Stephen Paddock, the shooter who killed nearly 60 people in Las Vegas last weekend is an enigma. He was a one time employee of Lockheed Martin, the aircraft manufacturer, and a high stakes gambler who was able to make his brother’s family and their mother comfortable using his significant winnings.
It’s clear that Stephen Paddock was an unusual man. He was a savant gambler, as it seems from the claims of his brother Eric. Stranger still, ISIS has claimed that Stephen had converted to Islam months before and that he was acting on behalf of the Islamic State. But law enforcement officials have been saying that ISIS’ claims to Paddock are unsubstantial and that there is no evidence he was a converted Islamic terrorist.
By all appearances, it looks as if Stephen Paddock acted alone in perpetrating the Las Vegas shooting. There are a number of strange incongruities surrounding the event, which may in time prove otherwise. But at the moment, there is no reason to believe that anything external, political, or otherwise served as Stephen’s motivation.
Despite this, people at nearly every point on the political spectrum have been making claims that Paddock’s motivation aligns him with their ideological enemies. To be certain, a few people on the Right, Republicans, and Conservatives have pointed their fingers at leftist elements in the government, claiming the shooting was an engineered false flag meant to push an agenda for stricter gun control laws. But by and large, the overwhelming bulk of the political jockeying over this horrifying attack has been done by people on the Left.
A CBS legal executive, Hayley Geftman-Gold, was fired for a tweet in which she said the following about the victims of the attack, “If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing. I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun-toters.”
It took Geftman-Gold less than 48 hours to make this horrifically insensitive public statement. But many others were making public statements about how the event proves the toxicity of straight white men, and that people who support the 2nd Amendment, Republicans, Conservatives, and the NRA are all responsible.
Late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel went on stage to tearfully admonish people who support the 2nd Amendment, Republicans, Conservatives, and the NRA… of not caring about children, of loving their guns too much to do anything about gun violence and to more or less accuse at least 50% of the nation’s population of being heartless monsters on national television- on a program that is supposed to be funny.
Kimmel later apologized for ‘not being funny’ because it’s just ‘so hard’ to do his job when things like the Vegas shooting have been going on. All the while, the rest of us have to go on doing our jobs no matter how upset we are- even if we personally knew someone who was gunned down in Las Vegas.
It’s interesting though, that Leftists only grandstand about gun violence after a major shooting takes place. They only care about the victims for as long as the news story is still hot, and the bodies are still warm. It’s enough to make a person reconsider those conspiracy theories. After all, no major change ever happens without a significant groundswell of public opinion- and there’s absolutely no public interest in gun control except immediately after a high profile shooting has taken place.
But the people who are using this tragic event to vent their hatred for conservatives, and people who don’t understand that gun control laws only soften the targets of mass shooters are simply ignorant of the facts. The fact is that gun violence has dropped dramatically since the early 90s since the rise of the Internet. At the same time, suicides by firearm have risen but gun-related murders, on the whole, are on a steady decline.
If you only watch mainstream news, it would seem otherwise, as the networks scramble to cover every shooting that forwards a leftist agenda- ignoring many many others. And alas, mass shootings account for just a fraction of all gun deaths- and far less than automobile deaths. However, we wouldn’t advise sharing these facts with a leftist- unless you’re willing to be doxxed on social media, lose your job, and possibly be maced by a masked Antifa member.
~ American Liberty Report
