Night Thoughts On The American Cold Civil War - Look At What The Killer Watches On TV and Online If You Want To Know Why He Did It

While they're trying to figure out what motivated the mass murderer in Las Vegas to use his "Second Amendment rights" to murder close to 60 people and injure many more, trying to square an old, white man who was a millionaire, living the materialistic good life such as the United States affords to old while men like him, I'd like to know what movies and TV and other entertainment media he watched because it's more than possible that was what provided him with the idea to do such a thing, such media has certainly inspired previous violence.  Timothy McVeigh and Dylan Roof got their inspiration from The Turner Diaries, I would wonder what this Paddock was reading and watching. I suspect that might provide a more fruitful avenue to trying to piece together a motive than looking at his bank robber daddy.

But I doubt that will be done, the major news venues are all owned by people and are staffed by people who produce such content or they, otherwise, benefit from the absurd idea that the propaganda that any mass media is entirely innocuous even when it spreads the most obviously pathological glamorization of violence.  They claim it has no known effect on behavior, sometimes doing that in between the commercials it carries, those 20 second messages broadcast in order to effect behavior.

The images of manliness sold by the media, the movies, TV, novels, pop songs, are intimately involved with the cold-civil war we are in.  I don't know anything about the singer whose concert was attacked, other than what I've looked up in the lyrics he sang, things like "Dirt Road Anthem" (I didn't listen to him, I just read the words as found online) and there was no specific advocacy of guns, though I didn't look at the lyrics of everything he sang.   But when he was described as a "country" singer, the frequent advocacy of armed, gun-packing, manliness manliness in "country" music was one of the first things I thought of.  Country music as much as other pop styles promote what is contained in their content. 

And, never let anyone get away with pretending that any advocacy of gun ownership and use is anything but the advocacy of violence,  violence is the only reason guns exist, it is what they are made and scientifically enhanced to produce.   And the scientists and engineers who invent and design guns are as much a part of the chain of violence that killed and injured those people and all others who get shot have as much blood on their hands as anyone.

So, we know 64 year old, white real-estate millionaire who liked to gamble and go to shows in Las Vegas, who has an Asian girlfriend committed what is, for now, the largest single mass murder by gun in American history.  People are expressing shock and surprise that someone of his discription did such a thing but, given that he probably grew up on American TV and entertainment, such a thing shouldn't be surprising.   Such a person is likely to feel a sense of entitlement that might lead them to do this.

I would especially look to see if he liked watching things like cable crime-shows, the kind that describe real-life crimes and focus on the criminals as if they were celebrities.  After the man murdered the Amish school girls in what blurs into the tapestry of mass gun death under the Second Amendment I wrote that to probably a tiny but dangerous number of the audience members, those shows carry both a how-to set of instructions and a pathological notion of glamor and celebrity that might be emulated.  I would like to not be proven right in that suspicion but since the Supreme Court, the Republicans in congress and elsewhere, the gun industry and the "civil liberties" industry provide the phenomenon, the possibility of testing that is constantly provided.   I am afraid that for the future mass murderers in the cable TV audience, on the sewer levels of the internet, they'll see this guy as someone to learn from and to try to top to take his position.  I wouldn't bet against those people being in the audience.  What else would they be watching?