...but I'm gonna ask anyways. But before I do, we need some background...
What powers the Trump campaign is the idea that the country is riding a freight train to Hell. Trump, running a play similar to Nixon's in '68, wants people to think that the nation has never known such a fearsome wave of crime and terror and unrest.
Statistics tell us that there is no crime wave. Crime began to plummet under Bill Clinton. Since Obama took office, there has been a 13 percent drop in homicide. There were 159 terror fatalities under Obama as of July 2016, as opposed to 3025 under Bush.
Unfortunately, psychology overpowers statistics. If people feel endangered, if headlines and cable news keep blaring the message that "Chaos rules!" then the self-proclaimed apostle of Order has a better chance of attaining office.
So my question is a simple one: As we head into the final stretch of this campaign, don't you find it rather conveeeeenient that this shit suddenly seems to be happening every other day? (Added note: And now we have this shit, right here in my adopted home town.) (Added added note: On the same day, the same hour, we have this shit. Good Lord!)
A related question: Have you noticed that none of the current mass shooters are right-wing nutjobs? At one time, the list of kill-crazy creeps included guys like Wade Michael Page, Robert Dear, Jared Loughner, Jim Adkisson, Byron Wilson, Jerry and Joe Kane, Andrew Stack, Frazier Miller and Tim McVeigh. Arguably, we should include Adam Lanza, a non-political wacko raised by a conservative gun nut.
All of those guys are keeping suspiciously quiet.
Meanwhile, every unhappy young shlub with a foreign-sounding last name has decided that now is the time to make a statement. Something tells me that ever-so-scary non-Christians and non-caucasians will be reaching for Glocks and pipe bombs on a near-daily basis -- right up until the time Trump puts his tiny little paw on a Bible and takes the oath.
You know damned well that, if the shoe were on the other foot, Alex Jones would be screaming "False flag! MKULTRA! Crisis actors! False flag!"
On a related note: I will leave it to others will debate the justifiability of the police shooting Keith Lamont Scott. There are no easy answers here: Apparently, Scott did have a gun -- and wore it legally, North Carolina being an "open carry" state. My question goes to a different issue: Why was a man with undeniable mental health issues -- a man who had suffered a traumatic brain injury -- allowed to own a firearm? Doesn't this episode demonstrate the value of moderate gun control legislation? Doesn't it make sense to keep guns away from those with serious psychological troubles? Why do demagogues always insist that limited regulations will inevitably lead to the eradication of the Second Amendment?
7 comments:
America suffering a spate of spree killings isn't unusual enough for me to think it suspicious.
The answer to one of your questions is that the right wing nut jobs have their champion on TV everyday saying and doing what they want to say and do. There is no need for them to use their guns now. If Trump loses, they will be out there in droves.
Same analogy applies to blacks and people with foreign sounding names.They feel under attack, marginalized and are worried about their future. It makes sense to imagine that some are cracking under the pressure.
M
Yes.
The US is like a tinderbox where it's very easy to imagine some shit happening - even just one event - that could blast Trump into the White House not by handing him Pennsylvania as well as Ohio and Florida, but by a fucking landslide.
We don't have to hypothesise another 911. Try a Nice promenade. Or - an incident with only a single death - consider the gruesome murder of the 85-year-old priest Jacques Hamel in Normandy in July this year. Is it so difficult for those who wish to ensure a Trump victory to find a couple of guys like the Tsarnaev brothers and send them not to a street race carrying a bomb, but to a church carrying a knife? (And a smartphone.)
At the same time, as I keep saying, there could be a military confrontation between the US and Russia. Not necessarily big, for the time being: a downed plane or a sunk ship, maybe, some movements of military forces, and some fierce words. (Only start the nukes flying after the inauguration, right?)
I can't envisage a shock occurring that will help Clinton, not even if Trump is exposed as having checked into a mental institution a few decades ago for depression. So what? Everyone who's capable of considering the issue already knows that Trump suffers from big-time mental problems. And the mental hospital story is probably false anyway.
Few or no mainstream commentators understand that Trump will kick Clinton's arse in the first TV debate. Have any of them even written about that as a possibility? Let them go and watch Trump at the wrestling and maybe they will realise this isn't about debating points or arguments in support of viable policies.
email/server email/server email/server
I suspect the spate of mass shooters by immigrant/foreign-ish young men is due to each one being inspired by the earlier ones. You see it with suicides so often there's the term "suicide contagion" to describe it. With suicides, if a middle-aged guy with financial troubles shoots himself, you see an uptick in suicides generally, but you especially see other middle-aged guys with financial problems shoot themselves. If it's a young woman who hangs herself when her boyfriend dumps her, you see more young, dumped women hang themselves. The first suicide in a set is like permission to other similar people in similar circumstances to off themselves in the same way. With mass shooters, once another right-wing nutjob shoots up a mall, we'll probably see another spate of that sort of shooter do the same. Something to look forward to.
Scott's gun was not legal. He was also a felon and drug user. That made his gun illegal.
Joe, you must be slipping..I've already seen these shooting described as "active shooter drills" and "false flags" on a few right wing conspiracy sites. Maybe not Alex Jones, as I don't ever go there anymore. I'd be quite surprised if those theories weren't being floated about (and would then suspect that they really were "false flags", if none of the conspiritainment folks had anything to say along those lines).
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