American media is still at a loss on Stephen Paddock’s motive.
Remember Paddock? Long time ago…like…way back when…on the first day of October 2017…this white man got himself a massive stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, and killed at least 58 innocent people in Las Vegas. He also hit 500 other people with his American guns, rifles, and bullets.
And the entire thing is going down memory lane…fast. Very soon, it will be another forgettable history. Nothing will happen here in the U.S. to stop the violence and bloodshed. Nothing will happen to stop the NRA and its gun monster.
Media is sketching the killer’s psychological profile. And FBI and police and law enforcement are trying to find his motive. Why did he kill so many people? They are scratching their heads. The ISIS connection theory that some floated is debunked.
Here’s why and how Stephen Paddock killed so many people.
An ordinary white, wealthy man. He has no meaning of life. He curses himself everyday. He is alone, divorced twice. Gambles with hundreds of thousands of dollars…in fact, millions of dollars…and this big addiction for money seems to be his only reason to live.
He knows his father was a bank robber and a notorious criminal: he keeps a dark trauma secretly in his mind. He doesn’t have any faith in the system, and wanders in life aimlessly, making money and more money.
At one point, he doesn’t want to live anymore. He wants to kill himself. Just before that, he sends his girlfriend away to her native Philippines, and sends her a bunch of dollars. Nice gesture! His mortal duties are now done. He is ready to die.
Up to this point in this story, there’s little difference between Stephen Paddock the mass murderer and any other average white, black, brown or yellow man living in Sweden, Germany, India, Nigeria, or China. This is not an extraordinary profile of a lone wolf.
Here comes the difference. The men in those other countries want to kill themselves. And they do. In fact, suicide rate is much similar in Sweden to what is it is in USA: about 10 per 100,000 people. In Germany, it’s 9; in Finland, it is 16; in India, it’s 22; and in China, it’s 22.2.
The difference is this. The other countries — none of them — have such primitive, medieval lax and laughable gun control laws. Their gun lobby is not so fiercely strong, they don’t have a rabidly reckless organization such as the National Rifle Association that buys off politicians from both parties. Example: John McCain alone got $8 million from NRA.
The other countries’ media is sane and common sense, and their education is much more modernized than that in America. They know guns and civilization don’t go together. In fact, they know violence has no place in a civilized society.
Here in the U.S., however, violence is glorified, and the ordinary people are brainwashed into believing violence is fun and harmless (until it hits them personally): look at America’s Hollywood and its relentless violent movies, look at America’s extremely violent video games and billion-dollar often-violent porn industry, and look at America’s culture of violent sports and games. The American powers and media have always portrayed open violence and sex and gore in a glorified way, and it has made people desensitized.
A man who is a lone wolf, frustrated and unhappy and wants to kill himself could decide to kill a bunch of happy people (such as the concert-goers in Las Vegas, or the little elementary schoolchildren in Connecticut) — because he has an emotional and depraved sense of revenge for his inability to cope with his own life vis-a-vis the happy young people’s happy, full life. He doesn’t know anymore if he is killed five, fifty, or five hundred people. He is mindlessly carrying out his life’s final wish: kill them, and then kill yourself.
Period.
A primitive, medieval American system supported by the gun and WMD industries, their media, and politicians gives him the opportunity to buy and stockpile WMD, and plan a mass carnage at the time he decides to take himself out.
And that’s precisely what happened in Las Vegas. And that’s precisely why USA has three times as many gun deaths as Finland, five times as many as Sweden, and six times as many as Germany. The number of gun deaths in USA could actually be higher, by some other estimates.
The other developed nations – even developing nations — have developed on gun control and education on WMD. America has not.
Pure and simple story. CNN and NBC and ABC won’t tell you this simple story in such a simple way.
You decide. Let me know what you do.
Sincerely,
Partha Banerjee
Brooklyn, New York
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