have to make tough decisions about whether to disclose sensitive, non-public information to Trump (even if it is information that Trump wants, and that a normal president should receive) because of a justified fear that he will disclose the information on a whim.

Yeah. Like you, it sounds like, I have battled through some rough mental times over the course of my life. When I look at other people who are more mentally stable I'm ambivalent, like on the one hand they are mentally stable so maybe they should be in charge of sensitive stuff, but on the other hand if you unleash really bad emotional trauma on both our brains, I'm confident I deal with it better, because they are totally unprepared. But then again, maybe bad emotional trauma is flat out impossible given how their brains are put together. So it's hard to know what the conclusion should be.

Why did he kill himself, though?

Update, also, on the whole Secret Female Accomplice rumour:

I'm not sure some of you realize that 'home invasion' means you were home and confronted during the robbery. What you're describing sounds like a burglary.

It's an important distinction when discussing the rationality of owning a gun.

Also, owning a gun or being known to have guns in the house makes you a more attractive target for burglary, but I'm assuming not home invasion.

I know two people who had gun point home invasions. Both drug related.

A corner room is far away from the lift and fatassed lazy murcans don't like to walk far, so corner rooms are usually not booked first. They are however sometimes preferred by "serious" gamblers as if you are sleeping late, you don't have people walking by your door talking or dragging luggage.

My mistake. I was burglarized. It did not cause me much psychological distress, and it did not make me want to own a gun. I'm sure the experience would have been more unsettling if I had been home, especially if I woke up while the guy was still in the apartment.

But in general, I tend to discount the risk that I will be the victim of a violent crime, even in situations where others might feel more at risk. That's one of many reasons why I've never had much interest in owning a gun.

Do most home invaders know in advance whether the owner has a gun? I guess you do if you are robbing a drug dealer or you are robbing someone you know.