Behaving violently when you're on the spectrum.

 None of what I say in this post will be popular. But for better or worse, all of it is the truth.

I frequently look back through my old Facebook posts. In one from last year I made defending Greta Thunberg, a friend of mine who dislikes her said something very basic but, in hindsight, accurate: "not all people with ASDs are nice people." Unfortunately, many notable people on the spectrum besides Thunberg have more than vindicated that statement.

Next month in Australia will see the release of Nitram, a film about Martin Bryant's life before he committed the Port Arthur massacre in 1996; Bryant was later diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. Unsurprisingly the film has already generated much controversy here, including online petitions to have its production stopped. Bryant was not the first autistic person to commit mass murder and he certainly wasn't the last. Among the others in this long "honour" roll; Sandy Hook Elementary School murderer Adam Lanza; white supremacist Samuel Woodward, who killed Jewish and openly gay teenager Blaze Bernstein in 2018; Andrew Lackey, who was executed for murdering WWII veteran Charles Newman in 2005; Nicholas Godejohn, who killed his then-girlfriend Gypsy Rose Blanchard's mother Dee Dee in 2015; Peter Mangs, who committed the 2009-10 shootings in Malmo, Sweden; William Freund, who killed three people including himself in Aliso Viejo, California in 2005; 2018 Capitol Gazette massacre perpetrator Jarrod Ramos; 2019 University of North Carolina shooter Trystan Terrell; Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 Latinos in El Paso, Texas in 2019; and Elliott Rodger, who committed the 2014 Isla Vista slayings and almost as infamously made a viral video manifesto. In recent years it has also come to light that Hans Asperger himself worked with Nazi Germany's eugenics program.

They all are/were horrible human beings, but they were all on the spectrum nonetheless. That in no way even excuses their crimes, let alone redeems them of those, but it is a fact I believe must be remembered. Nonetheless. biology plants the seed for violent and hateful behaviour; society waters that seed. And it waters that seed especially in people perceived as abnormal because they are too often excluded, discriminated against, or feared. Autistic people are not all violent or bigoted and some of never even become either of those. But many of us do (as just as many neurotypicals do, let us not forget or deny), and that is our sociology's fault as much as theirs. It will never stop until everybody treats people who are different in whatever form completely as equals.