An Ohio man has been charged with brandishing a gun at an Ohio Wikipedia conference.
An Ohio man is facing criminal charges after he allegedly stormed a stage at a Wikipedia conference in New York City with a gun – as well as a sign declaring himself a “non-offending pedophile” – and threatened to kill himself.
Connor Weston, 27, was reportedly tackled by organizers of WikiConference North America 2025, thwarting tragedy, before police said officers booked him on counts of criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.
The Dayton resident had evidently paid to attend the four-day conference when he disrupted its opening ceremony at 9am Friday in Manhattan’s Civic Hall. He jumped on to a stage at the venue, pointed a gun at his head and the ceiling, and expressed a desire to take his life while a sign draped around his neck declared him to be an “anti-contact non-offending pedophile”, police and multiple media reports said.
…Friday was apparently not the first time Weston had publicly labeled himself an “anti contact, non offending pedophile”. A social media video circulated in July shows a man providing Weston’s name, age and home town; applying that term to himself; and saying he can “choose not to harm minors … but can’t choose to stop being attracted to them”.
…As NBC News noted, Johns Hopkins University defines non-offending pedophiles as “a unique population of individuals who experience sexual interest in children, but despite common misperceptions, have neither had sexual contact with a child nor have accessed illegal child sexual exploitation material”.
Wikipedia has a rule indefinitely blocking and banning from the platform any editors “who identify themselves as pedophiles”
Pedophiles are arguably the most reviled people in society. I have read that in prisons, they are the most likely to suffer violence at the hands of other inmates, even more so than any other class including mass murderers. But if we take the self-description given by Weston of being an “anti-contact non-offending pedophile” at face value, it means that these people are only thinking about it, and not actually doing anything. It would be a thought crime.
People have all manner of fantasies that would be condemned if they said them out loud. Almost any day sees stories about people saying things on the internet that gets them into trouble. Usually that is because those people are stupid or careless or arrogant and think that they will not suffer any repercussions. The question is why people like Weston would want to publicly out themselves as pedophiles, however carefully circumscribed to be not prosecutable, since it would immediately bring about a great deal of opprobrium on them. What benefit do they gain?
The only reason that I can think of is that they are trying to gain acceptance in society as just another special interest group so that they can openly form affinity groups on social media with like-minded people.
Interesting story. Just last night on tv, there was a storyline on Chicago Med of a man who obsessed over the worry that he would kill someone on purpose by choking them, so he cut off his left hand with a saw to take away his ability to do so. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, but his intrusive thoughts kept telling him it was only a matter of time until he did.
As for the Ohio man, I have no idea why he felt a Wikipedia conference in another state was the perfect venue to air his personal issues to perfect strangers who were in no position to help him and threaten them with his gun (even if it wasn’t pointed at them in the moment, seeing a man with a gun ranting and acting crazy is traumatizing). Entitled young white man would be my guess.
Katydid @ #1
Wikipedia wouldn’t let him be an editor.
Did he identify himself to Wikipedia previously and they denied him? Or did he keep his urges to himself?
Pedophiles … are the most likely to suffer violence at the hands of other inmates, even more so than any other class including mass murderers. But if we take the self-description given by Weston of being an “anti-contact non-offending pedophile” at face value, it means that these people are only thinking about it, and not actually doing anything. It would be a thought crime.
By “these people,” you seem to mean people imprisoned for sexual offenses against kids. In which case they’re not imprisoned for “thought crimes,” they’re imprisoned for ACTIONS. I know we’re living in a police state where innocent people do get framed for one reason or another, but AFAIK people don’t get locked up merely for having fantasies or feelings for kids. Fired and ostracized if they talk about it, yes, but not imprisoned.
Keeping part of you a secret when others are constantly demonising people like you is really stressful. This guy has what are functionally intrusive thoughts, and is constantly seeing others say he should be killed or tortured for them. That is a really shitty thing to deal with
He’s probably not even really a threat; a lot of the time those sorts of thoughts are not a desire to really do the thing but more a disordered awareness that you shouldn’t. Even if that’s not the case, he’s not actually harming people
The guy needs help not judgement, but all he gets from society is judgement. Being in that situation will stress you out enough to do shit like what he did
Further, there are a set of people who are pro-child abuse and they will recruit people like the guy above for support. We should interrupt that. Helping people like him is also helping keep society safer for everyone
Raging Bee @#4,
No, by ‘these people’ I meant people like this Weston guy.
