Just Another Normal Massacre

So far, anyway (I'm writing this at 8:27 a.m.) the usual suspects of Xenophobistan are curiously mute about yesterday's mass shooting, allegedly committed by a husband (American) and wife (Pakistani) team who met in Saudi Arabia. Either it's to their credit that the warmongers of Congress and CNN are not screaming IsisIsisIsis! at the top of their lungs before seeing even a shred of evidence, or else they're afraid to offend their friends, the Saudis. Remember that the 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 Commission Report allegedly show a Saudi royal connection to that terror attack. And Saudi Arabia, despite its sordid and brutal regime, is a close partner of the US as well as its largest arms customer. President Obama  brokered the latest multi-billion-dollar deal of high-tech weaponry just this past fall.

I think it's safe to assume that if the wife had hailed from Syria, the usual suspects would have been jockeying for anti-immigrant position before the crack of dawn.

So I'm not going to speculate on the motive* behind the latest shooting. But I think it's fair game to speculate on the motives of the speculators. I think it is fair, even desirable, to watch the Thoughts and Prayers hypocrite squad squirm in helpless silence. I think it's also fair to speculate on a correlation between the frequent mass shootings and the epidemic of human misery wrought by the financial crisis and all its unindicted economic terrorists.

It's true that mass murder by firearm is rapidly becoming the New Normal, with not even a week separating the California massacre and the atrocity at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. These "incidents" are all melding into one sickening bloodbath. As the New York Times points out, there is, on average, one mass shooting in the United States every single day. Most of them are greeted by a giant group yawn. Most are simply not bloody enough or spectacular enough or politically co-optable enough to merit interruption by the mass media of its daily broadcasts of Donald Trump rallies.

From today's Times:

Including the worst mass shooting of the year, which unfolded horrifically on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., a total of 462 people have died and 1,314 have been wounded in such attacks this year, many of which occurred on streets or in public settings, the databases indicate.

It is impossible to know whether the number of such shootings has risen in recent years because the databases go back only a couple of years. More data is available for mass shootings calculated by a different standard, one used by congressional researchers and other experts who study mass killings: four or more dead. But experts fiercely debate whether mass shootings by that more deadly standard have remained level or ticked up slightly in recent years.

Still, say experts, there is no real way to measure whether mass shootings are truly on the upswing. The US has been a violent country ever since the Pilgrims landed and started exterminating the aboriginals. But what is truly on the upswing, says criminologist James Fox, is fear. “A lot of that has been because of the nature of media coverage," he told the Times. "In the ’70s and ’80s, we didn’t hear about it on the Internet — because there was no Internet — and we didn’t have cable news channels that would devote 24 hours of coverage.”

We didn't have 24/7 coverage of Donald Trump and his closest fascist rival, the truly awesomely scary Ted Cruz.

Meanwhile, the Scottsdale (AZ) Gun Club is going ahead with its annual Christmas family fun extravaganza. For only $15 ($10 for members) you get your choice of weapons to hold while posing for a picture with Santa himself. As a special added bonus, they'll take your kids' fingerprints, for free.... because, freedom. Because taking fingerprints is what passes for responsible gun safety in gun states. 

 And in case you were worried about President Obama's recent ban on the importation of Russian-made AK-47s (pictured above) in order to punish Vlad Putin over Crimea, don't be. Because now they're made in America. Whoever said offshoring is destroying good American jobs is nuts, especially since the slogan of the new company is "Russian heritage, American innovation."

Although the new American assault rifle company is headquartered in Pennsylvania, the CEO refuses, for some reason, to divulge the location of his physical factory. So, you might ask, how is he advertising for those great-paying new American manufacturing jobs? Well, I wouldn't be surprised if he is using robots instead of humans from the Rust Belt.

It's the American heritage and it's the American way: Ka-ching and Ka-boom.

* On second thought, I wouldn't be surprised if postpartum depressive psychosis turned out to be a contributing factor. Six months after the birth of her first child, the culture shock of moving from a repressive society, husband just returned to work after a pretty long parental leave by American standards... the timing is certainly right. The husband could have been the follower in this madness, which seems to be a hybrid of workplace violence and terror attack and suicide by cop. I'm sure we'll find out eventually. But at the end of the day, what difference does a motive make? People are dead because guns are rampant.