UPDATE: 2:30 PM 10/2/17: The death toll has risen to 58, with more than 500 injured. Though it was first reported that Paddock was killed by police it now appears he shot himself before the police entered his room. There are still no details as to Paddock’s possible motives. The original post follows.
As I write this, the media is reporting that 50 have been killed and more than 400 others have been injured in a mass shooting at an open-air concert in Las Vegas. Police have identified the shooter as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who opened fire on concertgoers from a hotel room in the Mandalay Bay complex overlooking the venue, killing dozens before himself being shot dead by police.
The staggering death toll, which seems sure to rise, makes this the worst mass shooting in American history. At this point we know very little about the shooter or what his motives may have been, but that hasn’t stopped 4Channers and far-right “media” sources from spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories.
We’ll know more soon enough, I assume. In the meantime, here are a few useful tweets I’ve gathered up so far.
A couple of thread on on the disinformation being spread about the shooting by many of the usual suspects.
For easier retrieval, I'm threading together the disinformation I've seen about the #MandalayBay Casino shooting in Las Vegas.
/1/
— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) October 2, 2017
Here Are All The Hoaxes Being Spread About The Las Vegas Shooting #MandalayBay https://t.co/L79J6iLuqU via @BuzzFeedNews pic.twitter.com/l2p9KOt8M7
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) October 2, 2017
The execrable right-wing Gateway Pundit remains dedicated to getting everything wrong the fastest.
The @gatewaypundit wrote up Geary Danley as the #mandalaybay shooter and then deleted their post. pic.twitter.com/ocXtTOX6rL
— Ryan Broderick (@broderick) October 2, 2017
Other relevant tweets:
https://twitter.com/NivenJ1/status/914795331241484288
This week Congress is deciding to end background checks for silencers. No joke. #opposeSHAREact
— Jillzie 🟧 (@jcindc2002) October 2, 2017
Here is a rundown of Nevada gun laws. It’s lawful to possess a machine gun that is legally registered https://t.co/BjdQm68crz
— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 2, 2017
Just a reminder that it's only been 16 months since the last worst mass shooting in US history. https://t.co/jHQnDy30Lv
— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) October 2, 2017
My heart goes out to all those affected by this senseless tragedy. If you’re a WHTM reader who lives in or around Las Vegas, or if you’re visiting there, please let us know how you are doing.
My condulence to everyone who lost people they care about and hope that most of the people, who are hurt, survive.
The numbers of the victims are very scary.
I have a cousin who lives there and I’m getting kind of worried, I tried to contact her but I haven’t heard back yet. Hopefully, she is still asleep.
We have been chatting on and off in the discord about this as soon as it happened.
I feel sick.
Trump and his “warmest condolences” and “god bless you!” Can drink a tall frosty glass of my farts.
Oh god, I didn’t even know this had happened. This is just so horrible. And another white guy with a gun.
I want to say it is time to get very, very angry, but we hare far past that time.
Zenobia,
If it makes you feel any better, locals don’t usually go to the strip. I do hope she’s safe though. I’m feeling glad my mother no longer lives there right now. She wouldn’t have been anywhere near this shooting even if she did but, still.
weirwoodtreehugger,
She get’s a lot of free passes to stuff like this. But it turns out she wasn’t there. I am much relieved, but still really sad this happened.
There will now, almost certainly, be many conversations about gun control and mental health care, and those are necessary talks, to be sure.
But maybe we need to talk about the larger culture as well, a culture that too often celebrates “toughness” and strength and militarism as manly virtues and denigrates kindness, gentleness and compassion as weak and therefore feminine.
It almost seems to me that as women have gained rights and some economic parity the backlash has led to even more regimented gender modalities as men feel the need to separate themselves from women in any way they can. The men this site talks about are now cartoons. They’re what a 12-year-old boy might think a man is. Still, this cartoon version of masculinity seems to be taking a dominant role in our culture, and that makes me sick.
The sexism is clear to me. Patriarchy kills. It denigrates women and deforms the humanity of men.
I don’t know what to do about any of that. I just think it needs to be part of the conversation.
@ vox, all:
there will be a LOT of conversations about “mental health” (scare quotes represent my feeling that the conversation will focus on “the shooter was a nut-case, and, as such, it’s an anomaly” and NOT on mental health awareness or on the lack of access to mental health care.)
there will be a LOT FEWER conversations about gun control, gun violence, or violence….
when I heard about this, I found myself hoping it was a white man, and not a person of color or a Muslim…
And of course, no conversations about survivors who can’t get the mental health care they need….
Top headline in our largest daily newspaper at the moment: “America never learns”
“America never learns”
THAT!!!!
again and again and again….
My feeling go to thoses whose loved one were wounded or killed here. Including psychological wounds.
A french friend is blocked in the pool of his hotel because of the terrorist attack. He act like he is only midly inconvenienced, but I hope he won’t get PTSD or something.
@Weird Yes, I’m a little relieved too. Of course it makes no difference to the number of dead, wounded and traumatised, but it probably does make a difference to the number of revenge hate crimes.
