Gunwitch.

Pick-up artist "Gunwitch" shot a woman in the face at a party. 20-year-old Amber Tripp was in critical condition at time of last news reports.

This wasn't some dude who had a few PUA books in his apartment and posted on a forum the one time. He was in The Game, he sold courses, he had followers. Still has followers. Nor was this some unrelated incident; according to totally unreliable Internet sources, he was touching Tripp inappropriately and she fought back and that's when he shot her.

His official website has been taken down, but his page at Fast Seduction is still up. I don't really want to go through it in detail now though. I mean, I'm sure it's full of total howlers of misogyny and social ineptitude and just plain wrongness, but fuck, he shot someone. It's hard to nitpick "hey, don't talk to people like that" when he's got problems more on the scale of "hey, don't shoot people in the face like that." (He's also not much of a writer, to put it mildly. No wonder he sold audio lessons.)

PUA is, fundamentally, all about women as Other. You've got you and other men, who are people, with thinking and decision-making much like your own--and then you've got women. They're something else. You need a special method to interact with women because the methods you use for interacting with people won't apply here. There's a lot of "women all do this and are all like this" talk. Hell, sometimes it's not even negative. Saying "women are generally rational and have their own sex drives" can be, with enough twisting, just another way of putting "women" outside the Venn diagram of "people".

And seeing someone as unlike yourself, as unlike human beings, makes it a lot easier to pull the trigger. The frustration and resentment of not getting laid when you really want it--that's something I experience too, frankly, but I can temper it with "well, I know how he feels, because sometimes I feel that way myself." Take away that empathy and you just get pure rage that a not-exactly-person would hurt the feelings of a person.

It's horrible, but not entirely surprising, that sometimes that rage and dehumanization would turn to violence.