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.
@ wwth:
“… never saw it coming… yeah, I mean, he beat his old lady, and there was the time he went off in the bar about ‘people need to die in large numbers before shit is gonna change in this country’, and he was always really quick-tempered and angry… but to do this??? Shit came out’a nowhere, did’n it???”
I know…
And even if it turns out he had a facebook page full of angry threats to do just exactly THIS, it’ll still be an anomaly. Even if it’s a facebook of angry threats to do just exactly THIS in order to make them see that the (insert most disfavored oppressed group) need to be (insert most favored revenge fantasy), it’ll STILL BE CONSIDERED AN ANOMALY
@Tashilicious : a weapon is a tool indeed. I don’t want people to misuse gun any more or less that people misuse trucks or power tools or explosives. And I think armies are a necessary evil that won’t go away ever.
(plus, hunting exist, and even if a hunting rifle isn’t anywhere as lethal as an assault weapon, it’s lethal enough to make a mass murder anyway. And even if you’re opposed to sport hunting, I hope wild animals will continue to exist, which mean some specific guys will have to deal with them)
@Weird Eddie : of course. It HAVE to be an anomaly since it’s against the statu quo. It’s way easier to classify something as an anomaly regardless of circumstances that ask for a change, and especially easier than admit being wrong.
That’s where we see that the medias aren’t actually diverse yet.
MY issue is when you call a gun a tool, you are playing into the “Well it’s not a dangerous thing it’s just a tool, like a car or a hammer or a saw!”
This is disengenuous and false.
A gun has a single use, none of them toolworthy. That use is to kill. A tool which only has one use, to kill, is called a weapon.
We don’t call a bec-guisarme a tool. It’s a weapon.
We don’t call a battle axe a tool. It’s a weapon.
We don’t call a hand grenade a tool. It’s a weapon.
Don’t call a gun a tool.
This has nothing to do with my personal gun control/use politics. This has everything to do with language being used to misdirect.
It is not a tool.
It is a weapon.
A tool CAN be used as a weapon, but it has another purpose in its existence. It does work, it builds or changes or helps.
A weapon has none of those qualities. It simply exists to kill.
@VOX – I wish to add an outsider’s perspective to the discussion of masculinity and weapons. I am not an American, and come from a country where military service is a requirement. By American standards, I am an ultimate “tough guy”: M.Sgt. (res.), combat engineers, fired just about anything from a pistol to an assault rifle to an anti-tank missile and a grenade launcher, been in tanks and APCs, etc., etc.
Yet, I assure you that in my own country I am nothing special, and if paraded around making myself into a tough guy due to this, I would be laughed at. NOBODY I know, most of them with similar or sometimes much “tougher” backgrounds, would ever think of using their knowledge of small (or not so small) arms as evidence of masculinity or toughness. In my country, in fact, private ownership of firearms is on a low level, precisely because everybody uses them in the army; to say you know how to use a gun is no more special than saying you know to drive a car.
What I suggest to you is that, paradoxically, if there were a draft in the USA and everybody served in the armed forces, this would significantly LOWER the American gun-craze. When everybody uses a gun in the army, there are no masculinity points for doing so in civilain life. When everybody is in the army, you realize that the American paranoia about having to have gun because “the government” will otherwise get you is absurd: as a soldier, you ARE the “government”, so good luck to them ordering yourself to oppress yourself.
We have mass shootings just about every day in the US. The news was just saying there have been 273 this year. They just usually aren’t this big so they don’t become huge news story. Not so in countries that have actual gun control. Obviously the gun culture is a problem, but the biggest and immediate issue is ease of access. We’re not going to change the gun culture as long as people are allowed to stockpile weapons.
Also, if high capacity magazine guns were outlawed, there’s every chance that future mass shooters who are motivated to get these guns anyway will be caught and convicted of illegally buying guns before they can kill people.
