"The damage inflicted on American society by constant war
and deepening social inequality has found expression in an
endless series of events like the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the US
accounts for 30 percent of the mass shootings. And the scale
of such horrors is increasing: the four worst mass shootings,
in terms of casualty toll, and six of the seven worst, have
taken place since 2007."
The social
pathology of the Las Vegas Massacre
The social pathology of the Las Vegas Massacre
3 October 2017
In yet another eruption of savage impersonal violence, at least 59
people were killed and 527 people wounded as an outdoor music festival on the
Las Vegas Strip, attended by more than 20,000, was suddenly converted into a
war zone.
The alleged gunman, Stephen Paddock, used multiple semi-automatic
weapons that had been converted to fully automatic use, through an attachment
known as a bump-stock device—available for a mere $40 per weapon—as he opened
fire on the helpless crowd from his vantage point on the 32nd floor of the
Mandalay Bay hotel and casino. He took his own life after the rampage.
Paddock could lay down a field of fire on a military scale, nearly
100 rounds per minute. He was found in possession of about 20 weapons, many of
them high-powered semi-automatics, along with additional ammunition. The first
minutes of gunfire triggered a smoke alarm that allowed police to locate
Paddock far more quickly than through a search of the huge 3,300-room hotel, a
fact that suggests that the toll of death and injury could have been much
higher.
The gunman’s motives are unknown, and his identity sheds little
light on what drove him on this murderous course. Paddock was 64 years old,
shared a comfortable home with his female companion, and was, according to some
reports, financially well-off. One of his brothers described Paddock as a real
estate multi-millionaire. He had a pilot’s license and owned two small planes.
He had no known associations with any political or religious group.
There is a family history of mental illness—Paddock’s father,
Richard Hoskins Paddock, was a bank robber and diagnosed as a psychopath. He
was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List for nearly a decade. But Stephen Paddock
had no contact with his father after he was seven years old, and there are no
reports that he exhibited mental illness or received any treatment for it.
As in virtually all such shootings, the gunman knew none of the
wounded and killed. They did not exist for him as individuals. Paddock saw the
concert-goers packed below him in a parking lot not as fellow human beings, but
as objects to be destroyed. The victims were the random targets of the
uncontrolled and impersonal hatred of a gunman indifferent to their fate and
the lifelong suffering that awaits their surviving family and friends.
Clearly, this was not the act of a normal person. Some form of
mental illness, even if not previously diagnosed, must be involved in Paddock’s
crime. But there is certainly a socially induced element in this terrible
event. The frequency of these occurrences cannot be explained in purely
individual and personal terms. The Las Vegas massacre is a peculiarly American
crime, arising out of the social pathology of a deeply troubled society.
What is the social context of this latest episode of domestic mass
killing? The United States has been at war more or less continuously for the
past 27 years. The US government has treated tens of millions of people in the
Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa as targets for extermination through
bombs, bullets, and drone-fired missiles. These wars have penetrated deeply
into American culture, celebrated endlessly in film, television, music and even
sport.
Social relations within the United States, characterized by the
growth of economic inequality on a scale that exceeds any previous era in
American history, fuel a culture of indifference, and even outright contempt
for human life.
One telling detail: on the day that the media was filled with
reports about the worst mass shooting in American history, the stock market
continued its relentless march upwards, with new records for the Dow-Jones
Industrial Average and other indexes. Wall Street is celebrating in
anticipation of the Trump administration pushing through the biggest tax cut
for corporate America and the super-rich in history.
The damage inflicted on American society by constant war and
deepening social inequality has found expression in an endless series of events
like the mass shooting in Las Vegas. With only 5 percent of the world’s
population, the US accounts for 30 percent of the mass shootings. And the scale
of such horrors is increasing: the four worst mass shootings, in terms of
casualty toll, and six of the seven worst, have taken place since 2007.
Corporate media pundits and government officials are incapable of
more than perfunctory expressions of shock and dismay over such atrocities,
which recur with appalling frequency in the United States. Even uttering such
rote statements seems to be too much to ask of President Trump, whose remarks
Monday morning were both banal and palpably insincere. How can anyone take
seriously a foul-mouthed misogynist and pathological liar as he begins a
sentence with the words, “Scripture teaches us”?
