Leftist ghouls score points off Vegas tragedy

AUTHORITIES had not even finished counting the dead from Monday night’s horror massacre outside the Mandalay Bay Hotel before the ghouls of the Left started scoring points off Las Vegas.

Authorities had not even finished counting the dead from Monday night’s horror massacre outside the Mandalay Bay Hotel before the ghouls of the Left started scoring points off Las Vegas.

Without so much as a clue to what drove the shooter, 64-year-old retired accountant Stephen Paddock, those watching coverage of the event overnight on their TVs or the internet were treated to all manner of speculation – far too much of it designed to push a particular narrative.

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was quick to suggest that Paddock might have claimed more victims had he gotten his hands on a silencer: “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get” she wrote on Twitter.

Investigators load a body from the scene of a mass shooting in Las Vegas.

Well, perhaps. Of course, to the extent that a “silencer” might work on an automatic weapon such as Paddock is suspected to have used on the crowd outside the Mandalay Bay, it would be like reducing the noise from a jet engine to that of a jackhammer.

And that’s assuming the silencer – or, more accurately, noise suppressor – didn’t melt entirely from the heat of the weapon.

Over on CNN, one commentator praised Trump (a rare occasion on that network) for hitting the right note in his remarks to the American people – and then, bizarrely, made the point that Paddock’s victims were, being country music fans, also likely to have been Trump voters.

Reporting a crisis live on TV is hard work, and perhaps he can be forgiven drawing such a bow. Far worse was the ugliness displayed by Hayley Geftman-Gold, until moments ago the American TV network CBS’s vice president and senior counsel of strategic transactions, who went online soon after the shooting and wrote, “I’m actually not even sympathetic [because] country music fans often are Republican gun toters … If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing.”

A broken window is seen at the Mandalay Bay Casino where a gunman opened fire on concert-goers. Picture: (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

(CBS, to their great credit, fired the exec pretty much as soon as the comments came to light.)

Meanwhile Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most public face of atheism, took to Twitter in his best stage southern US accent: “Durn tootin’, great shootin’. Cool dude sertin’ he’s 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah! Every country has its psychopaths. In US they have guns.”

Translation: America is a nation of ignorant rednecks who may as well have pulled the trigger themselves and who deserve everything they’ve got coming should a madman train his gun their way.

Remember, this is a guy who makes a living claiming that people who believe in God are ignorant dopes.

Stephen Paddock killed 59 people in the horrific attack.

Of course, critics will claim that those on the right of the spectrum are quick to politicise terror attacks committed by Islamists.

The key difference is that when someone drives a truck through a crowd or opens fire in a theatre or flies a plane into a building in the name of the Caliphate, they care committing an explicitly political act, and responses will be at least in part political.

This is also why not all mass casualty attacks can be considered terrorism, despite the efforts of some to say broaden the term. By definition, it’s a word reserved for acts designed to intimidate civilians or a government for a political aim, and using the workd where it is not called for dilutes it, perhaps deliberately.

But absent even any firm details about Paddock’s motive, what weapons he used, how he obtained them, and who if anyone may have helped him in planning his acts there is precious little that anyone can say about this in terms of policy.

It may be that America needs to get a better handle on its guns, but remember that a year ago in Nice a madman acting in the name of ISIS killed 86 and injured 458 others with nothing more than a truck.

Donald Trump, not always the most articulate of men, called Paddock’s crime “an act of pure evil”, a word which has gone out of fashion in an age that believes good and bad are mere constructs and that there’s a rational, technical explanation for everything.

But lacking anything better, it’s all we’ve got.

Originally published as Leftist ghouls score points off Vegas tragedy