November 8th, 2017 - I published this one after the Las Vegas shooting, and sadly, it still applies. The first impulse of every news organization was to get into the shooters FEELINGS and MOTIVATIONS. Well — at least this time we’ve shifted a bit in terms of the structural failures that enable such a violent angry damaged guy to get semi-automatic weapons and mow down praying people.
Las Vegas
Just waiting on baited breath as our national press scrambles to unearth Stephen Paddock's life, history, distorted thinking and angry motivations. Which clearly are completely different distorted angry motivations than Dylan Roof's or Adam Lanza's or Dylan Klebold's or James Holmes'. So we must get clear on these distinctions. Thank goodness money's being spent on having graphic designers produce FLOOR PLANS that look like IKEA assembly instructions for a mass shooting, so that we too can think through the logistics of slaughter. As for Stephen Paddock, I won't be able to rest until I know about his condos, and whether he owned 43 or 44 guns or, God forbid, 47, and whether and how he modified their triggers. Also, the angles of his cameras. Will his family will be SHOCKED by what this entitled, angry, anti-social, gun-loving, gambling-addicted, girlfriend-berating guy had in store for the concert-goers? So glad that our journalists are honing in what makes this latest defender of entitled white male supremacy SPECIAL.
70M gun owners (me among them). NRA claims 4.5M members and according to the Washington Post those assertions are inconsistent, exaggerated, and dishonest. So let's say 3-4M. That's 4-6% of gun owners. Of those, only lifetime NRA members, who pay a huge fee, can vote. So we maybe 2M slaughter-friendly bullies dominate. Less than .6% of our population buys the Congress and here we are.
Did Paddock belong to the NRA? Was he a lifetime member or just an average-joe beneficiary of the their orchestrated malevolence? Did he fight with the gun lobby, or hang with Wayne? Did he own gun stocks? What was his Congressperson's sticker price for each law that threw each victim under the bus? Who introduced reciprocal carry, or lifting the ban on silencers? Whose idea was it to market pink guns to girls at Tractor Supply? These questions will just have to wait until the important ones have been answered.