There was no “lack of red flags” in Paddock’s history. He very closely fits the profile of the kind of person who is demographically most likely to commit a domestic terror attack in the United States: He’s a white man, and he wasn’t a Muslim, and in fact he wasn’t particularly religious at all, and he had unfettered access to guns. When the news media reports shock and surprise at the lack of warning signs before a quiet, secular white guy commits an act of domestic terrorism, they’re not actually reporting a real lack of warning signs—they’re bolstering America’s steel-plated, gold-engraved, marble-polished tendency to give violent white men the benefit of the doubt, every time and indefinitely. This despite the fact that evidence shows men who look and act like Stephen Paddock are more likely than anyone else to commit crimes of this nature.
To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with profiling the men—it’s always men, don’t @ me—who commit these crimes. I think there’s value in exposing the monsters who live among us. The monsters who are our brothers, our fathers, our dads, our neighbors, our bosses, our partners.
But I wonder when the journalists responsible for crafting the national, historical narrative around mass murder are going to connect the dots instead of scratching their chins over how yet another quiet, pasty loner of a guy could possibly take to the streets with murder and mayhem on his mind. I wonder if that time will ever come, when our newsrooms are still mostly white and mostly male, full of men who appear to be deeply reluctant to accept that the next terrorist in our American streets will probably look like them.
No. And they will give him a pass precisely because of this. It should be newsworthy that Paddock committed the crime at all, but that would be a tacit admission that the real problem in this country are white men with legal stockpiles of guns and ammo and the willingness to use them against others.
Journalists can absolutely report that people say they are shocked or surprised, but journalists don’t have to take it at face value that it is, objectively, shocking or surprising that a quiet, nonreligious white guy would murder people in the streets of an American city. It is perfectly possible—and, if we are ever going to confront America’s culture of toxic white masculinity with the aim of ending this kind of violence, absolutely necessary—for a journalist to quote a surprised neighbor or brother and observe, in the next sentence or graf, that Stephen Paddock (or the next mass-murdering dude like him) fits the demographic profile of an American domestic terrorist.
To treat white male violence of this nature as unusual, when evidence suggests it is anything but, is to perpetuate the racist, Islamophobic and often misogynist narratives that empower broader political oppression of Americans of color and Muslim Americans. To be surprised by Stephen Paddock, and to fail to challenge readers and audiences to recognize the cultural biases that blind them to the reality of who commits mass murders in this country, is to normalize racism and bigotry. And that normalization trickles up and out: It empowers leaders like Donald Trump to enact bans on Muslim travelers, it stokes a “Build the wall!” mob mentality, and it delays the reckoning that this country so urgently needs to have with itself on the subjects of racism and xenophobia.
The country was built on racism and xenophobia, and that remains to this very day. Why would we ever expect anything to change? That power has always been backed by the implicit threat of the use of force, and the Second Amendment has been used as a tool to further that power. You can argue that this wasn't the original intent of the Constitution in the age of muskets and Minutemen, but then again the original intent of the document was that people like me counted at 3/5ths of a person. too.
Freedom of gun ownership has never extended to people of color, and especially to black America. That right has always been reserved for "law-abiding" white America, as well as the cultural cache of implied social power and virility that goes with it.
Little wonder then that the bump feed stocks that Robert Paddock used in his crimes are now selling like proverbial hotcakes laced with Viagra.
Bump-fire stocks remain legal, but it is getting increasingly harder to find one to buy. Scores of online retailers have sold out of the devices, which enable a semiautomatic weapon to mimic the functionality of a machine gun.
Police found at least a dozen rifles equipped with bump-fire stocks in the hotel room from which a gunman killed 59 people in Las Vegas on Sunday night. In the wake of the shooting, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California introduced a bill that would ban the devices.
Bump-fire stocks are typically widely available for purchase on the Internet. WalMart and Cabela’s, two of the nation’s largest gun sellers, appear to have halted online sales of the devices early Wednesday. For retailers that have continued to sell them, business is booming. The webpages of several online retailers state that the devices are sold out.
“Due to extreme high demands, we are currently out of stock. Please check back with us shortly,” reads a notice on the website of Slide Fire Solutions, the manufacturer of a popular bump-fire device.
After all, this is a country that sold a million firearms in the week after Sandy Hook, where three percent of Americans own half the 150 million guns in the country, and where nutjobs like Alex Jones are close to advocating using all those guns in the next civil war.
The enemy’s engaging us. Everybody needs to be packing, like I told you on Friday and on Sunday. Get ready -- Democrats are going to be killing people, a lot of folks. And obviously, just like you don’t see conservatives going out and doing mass shootings, they don’t want to blame the Second Amendment, they don’t want to go out and kill people. It’s almost always drug-head Democrats, devil worshippers, you name it. That’s their M.O. The Democrats know when they mass-kill now, they know to not say they’re Democrat operatives. They just want to use that to get the Second Amendment and get a civil war going.
Something's got to give, and soon. It won't be pretty when it happens, either.
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