Posting alleged threat against Wilfrid Laurier was ‘dumb decision,’ accused says I’m not sure how big a story this was anywhere else, but locally it was pretty huge news for obvious reasons.
To catch you up on what happened, last week, the Waterloo campus of Wilfrid Laurier University was put on lockdown after a threat was made against the school, specifically that people should stay away from the science building because something bad was going to happen there. It read similarly to a threat made before a recent mass shooting at a school in Oregon so naturally, the police kinda lost their shit. The Waterloo Regional Police, the RCMP and the FBI all got involved because of course they did, and eventually a 22-year-old Daniel Ransem from England was arrested.
Disaster averted?
No.
Why? Well, because this fucking idiot is going to be allowed to walk among us again eventually, that’s why.
In an interview with CTV, Ransem, who clearly has no sense of the world around him, explained that he didn’t mean anything by it. He was simply taking part in a running joke with people on 4chan, you see, and he didn’t know that anyone would ever take him seriously because he’s in England and North America is so far away.
Ransem said he didn’t realize authorities took those kinds of posts as real threats.
“I was ignorant of certain realities such as being that there was a level of paranoia across the pond that I wasn’t knowing about,” he said.
“I knew there was a lot of shootings but I didn’t know the paranoia was such that I was going to be arrested in this country.
Yup. Believe it or not, when there’s a real risk of being killed for simply existing, sometimes people get a little jumpy. Crazy, I know.
As soon as I was identified as being in another country, I’m not sure how I would be considered a credible threat.”
So we can add no idea how the internet works to no sense of the world around him.
Answer me a question, Daniel. What do the first two Ws in WWW stand for? The answer is world and wide. Figured I’d save us all the wait and help you out since it’s a bit of a stumper. But the point is that the internet makes things such that enormous bodies of water and thousands of miles worth of distance can be essentially meaningless. Maybe you weren’t going to fly over and take anyone out yourself, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t writing on behalf of someone who was already here. As easily as anyone in the world can help stop a real threat, they can start one. Hence the nice officers who showed up at your door.
He said it was “a dumb decision” and he thought he was protected by freedom of speech legislation.
With freedom comes responsibility, my friend. The fact that you can say something does not always mean you should, because sometimes the thing you want to say is monumentally fucking stupid. For example, “Don’t go to laurier science building hall tomorrow. happening thread will be posted in the morning.” And before you ask, no, the picture of a frog holding a gun doesn’t help.
“From the bottom of my heart, I am very, very sorry. I did not mean for the university to be shut down. I’m not a bad man, 10 minutes with me and you’ll realize I’m as dangerous as a doormouse.”
And almost as smart.