İsa Aras Mersinli pictured on his birthday
Ten normies, including one teacher, were killed in a school shooting in Kahramanmaraş,Turkey on Wednesday, April 15th. The attacker was 14-year-old İsa Aras Mersinli, who took 5 handguns from his father (a retired police officer), and proceeded to go ER at the Ayser Çalık Secondary School, where he was an 8th-grade student.
Police officers stationed outside the Ayser Çalık Secondary School
Skip the BBC and Reuters and CNN. All the fun is happening in Turkish-language media outlets. That's where you'll find all the videos of parents and teachers crying. But more importantly, this is an opportunity to observe a society that previously has not experienced a deadly school shooting, and before this week, was not exposed to what was largely an Anglo-American online culture war.
By now, Americans are largely desensitized to school shootings, and American newspapers and pundits and politicans have established protocols on how to best discuss these incidents. This is not the case for Turks. It's like a Native American encountering a disease one has no natural immunity to. The most obvious example: American media outlets know by now that they shouldn't plaster a shooter's pictures everywhere, lest it inspires an attention-seeking copycat. Turkish media outlets, though, have no scruples letting showing Mersinli's photos. They have yet to learn.
Turkish society is responding to İsa Aras Mersinli's rampage the same way that Americans a generation ago responded to Columbine: with wall-to-wall coverage. Despite a publication ban, Turkish media is reposting just about every online rumour or theory they can find. They are in full moral panic mode.
I'll show you some of what I found, despite not being a Turkish speaker myself, thanks to the magic of Google Translate.
Turkish news outlets find out who Elliot Rodger is
Turkish media has reported that Mersinli's WhatsApp profile picture was none other than Elliot Rodger, perhaps the most famous mass shooter of the 2010s. This is currently fueling speculation that Mersinli was an "incel", though the premise is unconvincing as it makes no sense for a 14-year-old to be upset about being a virgin, and Turkish authorities have yet to mention "incels".
Google Trends results—personal research
In any case, Google searches for both "Elliot Rodger" and "incel" have exponentially increased virtually overnight in Turkey, according to Google Trends. I would not be surprised if one or more actual incel shooters emerge in Turkey over the coming months.
Turkboomers blame video games
Whilst many younger Turks might be more accustomed to being chronically online and might know enough English to observe the online shitflinging over incels and feminists and whatnot, Turkish boomers are completely ignorant. This is partly due to the language barrier and partly because boomers in general are just clueless by default. In the absence of an explanation for Mersinli's actions, some Turkish politicans and government-aligned media immediately pivoted to blaming video games. Two games in particular have been singled out: PUBG and Roblox.
It's been reported that Mersinli's laptop contained a screen recording of him enacting the Columbine shooting on Roblox, shown in two of the screengrabs above.
This was, interestingly enough, the same way American society responded to Columbine for much of the 2000s, though at the time they blamed Doom and Mortal Kombat. A number of relatives of the victims of the Columbine shooting actually sued video game publishers; though the lawsuit was rightly dismissed. See Sanders v. Acclaim Entertainment, Inc., 188 F. Supp. 2d 1264 (D. Colo. 2002). A number of states and localities also enacted laws that would ban minors from playing video games, though all of these laws were struck down by the based federal courts as violative of the First Amendment: See, e.g., American Amusement Machine Ass'n v. Kendrick, 244 F.3d 572 (7th Cir. 2001); Interactive Digital Software v. St. Louis County, 329 F.3d 954 (8th Cir. 2003); Entertainment Software Ass'n v. Blagojevich, 469 F.3d 641 (7th Cir. 2006); Entertainment Software Ass'n v. Granholm, 426 F. Supp. 2d 646 (E.D. Mich. 2006); Entertainment Software Ass'n. v. Hatch, 443 F. Supp. 2d 1065 (D. Minn. 2006); Entertainment Software Ass'n v. Foti (M.D. La. 2006); Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass'n, 564 U.S. 786 (2011). (There is no doubt that, as a matter of law, the American video game industry absolutely demolished the panican parents' lobby.
)That said, Turkey very obviously does not have the two best items in the American legal system, the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, so they might actually try to crack down on video games (and guns). On the flip side, the Turks are hilariously incompetent at basically everything, so we'll see if anything actually gets done besides just sheer panicking.
Whatever happens next is guaranteed to be entertaining.
Shoutout to @AsiaCel for his previous thread on the manner, though I disagree with the "incel" characterization:
NEW INCEL SAINT JUST DROPPED IN TURKEY (9 KILLS; NOT JOKE)
NEW INCEL SAINT JUST DROPPED IN TURKEY (9 KILLS; NOT JOKE) All Hail Saint Isa Aras Mersinli Maras Okul Katil!!!!!! Kills: 9 Wounded: 13 Date of Operation: 15 April 2026 Location of Operation: Ayser Çalık Secondary School in the Onikişubat district of Kahramanmaraş Equipment of Operation: 5x...
incels.is
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