As for his moronic statement that the killings in Las Vegas were
“pure evil,” such a characterization explains nothing. It doesn’t even explain
Trump himself, who gave a speech two weeks ago at the United Nations where he
threatened to use nuclear weapons to incinerate the 27 million inhabitants of
North Korea. Yet CNN, ever the sycophant, described his televised remarks on
Las Vegas as “pitch perfect.”
Trump is to visit Las Vegas Wednesday, one day after an equally
stage-managed and bogus display of compassion set for Puerto Rico. There he
will view the devastation inflicted by Hurricane Maria, while pursuing his
Twitter feud with local government officials who have dared to criticize the
poorly executed federal response to the catastrophe.
During the 16 years since the 9/11 attacks, during which the US
government has been supposedly engaged in a “war on terror,” an average of one
American per year has been killed by a foreign terrorist. During the same
period, at least 10,000 Americans have been killed every year by other
Americans. Mass shootings like Virginia Tech, Newtown, Orlando and now Las
Vegas have killed six times as many Americans as all the terrorist attacks in
that period.
Further investigation into the circumstances of the Las Vegas
tragedy is vital. But one conclusion can surely be drawn: what happened late
Sunday night outside the Mandalay Bay hotel was a manifestation of a deep
sickness in American society.
Patrick Martin
Gowdy on Vegas Shooting: ‘Difficult to Believe That a Single Person Could Have Done This Without Detection’
Monday on Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) offered his thoughts on the investigation of the Las Vegas mass shooting a night earlier that left at least 59 dead and 527 injured.
Gowdy told host Martha MacCallum he was skeptical that Stephen Paddock, the individual thought to be responsible for the shooting, could have acted without at least one person identifying his behavior as suspicious. The South Carolina Republican predicted in coming days he will be proved correct.
“It’s an incredible level of premeditation that you don’t ordinarily see,” Gowdy said. “And it is difficult to believe that a single person could have done this without detection. And so, I hope that what comes out of this is people – you know, lots of crime is prevented because a non-law enforcement officer says something. The weapons and whether or not it was altered to become fully automatic and the premeditation of picking a certain hotel room. I think we’re going to find someone along the way was suspicious they should have turned that suspicion into a phone call to law enforcement. It’s an incredible amount of premeditation to not go detected.”
Mass Shooting Outside Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay; 50+ Dead, 500+ Sent to Hospital
A gunman opened fire on a country music concert outside the Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sunday evening.
Fifty-nine people are confirmed dead and there are 527 reported injured. The shooter, named as Stephen Paddock, was confirmed dead by Joseph Lombardo, the sheriff of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
The gunman opened fire on tens of thousands of concertgoers gathered for the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.
Update — 10:25 p.m. PDT: As late-night host Jimmy Kimmel lectures Americans about the “gun lobby,” footage emerges of a performance right before the shooting began. Country music stars Big & Rich performed “God Bless America” during their set at the country music festival, just an hour before gunfire rang across the plaza. The footage shows thousands of fans holding their cell phones aloft — thousands of lights in the night sky — and singing along.
“God Bless America”1 hour before the shooting.Besties video @mmeyer50 wanted to share@johnrich @bigandrich@BigKennyTV @seanhannity
Nearly 600 of those in the crowd would later be wounded, dozens of them fatally so.
Update — 9:45 p.m. PDT: The Associated Press reports that the gunman owned two “bump stocks,” legal devices that can mimic the effect of automatic weapons fire when attached to a semiautomatic rifle. It is not known whether he used them in the shooting.
Update — 7:20 p.m. PDT: The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department announced at an evening briefing that the suspect had been determined to have 23 firearms at the Mandalay Bay, and 19 at his home in Mesquite. The police continued to investigate evidence at the Mesquite home to determine the motive of the killer. He had acted alone, police said. Blood banks had received so many donations that they did not need any more help, they said. The police commissioner said that the department had received $2.2 million from a total of 30,000 donors, after setting an initial target of raising $500,000 as part of a donation drive to support the victims of the shooting.
Update — 5:45 p.m. PDT: On ESPN’s Monday Night Football, the entire Washington Redskins squad stood for the national anthem. Most of the Kansas City Chiefs did as well.