If anyone thinks gun control laws won’t change things here, just look at Hawaii. They have stricter than the usual gun control laws and they have less gun violence. Because unlike other states/cities in the US that have tighter laws, you can’t buy guns in places with lax laws and drive them into the area and use them to kill people.
@Tashilicious -I think the statement “a gun is a tool” is meant as an analogy. I think the poster you are replying to means that guns have specific uses – for example, to be used by soldiers to protect military bases or by cops to arrest criminals – and are not meant to be a status symbol.
@Ohlmann
A gun has one purpose: violence
A tool has utility. A gun is for killing. Full stop.
That, that’s not a meme you dipshits. You’re just taking the already low chance that the “wisdom of crowds” can help people genuinely worried about their loved ones and diluting it.
Twenty-eight years out from École Polytechnique . Eighteen years out from Columbine. Ten years out from Virginia Tech. Five years out from Sandy Hook. Sixteen months out from Pulse.
Round and round and round it goes, where it stops… only the lobbyists know and they’re guarding the controls. And all I can feel is despair and powerlessness.
There’s a tragic irony to this taking place in the midst of a protracted healthcare battle. But that irony brought to mind a discussion that Bluegal had on the Professional Left Podcast that I listen to every weekend. (As an aside, I highly recommend the Pro Left podcast to any Mammotheer. Released every Friday, it is my weekend catharsis from a week of Republican idiocy and a reminder that there are people out there grounded and fighting the good fight.)
Bluegal, being the theology graduate from Brandeis that she is, related the story of Cain and Abel and called attention to a part of the story that I had actually forgotten. While most people are familiar with the story of the first murder, the way it is translated reveals another arguably more grievous dimension to the sin:
Despite theoretically being omniscient, God didn’t see Abel die and had to ask Cain of Abel’s wherabouts; it was that telling response that tipped him off that something had happened. While God doesn’t say it explicitly in verses that follow, the obvious metaphorical subtext is that we are all our brother’s keepers. If one of is suffering, that’s on us to ameliorate it; I gotta imagine the Reverend Tommy Douglas had this passage in mind as he was working on the health care system in Saskatchewan.
But the neoliberalism and the Randroid Objectivism still permeating the discourse has made “rugged individualism” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” the main mantras of the United States in way that I really haven’t seen in other nations. Which strikes me as bizarre: it’s one thing that humanity has divided itself up into nation-states, but the fact that the most powerful of those nation-states has abdicated that communal responsibility? What does American citizenship mean if your brothers are just going to toss bootstraps at you when you’re in need?
America needs to get it through its societal skull that we really are our brother’s keepers and it reflects badly on its society to abdicate that responsibility is so callous a way. Just accepting the deaths of thousands as the cost of firearm ownership is a sin, if I’d call anything one. Ripping affordable health care out of the hands of thousands is also a sin. Committing both sins together… that’s just plain sadism.
It still leads to that linguistic slippage into excuse.
“It’s a tool. Why do we need to regulate tools!”
Use exact language. It is a weapon. All “tools” who’s only main goal is to inflict death or destruction are called weapons. To try and define it with a looser application of “tool” is only ever done to attempt to have less restrictions. They are attempting to categorize is as something benign, like a hammer or socket set. It isn’t. Do not allow it.
@weirwoodtreehugger
There’s a sizeable chunk of the population which would see those as virtues, not red flags.
So feeling a little auxiliary survivor’s guilt. I have a LOT of family in Vegas, and just the other day My middle sister was even out on the Strip at a different music festival. Thankfully she was a little busy being my youngest sister’s birth coach. I had hoped that the only news coming out of Vegas would be the birth of my lovely niece but some fucko with a gun ruined those plans. I just hate thinking that “50 people have died and all I can think is that I’m thrilled none of my family was among them.”
Next they start talking about knives, and whether you should be restricted from owning a cleaver.
@Schnookums
That’s a perfectly natural way to react, which I’m sure you already know.
