BOOK:
THE DEATH GAP: INEQUALITY IS KILLING AMERICA!
CALL IT OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS OR TRUMPERNOMICS FOR THE SUPER
RICH!
The Las Vegas
massacre the day after
By David Walsh
4 October 2017
The day after 59 people were shot and killed, and more than 525
wounded, at a Las Vegas, Nevada concert in the deadliest mass shooting in US
history, authorities were still at a loss to explain the motives of the alleged
gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock.
US politicians and the American media are displaying their usual
obtuseness and self-serving blindness in the face of this terrible tragedy,
that has ruined hundreds, if not thousands of lives. There is no public figure
who dares to trace this calamity to the extreme brutalization of American
society, including a quarter-century of unending war and threats of even wider,
bloodier conflicts, a society increasingly run by the military-intelligent
apparatus.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday told the press that Paddock was
“a sick man, a demented man. A lot of problems, I guess. We are looking into
him very, very seriously”—whatever that might mean—“But we’re dealing with a
very, very sick individual.” The know-nothing billionaire, as is his wont,
chose to see the silver lining in the ghastly event, congratulating the Las
Vegas police for how quickly they got to Paddock, who killed himself,
describing the results of the mass murder as a “miracle … They [the police]
have done an amazing job.”
To this point, no message, letter or communication of any kind
from Paddock has come to light. His brother, Eric Paddock, told the media that
his brother had “No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about
any of that stuff. … He was a guy who had money. He went on cruises and
gambled.”
There are certainly peculiarities about Paddock’s “unmoored and
highly unconventional life,” in the words of a New York Times account.
His father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was a bank robber and on the
FBI’s Most Wanted List from 1969 until his capture in 1977. His mother raised
four boys on her own, and the family moved numerous times. Stephen Paddock
attended California State University, Northridge and graduated with a degree in
business administration in 1977. He worked as an Internal Revenue Service agent
and later as an “internal auditor” for the predecessor of Lockheed Martin in
the mid-1980s. He also owned and managed several buildings.
According to his brother, Paddock lived recently from high-stakes
gambling. “The two brothers,” noted the Times,
“had shared a real estate business for decades, refurbishing properties, the
sale of which had left his brother with what he estimated was $2 million. ‘He’s
a multimillionaire,’ he said. ‘He helped me become affluent, he made me
wealthy.’” Stephen Paddock had no criminal record, and lived in retirement
communities in Florida and Nevada from 2013 to the time of the shooting.
Paddock carried out his killing spree with considerable care and
preparation. He arrived at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino three days before
he opened fire on the unsuspecting crowd at the Route 91 Harvest country music
festival. He apparently brought more than 10 suitcases, some of them filled
with weapons, into his suite. The Washington
Post noted that “Paddock aroused no suspicion from hotel staff
even as he brought in 23 guns, some of them with scopes. … Officials recovered
another 19 guns as well as thousands of rounds of ammunition and the chemical
tannerite, an explosive, at Paddock’s home in Mesquite, Nev. They also found
ammonium nitrate, a chemical that can be used in bombmaking, in Paddock’s
vehicle.”
In addition, Paddock set up video cameras, including one placed in
a food cart in the hallway outside his hotel room, to alert him to the arrival
of police.
Boston’s Fox 24 television station posted photos Tuesday, obtained
from police sources, of rifles on the floor of Paddock’s room. The Post commented, “The
sound of gunfire captured on videos recorded during the massacre … indicates
that Paddock fired from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
with at least one automatic weapon, or a semi-automatic rifle modified to fire
like an automatic. One of the two images of rifles published by the station
show an AR-15 type rifle with a bump or slide fire modification.”
All this horror, after decades of similar and mounting horrors,
and not a single profound thought expressed in the American media.
The Democratic Party and the liberal media argue without
conviction for gun control. This Los
Angeles Times editorial is typical: “No motivation can
possibly make such a barbaric act comprehensible, nor can it lessen the pain
and grief that will be shared by hundreds of families. … In the days ahead,
some will argue—indeed, some have already argued—that this is not the right
time to talk about gun control or our armed-to-the-teeth culture, that it is
too soon to dilute our grief with tawdry politics. But this is exactly the
right time to denounce the scourge of gun violence. … We may not be able to
control the violent impulses of our fellow Americans, but we must limit the
weapons available to them and we must better enforce the controls that we
have.”
Fox News opened its website’s opinion columns to religious
obscurantists such as Pastor Robert Jeffries, who saw the “heartbreaking
tragedy” as an opportunity to put in a few words for belief in the after-life.
“Although it [such a belief] in no way eliminates the pain of those who have
lost loved ones and the anguish our nation is experiencing, the hope of heaven
helps put our suffering in perspective. The pain we feel right now is very
real, but the Bible assures us that it is also temporary.”
The victims were average people: a special education teacher from
Manhattan Beach, California; a librarian and bus driver from Alberta, Canada; a
home builder from Riverside, California; an employee at a design firm in
Cambridge, Massachusetts; an emergency room nurse from Tennessee; a commercial
fisherman from Anchorage, Alaska; a kindergarten teacher from Lancaster,
California; a recreation employee for the city of Henderson, Nevada; a
secretary at the Gallup-McKinley County Schools in New Mexico; a receptionist
at a software company in Bakersfield, California; a youth wrestling coach from
Shippensburg, Pennsylvania; a mechanic apprentice from British Columbia,
Canada; and many more.
The victims whose identities have been made public were white or
Hispanic, and the rescuers and medical personnel came from every background.
That the shooter was a white male and that the scene was a country music
festival provided the occasion for various representatives of the upper middle
class to vent their reactionary views. Such commentators do what they can to
divert attention away from the diseased character of the American capitalist
order.
Undoubtedly expressing the views of a certain section of
liberal-left public opinion, Hayley Geftman-Gold, a vice president and senior
counsel of strategic transactions at CBS, wrote on Facebook that the concert
goers got more or less what they deserved. Geftman-Gold wrote that she had no
hope that such people “will ever do the right thing. I’m actually not even
sympathetic bc [because] country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”
CBS fired her after the comments were made public.
Joan Walsh of the Nation,
a feminist and staunch Hillary Clinton supporter, attributed the tragedy to
“the American male identification of guns as a symbol of freedom.” Barack
Obama, she claimed, had used “these occasions … to search for ways to prevent
future tragedies,” without the slightest success, one might add, but “Trump did
nothing of the kind.” Walsh concluded, “It’s hard to imagine this president, or
this Congress, begin to unravel the connections they’ve woven between
masculinity, power, guns, and violence.”
Racialist Shaun King, writing in the Intercept, used the opportunity to
pontificate about “white privilege.” He observed that “Paddock, like the
majority of mass shooters in this country, was a white American. And that
simple fact changes absolutely everything about the way this horrible moment
gets discussed in the media and the national discourse: Whiteness, somehow,
protects men from being labeled terrorists.”
King asserted that “What we are witnessing is the blatant fact
that white privilege protects even Stephen Paddock, an alleged mass murderer.”
The columnist did not bother to refer to the lack of “white privilege” enjoyed
by the overwhelming majority of the nearly 600 dead or wounded teachers,
secretaries, construction workers and fishermen.
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