The only thing worse than mass shootings

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
66
11
Only thing more grotesque than the damaged gun culture of Amerika & horror of mass shootings are conspiracy theorists who claim these attacks are manufactured. Apart from the insanity of those claims, it white washes the deep cultural changes needed.
 
It is a denial beneath contempt.
 
Amerika has a gun violence problem that has been exacerbated and fed by a domestic arms industry that plays to selfishness and neurotic fear and results in angry damaged white men to play out their revenge fantasies against a wider society they resent because of their own damaged toxic masculinity.
Mass shootings in a developed country is a symbol of a far deeper malaise and pretending that’s not happening in favour of shadowy groups wanting to manipulate people against guns isn’t just bordering on the rantings of the insane, it’s actually part of the problem.

66 COMMENTS

  1. What needs to be brought into the open is how the American political system is controlled by wealthy lobby groups. American politicians depend on money, big money. In other words they are bought. The National Rifle Association (NRA) and for that matter, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) are among the wealthiest and most powerful lobby groups.

  2. An American friend of mine is married to a Syrian man, they have 2 kids. She posted a conspiracy theory insinuating the suspect as a fallguy to an organised ISIS plot, with various critiques of events, such as his physical condition being inadequate to operate such weapons for a sustained period, the noise supposedly being two weapons fired simultaneously, the smoke and powder residue making the room unfit to breathe, etc.
    Infowars’ Alex Jones has tried linking the assailant to ISIS and Antifa (completely missing the utter idiocy in the idea of those two groups working together, since they are, at the heart of their values, complete opposites.)

    I chose not to comment on my friend’s thread, since it simply isn’t worth the trouble to try and reason where none is shown.

    • Yeah, with his resources, I can think of a LOT of ways that could have made this a heck of a lot worse and with a far larger bodycount.

      It’s one of the reasons why I’m very glad this nut was only a competent shooter rather than someone far more capable on the death and destruction front.

      For example, explosives all over the area, booby trapping stair wells, remotely triggered smoke options.

      Even something like rigging a few claymores in the hallway across from the elevators and stairwells would make things a whole lot more dangerous and deadly for even the people trying to get out.

      So it seems like there were at least four groups of responders to the 32 floor. The first was obviously the security guard. The second was police (likely those already at Mandalay Bay) who reached the 31 floor and then realised the shoots were above them. They reached the 32 floor 12 minutes after the shooting started and 2 minutes after the shooting stopped (presumably when the security guard got there). Soon a second group of officers (presumably from outside the MB) arrived. They got the master key from the security officer and secured the other rooms as the shooting had stopped. Then when SWAT arrived they breached the door, found Paddock dead and the door to the next room locked, so they breached that and found it empty.

      Also, case gets weirder. The cameras weren’t recording. Maybe they were live feed? Or just distractions?

      Down Mandalay Bay road past the main stage, 2000 ft from the shooters position is what looks like two 92,000 barrel jet fuel tanks. Seems like something he intended to set off, but failed to do so (thankfully). I don’t think the shots at the jet fuel tanks were accidental, considering the distance between the music festival and the tanks.

      Ambitious mass-murderers tend to go for bombs (cinematic!) but almost always underestimate the technical expertise needed to build a dependable bomb. The Columbine shooters tried and failed to use bombs. The Weathermen famously blew themselves and their posh NYC townhouse up, because it turns out that a bunch of a disaffected liberal arts students make for poor bomb-makers. They eventually got better at designing bombs by studying engineering, and passed on their designs to groups like the FALN, but it still took time — and that was in an era where you could still buy over-the-counter dynamite. Nowadays you’re potentially facing a mix of engineering and chemistry.

      And even if you have some institutional knowledge and support, it’s still possible to fuck yourself. That’s what happened to that terrorist cell in Spain a month or so back, and why they fell back on driving into crowds of tourists.

      • “Soros gives tons of money to Antifa groups all over the place”

        There’s nothing weird about this. Soros is a survivor of Nazi Germany, and operates from a typical liberal narrative in which Stalin and Hitler were extreme “right” and “left”, and “democracy”(capitalism with elected government) is the moderate “centre” ground. I presume this is why Soros supported Hilary (“centre”), not Trump (too far “right”), or Bernie (too far “left”).

