Dermatologist's Accused Killer Apparently posted on WP.net

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Maybe its the wrong word to use, but site traffic may increase from people looking at us out of curiosity. Its just people view people who are different than them as not human but more as oddities to look at.

Or maybe thats just how I feel people react.

Last edited by Kalister1 on 13 Sep 2007, 4:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Exactly what I mean, they try to "study" aspies after an incident. It may not be everyone, and I may be paranoid, but it does seem true...

That's because Caucasians are assumed to be the "normal" racial group in (American) society and all other racial groups are defined by ways they are different from whites. When a non-white person commits a crime, there's almost never a mention of their race. When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students in Columbine, no one claimed that they had committed mass murder because they were white. But when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech, many people said that the reason he had committed mass murder because he was Korean, and Korean families are ashamed to seek help outside the family for mental illness.

The same logic can apply to autism spectrum disorders. NTs without major mental illnesses are the norm in society, and autistic/AS people are defined by their differences from NTs. So when someone on the spectrum commits a crime, then people will blame the crime on their condition somehow. What you won't see is someone blaming neurotypiciality for a crime, "If only he'd had Aspergers, he would have stayed at home reading about minerals instead of joining a street gang!"

That being said, I don't think that this crime is going to have a major effect on many people's view of AS/autism because, like EatingPoetry said, very few people know what Aspergers is, and also because it isn't a national story. Some morbid gawkers might come to the site, but I think they'll get bored quickly when they discover that most of the threads about eye-contact and hand-flapping far outnumber those about gruesome violence.

Well I hate to burst your bubbles but if people come here after reading about the murder, it isn't going to be to look at us, really. They'll be ambulance chasers, looking for the murderer's posts, the atmosphere, trying to see more blood, so to speak. Trying to get into the mind of a killer. The rest of us will just be in the way.

Yeah, ditto that.

MMMmmm.. I dont know. We'll see. Just feels weird still.

I hate to even say this (cause I know I'm gonna start s--t) ...but I'm gonna anyway. Almost every one of us are potential murderers, Please don't take this wrong! Mish, if someone had a gun and was going to kill one of your children and you also had a gun would you kill the person. YES you would, as would any mother who loves her children. I'm not supporting murder in any way, but I just feel the point needs to be made that in the right circumstances everyone is pretty much capable of it. You can call it "self-defense, or protecting your children or whatever...but when the smoke settles and someones dead it's all murder. OMG I'm gonna hit submit.

::has a feeling this will cause the thread to digress into either an ethical debate over murder, or a semantic debate over the meaning of the word "murder"::

You didn't get the point I was trying to make... this isn't about any hypothetical situation involving me or anyone else. Whether we could be potential murderers, doesn't mean we go that extra step to make it true. The point I was trying to make is something like this is disturbing to the Aspie/Autistic community and this is the second time Wrongplanet has been part of a negative media issue due to a member's own actions. We are trying to make a positive community for autistics/aspies and to draw awareness to ourselves and the positives about being on the spectrum but things like this, do affect the image of the site and all to those that don't fully care to realize that just because one of the posters did something, that we're not all like that. I was here on this site when I remember Will Freund first posting. Not many of us took him seriously then either, some of us even thought he was a troll... and he carried out the plans he had outlined on this site and took two other lives and his own... yes that is a pretty darn scary thing to have happen on a site like this or any site.

And the answer to your question, logically I'd never have access to a gun, so I'd tell the kids to run and I'd put myself in harm's way even if I risked my life to save theirs and would hope that they can get away to get help.

Sorry, not all killing is murder. All killing is homicide (by definition), some is justified, most is not.

Protecting your family or other innocents from someone in a fog of rage is very different morally than laying in wait and slaying someone to take their money or silence their criticism of a regime. If someone climbed on top of a tower and started shooting at a crowd below, pushing them off would be unpleasant, but it would not be murder.

Last edited by monty on 13 Sep 2007, 2:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

your right about the thread digressing, sorry did't think of it like that. And Mish, I wasn't here when this happened previously so I don't know what you all went thru, all I can really say is all we can hope for is that whoever comes here to satisfy their curoisity will understand that all people are different and this should't impact how the NT world veiws people on the spectrum.
However, this not being the "Utopia" that we'd like to inhabit, I have to agree that this will proably stick in peoples minds, (the association I mean) I can hear it now.

It only bothers me that the press are associating this person with WP even though he doesn't seem to have claimed to be an aspie, or on the autism spectrum at all. There were probably a number of places that he posted, why bring up WP?

Perhaps we need to take people a bit more seriously when they post disturbing things, like murder plans! If we're so concerned about the way this site and aspies come off, then we'd better be willing to take some responsibility for what goes on here.

Only idiots will consider all aspies guilty by association. And again I say, anyone who comes here looking for a thrill after this recent murder will not care about any of you who are leading regular, boring (i.e. non murderous) lives.

You make my life sound so horrible

Well, there SURE are a lot of idiots in the world, many more idiots out there than people who have enough intelligence/knowledge about Aspergers to not make the association.

Its hard to take everything seriously, since its pretty normal to think about "beating someone up" or wishing you could
"kill them" from time to time. No matter how much you want to deny it, sometimes when someone does something you dislike, you think about how much better the world would be without them.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make is this - how do you seperate the real threats from the people who are just a little heated at the moment?

Last edited by Kalister1 on 13 Sep 2007, 4:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.

there's several here that are doing grad work for autism......... myself included... and i have only wp to thank for that

Alex, I had never heard of WP until reading about the Freund matter. The reference of WP in the article I read brought me to this site. I was mortified about what that boy had done. My son has AS, and at that time he was fixated with death. The whole thing scared the pants off of me. So, I was one of those people checking out the site because "a boy with Aspergers had killed someone." In a way, Kalister1 is not too far off the mark with his prediction. However, in the end, I think the potential for increased traffic and membership really just depends on how much media coverage this recent incident gets.

That being said, sure, there may be some people who come and lurk for a little while. BUT, maybe, as in my case, there is someone out there who could really benefit from this site but had never heard of WP until something like the Freund matter or the recent matter happens. So, even though there is a possibility of someone associating murderers with AS due to the media's coverage (although I think the general populus would be more inclined to think that murders are more emotionally disturbed than have AS), there is also a greater potential of many people who have AS or know of someone with AS to learn about the site and come here for help. And maybe....prevent more of these horrific types of things from happening in the future??? I sure hope so.