Wisconsin school shooter used only 1 of 2 handguns on her, police chief says
The shooter at a religious school in Wisconsin had two handguns with her but used only one in the attack that killed a teacher and a student and wounded six others, the city’s police chief told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Police were still investigating why the 15-year-old student at Abundant Life Christian Christian School in Madison shot and killed a fellow student and teacher on Monday, before shooting herself, Madison Police Chief Shon Barnes said.
Two other students who were shot remained in critical condition on Wednesday.
“We may never know what she was thinking that day, but we we’ll do our best to try to add or give as much information to our public as possible,” Barnes said.
The student who was killed was identified in an obituary released Wednesday as Rubi Patricia Vergara, 14, of Madison. She was a freshman and “an avid reader, loved art, singing and playing keyboard in the family worship band,” according to the obituary.
The name of the slain teacher has not been released.
Barnes released the name of the shooter, Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow, hours after the shooting on Monday.
Barnes said the medical examiner would release the names of those killed, but state law prohibits releasing the names of the injured.
Police, with the assistance of the FBI, were scouring online records and other resources and speaking with the assailant’s parents and classmates in an attempt to determine a motive, Barnes said.
Police don’t know if anyone was targeted or if the attack had been planned in advance, he said.
While Rupnow had two handguns, Barnes said he does not know how she obtained them and he declined to say who purchased them, citing the ongoing investigation.
No decisions have been made about whether Rupnow’s parents might be charged in relation to the shooting, but they have been co-operating, Barnes said.
Online court records show no criminal cases against her father, Jeffrey Rupnow, or her mother, Mellissa Rupnow. They are divorced and shared custody of their daughter, but she primarily lived with her father, according to court documents. Divorce records indicate that Natalie was in therapy in 2022, but don’t say why.
Female shooters rare
The shooting was the latest among dozens across the U.S. in recent years, including especially deadly ones in Newtown, Conn.; Parkland, Fla.; and Uvalde, Texas.
But the Madison attack is an outlier as only about three per cent of all U.S. mass shootings are perpetrated by females, studies show.
School shootings have become a near-daily occurrence in the United States, with 322 of them this year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. That is the second highest total of any year since 1966 — topped only by last year’s 349.
School shootings by teenage females have been extremely rare in the U.S., with males in their teens and 20s carrying out most of them, said David Riedman, founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database.
Emily Salisbury, an associate professor of social work at the University of Utah, studies criminology and gender. She said that females typically turn their anger on themselves because American culture has taught them that women don’t hurt people, resulting in eating disorders, self-harm and depression.
It’s difficult to speculate without knowing all the facts in Rupnow’s case, Salisbury said, but a girl resorting to the level of violence she displayed suggests she experienced severe trauma or suffered violence herself.
“It takes more provocation, more instigation for girls and women to become violent,” Salisbury said. “It’s a very high probability she experienced some sort of violence in her life that can lead to serious mental illness.”
Abundant Life is a nondenominational Christian school — prekindergarten through high school — with approximately 420 students.
Salisbury said the public shouldn’t assume that the school’s religious teachings mean its students are above bullying and ostracizing each other.
“They’re children,” Salisbury said. “As much as those [religious] values may be taught or discussed in the classroom in the culture of that school, kids are online all the time. Kids create their own culture through social media.”
Published at Thu, 19 Dec 2024 01:23:39 +0000
Bots and Indian TV push fake news about Canada in wake of Hindu temple clashes
A wave of misinformation about Canadian institutions is being amplified by suspected bot accounts on social media and by pro-Modi news outlets in India, raising concerns it could imperil relations between Sikhs and Hindus in Canada.
CBC News reviewed hundreds of posts on X and dozens of hours of footage streamed on YouTube in the days before and after clashes outside Hindu temples in Surrey, B.C., and Brampton, Ont., in November.
The analysis identified several posts containing misleading and inflammatory comments about the Khalistan movement — which advocates for an independent state for Sikhs — and Sikh Canadians in general that were recirculated by suspicious accounts.
