Tag Archives: Mass shootings

Twelve Questions to Consider Regarding Mass Shootings, by Douglas Young

Never underestimate the power of twelve good questions. From Douglas Young at lewrockwell.com:

To prevent more mass shootings, many demand more gun control laws. But do these laws prevent such massacres or address their root causes? Here are 12 questions to ponder.

First, why do almost all U.S. mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones”? Indeed, it’s hard to name any that have not. The 2015 Charleston mass-murderer apparently targeted a church instead of a school partly because the school had security – but South Carolina banned guns in church. Would any of us put a sign in our yard saying, “This is a gun-free home”?

Second, can an evil person using a gun to murder be stopped by anyone other than a good person using a gun? In the December, 2019 Texas church shooting, the murderer was prevented from murdering many times more than his two victims by a good parishioner with a gun who shot him in six seconds. Many other mass murders have been similarly stopped.

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The Demented – and Selective – Game of Instantly Blaming Political Opponents For Mass Shootings, by Glenn Greenwald

The blame game is only acceptable when it goes in one direction. From Glenn Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

All ideologies spawn psychopaths who kill innocents in its name. Yet only some are blamed for their violent adherents: by opportunists cravenly exploiting corpses while they still lie on the ground.

Buffalo Police on scene at a Tops Friendly Market on May 14, 2022 in Buffalo, New York. At least 10 people were killed after a mass shooting at the store with the shooter in police custody. (Photo by John Normile/Getty Images)

At a softball field in a Washington, DC suburb on June 14, 2017, a lone gunman used a rifle to indiscriminately spray bullets at members of the House GOP who had gathered for their usual Saturday morning practice for an upcoming charity game. The then-House Majority Whip, Rep. Steven Scalise (R-LA), was shot in the hip while standing on second base and almost died, spending six weeks in the hospital and undergoing multiple surgeries. Four other people were shot, including two members of the Capitol Police who were part of Scalise’s security detail, a GOP staffer, and a Tyson Foods lobbyist. “He was hunting us at that point,” Rep. Mike Bishop (R-MI) said of the shooter, who attempted to murder as many people as he could while standing with his rifle behind the dugout.

The shooter died after engaging the police in a shootout. He was James T. Hodgkinson, a 66-year-old hard-core Democrat who — less than six months into the Trump presidency — had sought to kill GOP lawmakers based on his belief that Republicans were corrupt traitors, fascists, and Kremlin agents. The writings he left behind permitted little doubt that he was driven to kill by the relentless messaging he heard from his favorite cable host, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and other virulently anti-Trump pundits, about the evils of the GOP. Indeed, immediately after arriving at the softball field, he asked several witnesses whether the people gathered “were Republicans or Democrats.”

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Antidepressants AGAIN: Dayton shooter found to have mind-altering SSRI drugs in his system, by Ethan Huff

It’s a little-noted commonality among many of the mass shooting that the shooters are hopped up on various antidepressant drugs. From Nathan Huff at naturalnews.com:

Image: Antidepressants AGAIN: Dayton shooter found to have mind-altering SSRI drugs in his system

(Natural News) Just like we’ve long speculated, the latest news reports about “Dayton shooter” Connor Betts reveal that the now-deceased 24-year-old did, in fact, have SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) antidepressant pharmaceuticals in his system at the time when he’s said to have gone on a mass shooting spree, killing his sister, her boyfriend, and seven other people before allegedly killing himself.

According to an autopsy report, Betts had not only been taking mind-altering SSRIs in the lead-up to his murder melee, but he was also taking cocaine, Xanax, and alcohol, three other deadly drugs linked to extreme violence. In other words, Betts was severely mind-altered by a combination of Big Pharma and Big Alcohol when he decided to take the lives of innocent people for no apparent reason.

Mainstream news outlets are finally admitting the truth that, rather than being the gun’s fault, it was actually the legal and illegal narcotics that Betts had been taking that ultimately drove him to murder his fellow human beings in cold blood – these brain-damaging chemicals apparently manipulating the young man into doing something horrific that he otherwise may not have done.

