21 dead in Thailand after a mass shooting and standoff continues.

Thai police escort survivors away from the scene. Reuters. 

At least 21 people are dead and many more wounded after a mass shooting and standoff occurred in Nakhon Ratchasima, with the situation still ongoing. Reuters. The attack is believed to have been carried out by Jakrapanth Thomma, who is a Sargent with the Thai military. The attacker killed several people at the Army base where he worked before moving on to a mall where he is currently holed up. Police tried to raid the mall in the early morning but the effort failed with one police officer killed and two more wounded. Thomma took credit for the attack via social media, though his multiple accounts were eventually banned by Facebook. 

RT.com has a post showing much of the video that has been taken during the incident. 

A screenshot I pulled from what may have been the suspect's account. Keep in mind this is unverified. 

My Comment:

I was following this story early this morning and I can't really believe it's still not resolved. It doesn't speak well that the attacker was able to repel the cops and is still free as of this writing. That statement might be out of date by the time this is posted but still, why hasn't he been neutralized yet? I know trying to remove an entrenched and trained solider is extremely difficult but it's not impossible. 

As for the attacker himself, it's unclear why he did this. There are rumors that he had some kind of disagreement with his commanding officer, but who knows if that is true? My guess is that he was just another person that wanted to be famous for a mass shooting, but even with his multiple Facebook accounts he didn't really see fit to post a manifesto or state his reasons for doing this. 

It's not surprising that this killer was able to get a double digit body count. He was well armed with a full-auto weapon and obviously had military training. The video of the shooting I have seen (which I can't post or link to here) show him to be fairly professional and efficient. Despite having a full-auto weapon he was taking aimed single shots, which shows he knew what he was doing. 

The social media part of this attack was fairly fascinating. The attacker knew his account was going to be suspended so he made dozens more and as soon as one got banned he moved on to the next one. Facebook couldn't keep up with him so he was able to keep making comments as the attack occurred. Of course it's possible that some of those accounts were fake and made by random people on the internet but at the very least some of the accounts posted live video from the scene that would be impossible to fake. 

I think deleting those accounts was a mistake by Facebook as they could have been used to try and talk this guy down. Though I am sure some people would have encouraged him to continue the vast majority of comments were telling him he was a bastard and that he should stop the attack. I don't know if it would have helped but nobody was allowed to try for very long.

I'm generally opposed to banning the accounts of mass shooters in the first place. I know that they obviously are breaking the rules of the platform, but I think the information that can be gleaned from those accounts is too valuable to lose. I also agree with the Kiwifarms reasoning that we should gather as much information about these kinds of shooters as we can so we can use ridicule on them to change the public perception of mass shooters as some kind of heroes. 

I fully expect this attack to be memory holed in the west at least. For one thing, the victims and attacker are ordinary Thai people which won't gather the kind of sympathy from the Western media that would happen if the attacker was white and the victims were anything else. 

There is also no gun control angle to push here. The attacker was a solider and had access to his weapons and nobody is arguing that we shouldn't allow soldiers to have guns. Thai gun laws are strict by American standards but looser than some countries, but the law was totally irrelevant in this case. A CCW holder might have helped end this incident sooner but while legal, but restricted, in Thailand, CCW doesn't appear to be that common. 

Indeed, it seems that only a few outlets are updating this story as new information comes out. The vast majority of news outlets are still going with the old death toll of 20, some even with the initial count of 12. Despite the drama of this case and the fact that it's still ongoing, there doesn't seem to be much interest from western media outside of the wire services.