I don’t think that’s what this guy was trying to do, but there is a history of that. In the UK in the 70s -- when I was a child -- gay rights were a new battleground. Homosexuality had pretty much only just been decriminalised in about 1967. In the context of that, there was an organisation that called itself Paedophile Information Exchange, and campaigned for equal rights for those attracted to children. They connected themselves publicly to the fight for gay rights, arguably doing decades of harm to the legitimate gay rights movement campaigning for equal rights for those acting on same-sex attraction to consenting adults. It was a tiny organisation -- membership in the low hundreds -- but it made a LOT of noise in media when it was operating between 1974 and 1984. It was the reason I first heard the word “paedophile”. Their central claim was to abolish the age of consent entirely, leaving them free to legally have sex with kids. I believe they are a significant contributor to homophobes conflating being gay with being a child-abuser even to this day. Looking back, it’s kind of hard to believe that the organisation even existed. Similarly, when South Park mentioned the North American Man-Boy Love Association, I thought they’d made it up for the show. My mind was absolutely boggled when I found out it was something real.
I try to think the best of people until proven otherwise. I speculate that what this guy was crying out for was not other like-minded individuals to swap porn with, or even just to commiserate with. I speculate that what he was looking for was help. If you take him at his word, he’s basically saying “I’m dangerous, help me keep you safe”. And right now, unless and until he actually commits an offence, society is offering nothing to him in response to that. (Unless there is help for that, but if there is, how would I know? I’m not looking for it, and I’m not about to type that into my browser search engine…).
It’s a serious point: paedophilia is a disorder. We treat the symptom only when it manifests in abuse. We don’t, as far as I know, have any mechanism for giving a sympathetic ear and practical help to people who have these feelings but, realising they’re wrong, seek help to avoid acting on them. This is probably because public revulsion for the very idea of having those feelings in the first place makes trying to help them electoral poison. We recognise alcoholism can be treated, and we admire alcoholics who swear off the booze. We don’t tolerate former drug addicts quite so well, but we do at least gesture towards treating them with methadone and such. It would benefit society to offer treatment to people who have this disorder, and would likely save kids from abuse. The fact that we don’t is evidence that, as usual, “but what about the children?” is a campaign platitude that doesn’t care about kids at all. This is, ultimately, an irrational and counter-productive attitude. I expect it to continue.
Just a thought: we have no idea what age or gender this Weston guy was attracted to: just “minors”, and the term “pedophilia” is also used in casual speech to refer to anyone under the age of consent--in this case, the reference is to “minors”.
We’re all agreed that this desire is a problem.
However, about a decade ago in the USA, there were the (country-club-belonging) Duck Dynasty fools who grifted off the evangelical/fundamentalist Christians by attaching themselves to the idea popular in those groups that adult men were owed compliant, underage girls. The fake-dynasty guys traveled the country famously urging their listening men to marry 14- and 15-year-old girls because (paraphrasing) they’d be compliant and uneducated and accept any kind of treatment. The audience of grown men really liked the idea of having their own personal sex slaves/house slaves. They weren’t the only grifters in this pond to say that, either.
The audience saw no issue with this religion-sanctioned pedophilia.
@7 sonofrojblake
The last I checked, conversion therapy was demonstrated to be useless, other than as a form of torture.
What would benefit society is for people to value civil liberties for everyone, even if it means they aren’t allowed the catharsis of rounding up a big lynch mob to go after an alleged pedophile.
@7 sonofrojblake
That’s what I think it is, a cry for help. There naturally are non-offending pedophiles. They can do nothing against beeing sexually attracted to children and know, that if they act on it, children get harmed and they break the law. They do not want to do that and they know, they can never fulfill their strong sexual urges. These people live in torment and there is always the danger they become an offender.
To help them and society, professional programs are badly needed. One such program that is offered in Germany is called “kein-täter-werden” (not becoming an offender). We need more of those.
As an aside: not all rapes of children are perpetrated by pedophiles.
@ 9 beholder
Sonofrojblake didn’t propose conversion therapy. That’s dangerous pseudoreligious woowoo.
He spoke of “therapy” , and I think, he meant the professional, clinical kind, where the goal is not to reprogram something that cannot be reprogrammed, but to help patients to manage and controle their desires and impulses.