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We’re All Enemies of the State: Draconian Laws, Precrime & the Surveillance State, by John W. Whitehead

The iron grasp of the US government is closing in. Will anyone slip through its fingers? From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken

We’ve been down this road many times before.

If the government is consistent about any one thing, it is this: it has an unnerving tendency to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of national security.

As David C. Unger, a foreign affairs editorial writer for the New York Times, explains, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.

It’s all part of the grand plan for total control.

The government’s proposed response to the latest round of mass shootings—red flag gun laws, precrime surveillance, fusion centers, threat assessments, mental health assessments, involuntary confinement—is just more of the same.

These tactics have been employed before, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, by other totalitarian regimes, with devastating results.

It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

For instance, in his remarks on the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

Let that sink in a moment.

In a post-9/11 America, Trump’s promise bodes ill for whatever remnants of freedom we have left. With that promise, flippantly delivered without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach, the president has given the FBI the green light to violate Americans’ civil liberties in every which way.

This is how the Emergency State works, after all.

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Mass Shootings and Political Misuse of Them Have Unintended Consequences, by Paul Craig Roberts

If somebody has an unaddressed hangnail somebody will take it as an argument for more government. Mass tragedies create an irresistible impetus for somebody, meaning the government, to do something. At the end of the article is a link to the El Paso shooter’s manifesto. From Paul Craig Robert at paulcraigroberts.org:

The unintended consequences of mass shootings and the attempts to use these shootings for various agendas can be far worse than the shootings themselves and ultimately endanger far more people.  

I was listening to NPR this morning prior to President Trump’s 10 AM EST address on the shootings.  NPR set Trump up for blame.  Trump opposes illegal immigration and spoke of the 20,000 person caravan as “an invasion.”  And so forth.  And it wasn’t just NPR.  As USA reported, while joining in the blame trump orchestration, “Media outlets around the country, and around the world, decried his [Trump’s] role in inspiring a shooter who gunned down 20 people.” US Rep. Veronica Escobar (D,TX) said:  “All of this has happened because Hispanic people have been dehumanized. They have been dehumanized by the president, by his enablers, by other politicians.”

Rep. Escobar did not explain why and how a country’s defense of its borders constitutes dehumanization of those that the law requires to be kept out.  Is the President of the United States, who is sworn to enforce the laws and Constitution of the US, supposed to violate the law?  If the American people want open borders, they should inform their representatives and get a law passed that abolishes border controls.  If Hispanics are dehumanized by being kept out, so are Russians, Chinese, North Koreans, Iranians, and Venezuelans, all people declared to be national security threats to the US which employs a massive armed force to be sure these threats don’t invade us. Just imagine how we dehumanized the Japanese and Germans during World War II by keeping them from invading us.  

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Politicians Promote Murder, Mayhem, and Terror to Propagandize Political Agendas and Consolidate Power, by Doug “Uncola” Lynn

Do politicians instigate as well as capitalize on mass shootings and other tragedies? From Doug “Uncola” Lynn at theburningplatform.com:

In his 1991 book, “Behold a Pale Horse”, former United States Naval Intelligence Briefing Team member William Cooper warned of a secret initiative by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.  In this sinister plan, described by Cooper near three decades ago, a project called “Orion” was revealed whereby drugs and hypnosis were to be used on mental patients coerced into shooting children in schools. The plan was to inflame the anti-gun lobby and cause middle class Americans to beg their government “protectors” into obliterating the 2nd Amendment.

The government encouraged the manufacture and importation of military firearms for the criminals to use. This is intended to foster a feeling of insecurity, which would lead the American people to voluntarily disarm themselves by passing laws against firearms. Using drugs and hypnosis on mental patients in a process called Orion, the CIA inculcated the desire in these people to open fire on schoolyards and thus inflame the antigun lobby. This plan is well under way, and so far is working perfectly. The middle class is begging the government to do away with the 2nd amendment.

– Cooper, Milton William. (1991). “Behold a Pale Horse”, Light Technology Publications, page 225

On June 28, 2001 William Cooper told of Osama Bin Laden’s connections to U.S. intelligence and even predicted 911.  Eight weeks after the Twin Towers fell in New York City Cooper was shot and killed at his home in Eagar, Arizona while resisting arrest.