The Redskins all stood for the National Anthem , one week after seven kneeled. They did... espn.com/espn/now?nowId…
Washington Redskins players link arms during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Kansas City Chiefs in Kansas City, Mo., Monday, Oct. 2, 2017. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Two members of the Chiefs, linebacker Ukeme Eligwe and cornerback Marcus Peters, satfor the anthem. Peters was promptly burned by the Redskins’ Terrelle Pryor, Sr. for a touchdown inside the first three minutes of the game.
By Patrick J. Buchanan | October 3, 2017 | 4:37 AM EDT
Patrick Buchanan: Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
Only the 1960s, with Vietnam and the great cultural revolution, and the War Between the States from 1861-1865, rival this as a time of national disunity and civil discord. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
"An act of pure evil," said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: "Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit."
"Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence," Trump went on in his most presidential moment, "and though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is love that defines us today and always will. Forever."
Uplifting words. But are they true?
Or will this massacre be like the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, or Charleston massacre of black churchgoers by Dylan Roof — uniting us briefly in "sadness, shock and grief" only to divide us again and, more deeply, in our endless war over guns.
"In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff," said the president. As he spoke, the mind went back to yesterday afternoon where the NFL was roiled anew by athletes earning seven-figure salaries "taking a knee" in disrespect of that flag.
Also on Sunday, cable TV was given over to charges that Trump, attending a golf tournament in New Jersey, cared nothing about the suffering of "people of color" in Puerto Rico.
And we just closed out a summer where monuments honoring the explorers and missionaries who discovered the New World and the men who made the America we have been blessed to inherit have, along with those of Confederate soldiers, been desecrated and dragged down.
Only the 1960s, with Vietnam and the great cultural revolution, and the War Between the States from 1861-1865, rival this as a time of national disunity and civil discord.
To understand what is happening to us, we should look to Europe, where the disintegration appears more advanced.
Sunday, 4,000 national police, sent by Madrid, used violence to break up a referendum called by the regional government of Catalonia on secession. Nine in 10 of those able to cast a ballot voted to secede from Spain.
Televised pictures from Barcelona of police clubbing and dragging voters away from the polls, injuring hundreds, may make this a Selma moment in the history of Europe.
This is the first of the specters haunting Europe: the desire of ethnic minorities like Catalans in Spain and Scots in Britain to break free of the mother country and create new nations, as the Norwegians did in 1905 and the Irish did in 1921.
The second is the desire of growing millions of Europeans to overthrow the transnational regime that has been raised above them, the EU.
The English succeeded with Brexit in 2016. Today, almost every country in Europe has an anti-EU party like the National Front in France, which won 35 percent of the presidential vote in 2017.
Beyond the tribal call of ethnic solidarity is a growing resentment in Northern Europe at having to bail out the chronic deficits of the South, and in Southern Europe at the austerity imposed by the North.
The German elections underlined a new threat to European unity. The ruling coalition of Angela Merkel's CDU and SPD suffered major losses. The Bavarian-based sister party of the CDU, the CSU, was itself shaken.
Angela Merkel as the new "leader of the West" in the time of Trump is an idea that has come and gone. She is a diminished figure.
Some 13 percent of the votes went to Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that, for the first time, will enter the Bundestag. In states of the former East Germany, the AfD ran second or even first.
What produced this right turn in Germany is what produced it in Hungary and Poland: migration from Africa and the Middle East that is creating socially and culturally indigestible enclaves in and around the great cities of Europe.
Europeans, like Trumpians, want their borders secured and closed to the masses of the Third World.
Germans are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.
Race, tribe, borders, culture, history — issues of identity — are tearing at the seams of the EU and pulling apart nations.
We Americans may celebrate our multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural diversity as our greatest attribute. But the acrimony and the divisions among us seem greater than ever before in our lifetimes.
Blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Native Americans, LGBT — all core constituencies of the Democratic Party — seem endlessly aggrieved with their stations in American life.
In the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists who agree with Merle Haggard, "If you're runnin' down my country, man, You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me."
A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics — our cherished diversity itself — appear to be pulling us ever further apart?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
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