Completely agree, conversion therapy is harmful.
The level of acceptance of socially damaging sexual contact (of any kind — inappropriate contact by pedophiles is simply the most repulsive and perhaps most damaging form of it) is always been baffling to me. American culture (perhaps world culture) is horribly over-run with this notion of “acceptability” for people with a very similar mental disorder to this pedophile (in particular, I am talking mostly about hetero-normative males attracted to adults who are by far the biggest violators of unwanted sexual contact). The fact that America has currently elected an actual convicted sexual molester as president confirms this unacknowledged but obvious fact (I personally find Donald Trump’s convicted offense a mere hairs width away from that of a pedophile who diddles kids). Until our culture overcomes its childish prudishness regarding sex and sex-education — in particular for our youth — I can’t see any light at the end of this tunnel when people — both children and adults — can feel safe participating in public free from unwanted sexual contact. Its a rampant problem that is self-inflicted on society by many failed institutions (mainly religious ones) that insist on infantalizing everyone with ridiculous taboos on openly talking and educating everyone about sex. Simply isolating out and punishing one aspect of it — namely pedophilia — simply provides cover for those with similar problems that continue to make public society unsafe. We will likely just continue to blame pedophiles for all of it, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that American society is rampant with people who are no better than pedophiles, and are not only willing to brag about their immoral/unethical/repulsive behavior to their friends, but who are able to be elected to the highest public office in the land.
@ mizzi, 11:
Actually, mizzi, if you do a search within this page, you’ll find that the first occurrence of the word “conversion” AND of the word “therapy” are both in post 9, the one from “beholder”. I didn’t speak of “therapy” at all, conversion or otherwise. A human who can read can verify this simply by scrolling up.
Not sure if you’ve posted here before or for how long, but you soon get used to this sort of thing. Some of the posters here present very much like AI large language models -- there’s no conscious thought going on there, it’s just a spewed out sequence of words that (usually at least) look like coherent sentences. You might try asking “beholder” how many “r’s” there are in the word “strawberry”, it would be interesting to see the result.
What’s happened here is a common problem with these AI models -- hallucination. I posted something, and “beholder” hallucinated something else, and responded to that. For extra bonus points, they couched it in sarcastic terms (“last I checked”) to make it seem more like the text had been generated by a conscious mind. If you’re not primed to spot the tells, it can be quite convincing.
Actual LLMs, when called on this kind of bullshit, obsequiously backpedal, admit their error and bafflingly then re-engage with reality as though they’d done nothing wrong, at least until the next time they hallucinate something. The LLMs that regularly post here, on the other hand, more typically react angrily, denying they’ve hallucinated anything and doubling down on their easily refuted position.
You get used to it.
@ Katydid, post nine
Sadly a lot of society is comfortable with abuse if it’s properly justified with misogyny. If you poke around you can find exactly the same conclusion justified with “Science”
@13 sonofrojblake
If I was a LLM I would have spewed more truthy verbiage to support my claim, whether or not it was true.
So I’ll burn through my second of three comments here to state: Nuh-uh. I didn’t feel like I had to connect the dots and spell it out in the comment — I was inferring that the treatment options are dangerous for the subject.
That’s easy. Ten.
>>> print(len([r for r in “strawberry”]))
10
A long time ago I knew someone who was attracted to minors. They were also attracted to adults and chose to focus on that instead. Around this time I was poor and so were they. We had various periods where we lived together and sometimes with other adults so we could all pay the bills, keep food on the table, and a roof overhead. After explaining this to me (in private) they asked me to help them avoid being alone with minors. Many years after parting ways permanently, I spoke about it with a different close friend from that time and found that I wasn’t the only person who was approached this way and asked to help them avoid being alone with minors.
It was certainly a shock to learn this but I really couldn’t think of any more productive approach to it than the one they suggested. I’m sure someone would suggest going to the police or talking to everyone we knew and publicly labeling them. I knew just about everyone they knew. They certainly took the risk that I would do any of these things by opening up to me. I did not because I couldn’t think of a more practical, repsonsible way anyone could handle having this sort of inappropriate attraction. I’m aware that some portions of our society who appoint themselves moral guardians would suggest that public shaming is the only way to go but these are also the same sort of people who suggest that responsibly dealing with sexual frustration is shameful. So they definitely don’t have the answer. But shaming from people like this is one reason I can think of for the actions of the person in the article.