Come to think of it, there will still be some revenge hate crimes. Somebody, somewhere is still going to assume that the shooter was Muslim and go spray swastikas on some totally innocent person’s car.
I’m not feeling too proud of Spain (where I live) at the moment, but we don’t have to worry about mass shootings.
They’re still gonna make up some story about the shooter being transgender, like they did with the PP shooter in Colorado among others. To the right, it doesn’t matter how white and straight and cis and male a shooter is. They will always make up a story to pin the crime on “the other side” while simultaneously praising the killer and blaming the victims. And, also simultaneously, claiming the attack never even happened.
I’m still struggling to process the enormity of this event, and the pre-meditation involved. When I turned on the TV this morning and saw ’50 dead’, I think time stopped for a moment.
Does anybody know of any legit collection efforts to help with medical expenses for the living/final costs for the deceased? Or is it too soon for that still?
I think this perfectly expresses my sentiments and rage at this particular moment:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/06/12/thoughts-and-prayers/
I’m really just too angry to listen to that kind of sht right now. But America does not learn. It won’t ever learn. It refuses to to learn, and our kids, and teens, and adults are going to keep dying en masse, again and again and again. America aint gonna do sht about this either, except act appalled at how awful it was, clutch our pearls, and keep it moving.
I lost hope for this whole country, after twenty little babies got killed at Newtown and America did nothing but offer thoughts and prayers. (The next White person who spouts “All Lives Matter at me is going to get a swift kick in the shins, because in America that is an extremely obvious lie.)
I suppose the conservatives already have an angle to blame trans folks for the shooting, considering the killer apparently had used some woman’s ID or whatever. They will claim the shooter was trans. Just watch.
I’m wondering whether the shooter will turn out to have a record of domestic violence. They so often do.
I hate how every time this happens, there are people who’s idea of gun control is to not change the overall gun laws but to restrict access to mentally ill people only.
That wouldn’t have stopped this or many other mass shootings. He had no criminal record. As far as I know, no history of severe mental illness.
People who knew him are surprised and say nothing about indicated that he would do this.*
Mental illness can be a factor in mass shootings, but from what I’ve read, when that’s the case, the victims are random and it’s not planned extensively. This was obviously planned. He was in the hotel for days. He was probably waiting for the perfect time to carry out the shooting.
The problem is the guns, not that bad people are allowed to buy them. It’s impossible to anticipate who might be buying them for nefarious reasons. Real gun control will probably never happen. Maybe it’s time for people to start voting with their wallets and refuse to give their tourist dollars to states that have particularly lax gun laws? There’s so little hope of anything happening on a federal level we may have to focus on state and municipal legislative bodies.
* I’m not sure I buy this. People don’t become murderers just out of nowhere. There were probably red flags that people just dismissed. Hateful, violent, extremist or conspiratorial ideology. Obsession with weapons. Incidents of domestic violence or sexual harassment or assault that he was never charged with. Things like that. I expect some of this info to eventually come out. It’s all too common for people to dismiss or be expected to dismiss these kinds of red flags that men – particularly white men – display. To add to what Vox wrote, patriarchy not only values toxic masculinity, it expects us to bend over backwards to assure ourselves and others that the worst products of it are really “nice guys” who should be cut slack. I’m fucking sick of it.
Every time I tell someone that the Neocon/Alt Right ilk will always flip a tragedy like this and blame the left for this. Here’s a quote by Paul Joseph Watson, he works with Alex Jones.
Odd that the same people who say “carry on as normal” after every Islamic terror attacking are suddenly demanding new laws after Las Vegas.
Trump and Pence tweeted about this and won’t even call it terrorism. As a matter fact some won’t dare say the word. If this was a Muslim or a refugee/immigrant, they would be having a field day with this.
Trump-My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you.
Pence-To victims, families & loved ones affected by this senseless violence in Las Vegas, Karen & I are praying for you & offering our love…
warmest fucking condolences
fresh off the stove
steaming hot
WWTH : I would say, the problem is the culture around guns.
If people really want to, they can get guns in Europa (see : the murder spree in Paris). But guns aren’t glorified, so not only disenfranchised people are less likely to hold on a gun as a status symbol, but people don’t alway have an assault rifle handy for they have the mass murder equivalent of a suicide ideation.
While decreasing availability of guns would likely be a good first step, I think americans need to think it’s ridiculous to think they can shoot bad guys ; and they need to think that a gun is a specialized tool for some jobs, not a status of being an adult / a male / someone in charge, or similar.
A gun is not a fucking tool.
Do not even begin.
A gun belongs to an intensely specific kind of tool we have a name for; a fucking weapon.
“Our condolences, but we find the random mass murder of people by cis white men entirely acceptable in our eyes and will do absolutely nothing that could have any chance of limiting future casualties or even preventing another domestic terror attack in the future.”
That’s what everyone who goes “thoughts and prayers” is really saying. I am sick of it, and I am going to call these bastards the fuck out.