        That said, Soros has stacks of money, and the Open Society Foundations that he set up as a philanthropy platform has funded *heaps* of different kinds of stuff, much of which he probably doesn’t even know about. There are OSF organisations in dozens of countries, running a whole bunch of general programs, which in turn fund more targeted programs, which in turn fund specific projects. There’s no way any one person could personally know about every group they fund.
        https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/about/programs

        • You know guys. And this is maybe speculation. Paddock was a self made gambling millionaire with a penchant for machine gambling. How the casinos let the guy get away with it for so long I don’t know. With the sophistication of catching gambling cheats, and his accounting background. I’d liken this dude’s brain to a big, complex piece of machinery that only has ONE broken part, though the broken part is really important. Because most of the rest of the gear is perfectly fine, he’s capable of planning and executing complex plans. The broken bit in this case sends him off into homicidal territory, but the rest of the gear works, making him sadly, very effective at it. At the same time, you have intact bits of the moral system screaming at him, the broken bit interfering at odd moments.

          So he’s mostly rational, but where he ain’t, he’s really off the rails.

          I’d also compare this to my attempts at home improvement – I often forget this little thing just because I’ve never done it before, but it’s obvious in hindsight.

        • [Comment declined for publication. Constant references to Jews is crossing the line to anti-semitism. You can make your point without reference to his religion. – Scarletmod]

          • As CJ said and I agree. The lesson from the beginning was, superior fire power is important to Americans.

            In the mind of a republican, NRA member, hick, ect. If the government confiscate weapons. The government still keep theirs. Multiply that by 3 million armed republicans and confiscating there guns may very well blow up into an all out civil war. But not under Trump. A Democrate maybe.

          • “In the mind of a republican, NRA member, hick, ect. If the government confiscate weapons. The government still keep theirs. ”

            Which is patently ridiculous, as the US government’s arsenal of attack helicopters, fighter jets, bombers, atomic missiles, submarines, attack drones, cruise missiles, tanks, artillery, submarines, warships, etc, etc, will always outgun the populace.

            The only weapon the US government cannot outgun is the vote. Relying on guns to “safeguard democracy” is a narrow, redneck view of a complex world.

          • NRA members have proven on multiple occasions that they can push back law enforcement simply by showing up in force. Multiply that by 3 million armed republicans and the pure technicalities of executing gun prohibition on the American continent becomes prohibitive. Or even states create by-Laws. The number of outs is significant.

      • maybe they don’t trust their government?

        Then vote them out.

        Conflating gun ownership with distrust of central government is a lazy cop-out.

        Shooting people, en-masse, in the US does nothing to change the political system.

  4. Lone wolf seems to be a convenient way to describe white terrorists.

    Because white American’s who kill other’s on mass, apparently can’t be described as terrorists.

  5. Yeah….nah.

    Maybe they’re just thinning out the dross.

    This shit has been going on in the States since Moses was a cowboy.

    They have it in their power to solve it, IF THEY REALLY WANTED TO.

    What worries me is that this is the kind of ‘democracy’ the US likes to impose on the rest of the world, usually at the point of a fucking gun.

    We should try and persuade them that the second amendment includes thermonuclear weapons. With a bit of luck they could extinct themselves.

  6. As for ‘motivation’, it is too far fetched to think he was simply used as a fall guy by some radical islamist jihadists or whosoever, as the scene was soon watched, from the distance, but also would people working or staying in that hotel have noticed some stuff.

    If others had done the shooting, they must have escaped, but how? They will most likely have been noticed one way or another, and such large hotels will also have CTV inside and outside.

    There are enough individuals out there, in the US, same here, who have personal issues, whether mental or whatever, and some may hold a grudge against identifiable people, but also perhaps people and society in general, given their life experiences.

    It may go back to their childhood, where they were bullied or whatever. The man being rich, but a kind of loner, living somewhat in privacy, a double life perhaps, suggests he may have some worrisome personality traits.

    He may have been rather antisocial, but many psychopaths do manage to appear quite normal, even friendly, Heinrich Himmler and Goebbels and so, they were described by some fellow compatriots as ‘loving and caring’ persons, totally normal. We know what they got up to in the end. Goehring, another leading Nazi, was the same.

