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The disturbing rise of ‘gooner’ assaults at Dollar Tree stores: ‘They find it funny to degrade women’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2026
399 points (96.9% liked)
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How... How do you even do that????? Dumbfounded.
do you live in a city?
lots of homeless mentally ill folks bust nuts in public, and assault strangers. pretty common sight.
Which city are you in where this is common?
Boston, NYC, SF, Seattle, seen it all of them and if you follow the news blots it's frequently reported.
It's just that homeless folks are doing it and it's passe. It's not shocking, except maybe to people new to the city or suburbanites.
Folks masturbating and sexually assaulting others in public is not something mentally healthy people do. It's a co-morbid with other problems.
But hey, why try to understand human behavior when we can just get outraged about it?
"Which city are you from" "Oh, i don't live in the city, I just see it sensationalized in the news"
These aren't homeless people committing these crimes.
This story is quite literally about men online that are part of the "gooning" community that encourage each other to sexually assault women in public.
This seems like something separate to gooning.
Why do you say that? The reporters found posts sharing these public assaults in gooning communities, which are not hard to find tbh.
yeah, who are mentally ill, and many only mentally ill communities become hotbeds of egging each other on.
You framed this as homeless mentally ill people doing it which is inaccurate.
No, I didn't. But please continue to misinterpret me to push your agenda.
I'm glad this story in shocking and horrible for you, but in my life experience it's just par for the course. Guardian just loves to frame stuff like this as shocking and new, when online spaces full of nutcases are have been around for 20 years. Including spaces for celebrating sexual assault, self harm, and other horrible things.
Your comment again, since you forgot:
Yeah, that was my comment. As in, this isn't some random or novel thing.
But hey, don't let me ruin your narrative that all men are evil and these folks are totally normal well-adjusted folks, or something.
You realize your comments just help their narrative right? "Hey not all men are insufferable pricks like me!" But keep making condescending dickhead comments, I'm sure they'll come to that conclusion eventually.
I am not interested in fighting a war against mentally ill folks, but lots of posters here certainly are.
Yeah you definitely sound like a very understanding person haha
Do you make up your comments like a mad lib? It's the only thing that makes sense since they don't have anything to do with mine, yours or the article.
OK. So why do you keep replying then?
For fun.
Because you're blatantly lying about what the article is about in order to defend these men.
It's not an agenda when we're talking about a specific article here.
These men aren't homeless and mentally ill folks just busting a nut in public, this is coordinated and shared and encouraged in these "gooning" communities of men.