I think everyone has had some kind of inappropriate attraction. Someone you found very attractive in high school who just wasn’t interested in you. Or maybe a celebrity you think is really hot. Or a friend or neighbor you shouldn’t get too close to because you’re already in a monogamous relationship. Mostly these are harmless because you don’t act on them. Can you imagine being treated like a potential rapist or stalker over simply having such an attraction?
An inappropriate attraction to minors does have a couple extra complications. Minors are more vulnerable to being pressured or to not understanding what’s happening than adults are. They’re kind of similar to very drunk adults: they can’t meaningfully give consent so anything intimate you might do with them is automatically harmful. And unlike adults there’s no equivalent to sobering up, they have to simply age out of being minors.
This might seem overly philosophical but as you can see above, I had good reasons to think about it and whether my actions or inactions were contributing to harm. Religions are where our society gets most answers around this topic and the answers mostly seem catered toward serving the religion rather than any of the people involved, including any potential victims.
As recently as last month I encountered that sort of overreaction to this topic in an online gaming group. It was found out that a couple was into adult baby or age play. It’s a sexual kink where one person pretends to be a minor or at least pretends to act like one. Suddenly in this group there was hyperventilating and pearl clutching and the next thing I knew the couple are being talked about like they’re Epstein & Maxwell. In some very real ways I think this sort of overreaction not only harms the people it targets but it also trivializes actually abusing children. How seriously do you initially take accusations that someone’s a pedophile when it’s become popular in some right wing circles to slap that label on anyone you disagree with? Similar to how another person might call someone an asshole?
I couldn’t say for sure that I reached the right answer to all of this. But it feels a lot more right to me than many of the other options on offer. I can’t read minds but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some of those other takes pressured the guy in the article to act out in a bad way.
@lanir: thoughtful post. Reading it, I wonder if paedophiles may, possibly, be the next group society changes its attitude to. We started it with women, with Black people, with homosexuals, with transgender people. All those groups are at different stages advancing towards acceptance that, like straight white men, they’re fully human and deserving of all the rights that go with that, and those journeys really only started between about 100 years ago (for women, taking as an entirely arbitrary reference point the first woman MP) and much more recently for others.
I’d like to think that at some point actual harm reduction and evidence may come to influence policy, and non-judgemental help of whatever kind works would be offered to people prepared to come forward and admit they need it. I’m not optimistic, given the world’s current apparent lurch to the right, but the general tide of history seems to be towards more liberal policies, even in the teeth of individual setbacks like the defeat of Roe vs. Wade. Paedophiles who actually offend would remain pretty much the ultimate pariahs, but it’s hard to argue that helping people who know they’re at risk of offending but don’t want to would do anything but protect children. At least until we turn into the Culture and can task a slap drone.
@sonofrojblake: I think this group isn’t going to get support in the same way because it’s the one that’s used to tar and feather the others. No matter what you’re into, if people don’t like it someone will sooner or later accuse you of actually being into children instead.
I think if there’s ever a point where someone gets sympathy for having but never indulging this sort of inappropriate attraction it will be part of a broader rethink about sex.
As a society we’re still waffling between two seemingly opposed ideas: the idea that sex is a sin and the idea that sex sells. But both take something internal to most of us, our sex drive, and make it serve some other group. The religious stance is still in the process of losing the battles over whether women get to feel good about sex and whether homosexuals get to exist.
These are mostly treated as separate issues but they’re really just the sin idea being completely and utterly wrong. When we stop treating them as exceptions and instead acknowledge them as part of the overwhelming evidence that religions are lying to us and always have been then we’ll get somewhere.
We don’t, as far as I know, have any mechanism for giving a sympathetic ear and practical help to people who have these feelings but, realising they’re wrong, seek help to avoid acting on them.
IANAE, but I’m pretty sure there’s psychiatrists, LCSWs and therapy groups who could at least try to help with this sort of thing. How helpful a particular practitioner is, and how affordable they are, are of course separate questions.
Also, as lanir said, most people have all manner of fantasies, fetishes or obsessions that we never act on, either because we know they’re illegal, or we know they’re harmful and won’t be nearly as enjoyable in practice, or other reasons why they’re impracticable or just bad ideas. One thing that would help nearly all non-offending thinkers of perverted thoughts, is simply reminding ourselves, and each other, that having thoughts and fantasies is just plain normal and inevitable.