    So at some stage of such a person’s life, perhaps aggravated by some recent event, the person may decide to live out a grudge, in the form of a hate attack, to take revenge at society.

    He was nearing an age, where many ‘retire’ and where life gets less happy and fulfilling. He sent is Filipina girl friend off to go to her home country, sent her a hundred thousand dollars to look after herself, and may well have decided to go down in history this way.

    He did by the way not shoot around for an hour, it was as far as I heard only ten to eleven minutes, with quasi automatic fire, and you can do a hell of a lot of harm in such a short time, with such an arsenal, from such a prominent location, where the target has no way to cover.

    • Regarding personal motivation for the atrocity…

      One thought that crossed my mind, and which is even more frightening than any ISIS or far-right terrorist attacks, is that the shooters motivation may be even more inexplicable: he did it because he could.

      Somewhere, sometime, the germ of an idea was implanted in his head and one day he went through with it.

      Just because he could.

  7. We have seen the news media used to give disproportionate air time to crime stories, and whip up hysteria around illegal drugs, in ways that serves the security industries (both state and corporate). We’ve seen the news media used to lie about “weapons of mass destruction”, in order to justify one group of countries invading another, serving both security industries and the oil mining, transport, and construction industries (see ‘Iraq For Sale’). Here in Aotearoa, we’ve seen a group of tino rangatiratanga and environmental activists smeared as “terrorists” to justify the passing of more invasive “terrorism suppression” laws. Is it really so far-fetched that the deep state might stage fake “terror” events, to soften up the population for surveillance, censorship, and other attacks on our civil liberties in the name of “anti-terrorism”?

    There’s nothing “insane” about considering the possibility of false flag operations, nor investigating to see if there’s any evidence for them. In fact, such investigative reporting is the responsibility of any journalist who doesn’t want to be part of the modern-day Pravda. Critical thinking, whether the person doing it turns out to be correct in their conclusions or not, is a basic requirement of a functioning democracy.

  8. Martyn you are an excellent writer. That means you are very sharp when it comes to expressing your thoughts in words.

    BUT you have no proven talent for critical thinking , independent analysis, or research . That’s a different barrel.
    You certainly are not an investigative journalist.

    The problem with this piece you have written, is that you condemn those who doubt what the Media portrays….without ANY investigation on your part whatsoever.
    You accept everything you’re told /as is portrayed.. by the Media…at face value.
    I suppose you’e still ensconced in the childish belief that the Media exists in order to keep the public “informed”. (lol)
    I suppose you also think NZ Media is somehow still “independent” (lol)

    Have you ever heard of “crisis actors” and “drills” ?
    Do a little research into this and try to find out why such a phenomenon exists at all. Then have a bit of a think.
    Your naive view of this world and your blind faith in Media makes me groan in despair.
    Also to see peoples comments here how truly lost they are. Some have a slight clue but on the whole, still in the dark about true reality today.

    • Yes Cassie ignorance is bliss, to ignore the odor of burnt friends and family as we enter the shower block is in built.
      We are locked into the bullshit, we simply do not have the ability to understand how fucked we are.
      At the first hint of reality it’s, look pandas.
      All politicians, know this, there very existence is reliant on maintaining the lies.
      But then at this very late stage of our existence should we ‘complain’ or bother pointing out to the ‘fucking pig ignorant’ the reality of our situation?
      What has kind of driven me these past 18 years, has been, if I can make people understand how bleak our near term future really is, they may not think of bringing another life into existence to suffer what we all face?
      But alas humans just don’t have the software to compute this information, and at @ over 7.5 billion souls what can you say?

  10. Thought provoking; Americans discuss guns and causes of violence:

    ‘Killing America’

    https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/405856-gun-debate-usa-terrorism/

    “Americans are constantly warned about threat of terrorism. Terrorism is very real and very deadly. However, terrorism is not the primary killer in America. Americans are. The gun debate is important. But why is America so violent?

    CrossTalking with Brian Becker, Don DeBar, and Robert Barnes.”

    (btw some ‘thought police’ neo McCarthyites in the USA government would like to ban RT ie freedom of speech

    https://www.rt.com/op-edge/405940-russia-media-foreign-agents/ )

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