Some of these claims were then repeated on Indian media outlets sympathetic to Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
A parallel analysis of pro-Khalistan accounts also revealed numerous unverified claims, but only marginal amplification by suspected bots.
Even before last month’s clashes, the media monitoring unit at Global Affairs Canada had reported “Modi-aligned” media outlets in India were pushing “often heated” narratives claiming Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is beholden to Khalistani extremists.
The steadfast opposition to the Khalistan movement is an integral part of a Hindu nationalist ideology the Modi government has been pushing both domestically and abroad, said Ward Elcock, a former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).
“The violence of those demonstrations [in Brampton and Surrey] suggests that that agenda has been pushed in [Canada] a good deal more than any of us realized,” Elcock said.
Sense of insecurity following clashes
Sikh separatists have been demonstrating outside consular events at Hindu temples since Trudeau alleged the Indian government was involved in the 2023 killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistan activist, in Surrey.
These demonstrations, though small, are often held near the temple entrance and can feature provocative slogans, such as “Who supports Nijjar’s killers: Hindu temple.”
Last month, demonstrations in Surrey and Brampton were met by counter-protesters. A series of confrontations ensued over a 48-hour period, resulting in several arrests and condemnation from politicians across the spectrum.
“Virtually everybody who has been here for 10, 15 or 20 years were of the view that they never had to confront such a situation,” said Balwinder Singh, who hosts a Punjabi-language call-in radio show from the basement of his home in Brampton.
“They never thought … they would feel unsafe in Canada.”
In the days following the demonstrations, social media was awash in unverified claims about retaliatory violence, government infiltration and police corruption.
CBC News examined the activity of six accounts on X during the first two weeks of November: three belonging to prominent Canadian influencers often critical of the Khalistan movement and three belonging to prominent Canadian advocates of the Khalistani cause.
Using publicly available data, CBC News counted the number of times a given post was reposted by an account that had the characteristics of a bot. The Digital Forensic Research Lab at the D.C.-based Atlantic Council defines a suspicious account as one that posts more than 72 times per day.
This type of analysis does not determine who is controlling the bots or if they are co-ordinating with each other.
The pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample have posted unverified claims about Indian diplomats using places of worship to build a spy network. But there was little evidence these posts were being boosted in a significant way by suspected bots.
The account belonging to Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a leading Khalistan advocate, only has 3,600 followers. CBC News detected 13 suspected bots pushing his content in early November; content from the two other pro-Khalistan accounts in the sample was amplified by fewer than 10 bots.
Suspected bot accounts push misinformation
Posts by critics of the Khalistan movement, on the other hand, showed evidence of significant amplification by suspected bots.
Two of the accounts received retweets from more than 1,000 different suspected bots, while the third had more than 500.
Daniel Bordman, a Toronto-based journalist with a right-wing publication called The National Telegraph who has 70,000 followers on X, had the most bot engagement in our sample, receiving nearly 6,000 retweets from nearly 1,800 suspicious accounts when we expanded the analysis to include the whole month of November.
Three men have been arrested after a series of violent demonstrations outside a Hindu temple and Sikh gurdwara in the Toronto area over the weekend. Similar clashes occurred in Surrey, B.C., and come during heightened tensions between Canada and India.
In at least two instances, these suspected bots amplified misleading information posted by Bordman.
On Nov. 13, for example, Bordman posted a video of a gathering in Surrey in which yellow Khalistan flags can be seen.
“Khalistanis march around Surrey BC and claim ‘we are the owners of Canada’ and ‘white people should go back to Europe and Israel,'” Bordman wrote, adding an offensive term and implying Khalistanis shape Canadian foreign policy.
Bordman’s post has received nearly 1.5 million views and 16,000 likes and has been reposted more than 5,000 times. CBC News found that, as of last week, 469 of those reposts were from suspected bot accounts.