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Exploiting Massacres to Raise Poll Ratings, by Patrick J. Buchanan

Despicably, politicians use tragedies like the recent shootings to make political hay. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019.

In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera — police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials — were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead and wounded.

But for the Democratic presidential candidates, the El Paso atrocity was like a loose football in the Super Bowl.

A mad scramble broke out over who would be first and most savage in indicting President Donald Trump for moral complicity in mass murder.

Never let a crisis go to waste is an old political adage.

And this crowd of candidates was not going to let that happen. Yet the naked political exploitation of these horrific acts, before the bodies of many had been removed from the crime scene, was appalling to behold.

Learning in Las Vegas of the slaughter at the Walmart in El Paso, his hometown, Beto O’Rourke flew back that same day and sped to the scene.

Railed Beto, Trump “is a racist and he stokes racism in this country … and it leads to violence. … We have a president with white nationalist views in the United States today.” He called Trump’s language about Mexican immigrants “reminiscent of something you might hear in the Third Reich.”

Asked on Sunday by CNN’s Jake Tapper if he believes the president is a “white nationalist,” Beto eagerly assented: “Yes, I do.”

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Americans Should Be Very Skeptical Of Calls For New “Terrorism” Laws, by Caitlin Johnstone

Remember the Patriot Act. Every time laws have been passed in the rush of a so-called emergency we’ve come to regret it. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

Two mass shootings have rocked the United States in less than 24 hours, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded. The first in El Paso, Texas was allegedly perpetrated by a white supremacist whose racist motives are outlined in a rambling “manifesto”, the second allegedly by a self-described “leftist” whose motives, like the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, are presently unknown. These incidents occurred a week after another mass shooting in Gilroy, California.

All the usual US gun control debates have of course reignited, which is understandable. Alongside this debate, however, we are seeing another, far more pernicious agenda being raised that I would like to address here.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid, notorious liar and propagandistMalcolm Nance claimed that existing laws aren’t sufficient for prosecuting the El Paso shooter, because there are no laws designating his act of mass murder as “domestic terrorism”.

“I think that Congress needs to take up right away a series of domestic terrorism laws,” Nance said. “It’d be very simple: just match them to the words ‘international terrorism’, so that a member of al-Qaeda and a member of a white nationalist terrorist cell or a militia that thinks they’re going to carry out international acts of terrorism are equal all the way around. Right now there are no laws called ‘domestic terrorism law’. They can get you for firearms, they get you for hate crimes, but you are not treated as a terrorist. This act in El Paso was clearly by all definitions a terrorist attack in the United States, but of course by the nature of the person being white and American he can’t be treated like a member of ISIS or al-Qaeda. He can’t even be detained, he can only be treated as a murderer.”

(The accused, for the record, is in fact under arrest currently, and prosecutors say that they are treating it as a domestic terrorism case for which they are seeking the death penalty. This is in Texas; he’ll be dead before the next Fast & Furious movie. Nance’s notion that prosecutors’ hands are somehow tied here is silly.)

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Red Flag Gun Laws: Yet Another Government Weapon for Compliance and Control, by John W. Whitehead

It used to be dystopian fiction, but now pre-crime scenarios are coming true. From John W. Whitehead at rutherford.org:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”—George Santayana

We never learn.

In the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes.

Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Mark my words: red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats, will only add to the government’s power.

These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, are yet another Trojan Horse, a stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.

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US Mass Shootings: Gun Issue, Mental Health Issue… War Issue? by Caitlin Johnstone

Constant exposure to violence begets more violence. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

Ahh, the day after a high-profile mass shooting in America: the only time Republicans will ever pretend to care about the mentally ill.

A man, pictured above, killed twelve people with a gun at a California bar yesterday, then turned the gun on himself bringing the total number of dead to thirteen. Like a disproportionately high number of mass shooters in the US, he served in the military. He reportedly suffered from PTSD as a result of his experiences in Afghanistan with the US Marines. America’s war in Afghanistan is the longest war in US history.

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