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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
Sorry for the doomer take, but I don't see a solution to this. NAFTA, unchecked immigration, the sexual revolution and its consequences, and constant race baiting is collapsing our society.
The problem isn't guns, the problem is that there are millions of disaffected people living in a country founded on the idea of individual human rights. That works when the people are hyper-invested in their families and the future that they'll be living in; that doesn't work when everybody is depressed and hates each other. No amount of restrictions or "doing something" is going to change that.
How do you solve the problem? I don't know, man. Maybe it's something [not so] simple like: Make everybody go back to church, bring the jobs back, undo the social problems created due to the sexual revolution, and encourage people to create families (but like I said, get people back in church, preferably a Catholic church).
How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?
I think that a program to make angry young man with no sense of hope about the future and an intense hatred of the present care more about the future and have some investment in the present might work better than constant kvetching and trampling on human rights. In fact, I suspect that more trampling on human rights will probably make the problem worse.
But hey: it's only the future. Not that big of a deal, right? Let's let some dorky lawyers and political grifters figure it out, they've been doing a really good job on everything else! Hey maybe we can get a McKinsey consultant on the job!
Yeahhhh. Seems pretty obvious that the perps in almost every case are people who have determined (correctly?) that they have very little to lose, and also very little to look forward to on their current life trajectory.
This is why Stephen Paddock was and is such an anomaly, since he seemed to have his life 'together' for most pursuits and purpose, though his personal life was very fraught with struggle, it must be admitted.
There's probably some other "X factor" in there that causes them to lash out rather than simply collapse into a stupor of video games and drugs and degenerate gambling on the stock market.
But the rise in suicide, the rise in rates of depression, opioid overdoses, the increase in dissatisfaction with life, the general purposelessness that seems to be permeating whole generations... it all likely has a similar root cause with those few who decide to go on rampages.
The Las Vegas mass shooting is such a weird event. The event was odd, he has all sorts of oddities in his private life that suggest asset. I don't know what the real story is, but we definitely didn't get it.
I try to eschew true tin-foil hat thinking. I never ever bought into Sandy Hook "crisis actor" stories, and I think most mass shooters are acting of their own volition, even if they were technically 'known to the FBI.'
But man, so little of the Las Vegas situation makes sense as described without there being some kind of conspiracy involved, even if the specific act of killing civilians was never a part of it, it reads like this was a situation that would have traced back to someone important and thus they opted to cloud the waters and feign ignorance rather than allow anyone to look too closely. Maybe the truth gets declassified in 30-50 years.
I hope so but given the lack of declassification of the Kennedy Assassination records I'm not optimistic.
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