Bordman’s post was cited in reports of the incident by NDTV, one of India’s most popular television networks, and by Mint, a Delhi-based financial publication. Other major Indian media outlets covered the incident as well.
But contrary to Bordman’s description, the video shows Sikhs singing hymns during a processional religious ceremony called Nagar Kirtan.
The voice in the original video saying “we are the owners of Canada” and “white people should go back to Europe and Israel” belongs to Inderjit Singh Jaswal, a local vlogger who livestreamed the ceremony.
In a Nov. 17 Instagram post, Jaswal said he is not “Khalistani” and that his statements in the video were directed at people who were making racist comments in the livestream chat.
“Thousands of racist people came there [in the comment section] and were abusing our gods, our culture, our values,” he said in the video, while displaying the racist comments he received during the livestream.
“Why did Daniel [Bordman] hide the comments? I was replying to racist people,” Jaswal says in his video. He posted a separate video in Punjabi offering a similar explanation.
Bordman later appeared on a podcast to discuss Jaswal’s explanation. He ridiculed and mimicked Jaswal’s accent and called him a “mentally deficient Khalistani.”
In another post, boosted by more than 370 suspected bot accounts, Bordman claimed a video of two Surrey police officers performing Gatka, a Sikh martial art, at a religious festival showed “Khalistani cops preparing for the next attack on a Hindu temple in Surrey BC.”
Bordman added: “Can we trust these two to be honest arbitrators of justice?”
A day later, NewsXLive, a pro-Modi news channel based in Delhi, ran a segment about the Surrey video, asking if the officers “can be trusted as impartial enforcers of justice.”
Pro-Modi media has size advantage, Ottawa says
Press freedom in India has dropped significantly since Modi took power in 2014, according to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
Many of the country’s largest media outlets are owned and operated by Modi loyalists, and their coverage is often sympathetic to the government’s goals, said Reporters Without Borders in a 2023 report.
The size of their audience, which includes diaspora communities, means Modi-aligned outlets have a “distinct advantage in amplifying negative narratives about Canada,” Global Affairs Canada said in a September report.
Bordman has given multiple interviews to Indian media over the past year, including ANI, known for its pro-Modi slant and for spreading misinformation.
In an interview with CBC News, Bordman said some of those media appearances were paid, but he declined to specify which ones.
“I’d never take money from the Indian government,” he said.
Bordman said it was not unexpected that bots would repost some of his content, given the size of his following on X.
“Do some bots retweet me? Sure,” he said. “But I don’t think bots are that significant in the outreach they have.”
‘The new normal’
The presence of artificial social media activity in online discussions of Sikh-Hindu relations in Canada is not novel.
Researchers with the Media Ecosystem Observatory, based at McGill University in Montreal, detected the remnants of a bot farm that issued identical anti-Canada messages in mid-October, just after the RCMP linked agents of the Indian government to homicides and other acts of violence in Canada.
India officially protested on Saturday the Canadian government’s allegation that the country’s powerful Home Minister Amit Shah had ordered the targeting of Sikh activists inside Canada, calling it ‘absurd and baseless.’
Read more: cbc.ca/1.7371969.
Earlier this year, the social media company Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) announced it had dismantled a cluster of fake accounts behind a fictitious pro-Sikh activist movement called Operation K.
The company said the network running the accounts was based in China, and that the campaign was directed at Sikhs around the world, including in Canada.
“This is the new normal,” said Aengus Bridgman, who heads the Media Ecosystem Observatory, about the proliferation of bot activity on sites like X.
He said policy-makers and social media users should expect some degree of manipulation “to occur with every issue.”
As Singh wrapped up another broadcast of his radio show Sargam (which means harmony in both Punjab and Hindi), he said he was worried the flow of misinformation is driving a wedge between two communities that once co-existed peacefully.
“A narrative has been created” that aims to make Hindus and Sikhs fear each other, he said.
“I think that is very, very dangerous.”
Published at Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000