Schnookums, that’s perfectly understandable. Humans a tribal beasts, and family is the closest tribe of all.
Tashilicious : if somebody say to my face that tools don’t need to be regulated, I would laugh him out of the room. Explosives and chemicals that lead to explosives or nerves gas are the prime example, but actually, most tools have reglementations attached to it, and quite a lot of them require actual autorizations.
(it’s not even just for terrorism. It’s also just to avoid gross misuses)
Oh. My. Goddess.
My deepest sympathies to the survivors and the families of those who were murdered!
Re: weapons/tools
A gun is a weapon, not a tool. Calling guns tools is a disingenuous way to downplay things.
@Gussie
I find that “individualism” pretty laughable in a sense. Especially when everytime a girl in school (in the US) gets tired of the sexist dresscodes in school. All of a sudden everyone (against her) is all about rules.
It’s two-thousand and fucking seventeen and the way girls and women dress is STILL being policed ffs.
@Pie
Sad but true!
Now that you made me think about it, I think I always assumed “weapon” or “gun” is a *kind* of tool in English, the word “tool” being a general one for all handheld objects used for a specific purpose, in the same sense “cutlery” or “fork” are tools. Technically, I think I am correct, dictionary-wise, but I am not sure about collquial speech.
Besides, aren’t many – if not most – tools licensed, except for those used in the home? You can’t buy a car without a driver’s license, nor most medical equiplent without similar permits, etc.
(Sigh) as Eddie Izzard put it, it is true that guns don’t kill people, people kill people – but the gun helps. If this guy had been standing in that tower with a wooden stick shouting “bang!”…
Gun related stock prices are up. Cos we can make money off tragedy, but we can’t be ‘political’
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/gun-stocks-rise-again-this-time-after-las-vegas-shooting
@Schnookum – you *should* care for your family more than you care for strangers. It all depends on *how much* and in *what way* you care more.
I don’t have anything constructive to add.
@Weird (and tired of trumplings) Eddie has it right all the way down.
I’m so thoroughly done with “thoughts and prayers”. If you’re not working to END ACCESS TO FIREARMS then you can shove your thoughts and prayers. I don’t want to hear one more damn politician expressing their “thoughts and prayers”, I want them to DO something.
But Sandy Hook showed me nothing will ever, ever be done.
@Jesalin : I don’t buy the argument that it downplay anything. A tool isn’t a toy, and almost no tools are safe under all circumstance.
It do however highlight that weapons, and guns should not be seen as glamorous, status symbol, or anything. Which is one of the problem of the gun subculture. People don’t buy chainsaws or elevator lifts to their children at 16′ nearly as often as rifles. People don’t stockpile screwdrivers or hammers just in case. There isn’t a cutting implement subreddit with people mystically assigning quality to constructors.
Also, it sort-of hide the fact that, as a lot of recent european incidents have highlighted, switching from a gun to a knife is only a very marginal advantage. There is less mass killing in Europa because people are less incented to do it more than by lack of implement. While I find maddening that assault rifles are authorized to the public in the USA, I could live with it if almost nobody bought them by lack of use, similar to how very few people actually buy a woodcutting axe.
Heck, just check out the (in many cases) rather broad laws against ‘burglar’s tools’ with the level of on-the-spot decision making involved.
People have been arrested for ‘carrying a crowbar while black’.
I don’t think culture vs law is an either/or situation. They both need to be addressed together. Sensible regulation of firearms among private citizens would ideally be accompanied by an effort to affect a change in how they’re portrayed in media.
Of course, the US Gov has a vested interest in glorifying the armed forces in media that would directly conflict with any effort to shift the public perception of firearms. They’re not going to pay for movies about marines playing hopscotch.
I almost wonder if the push for armed forces propaganda in TV and film is partially responsible for the public attitude towards firearms in the US to begin with.
Ohlmann, it’s a lot less likely that anyone carrying a knife (on the ground) could kill 50 people before being tackled, or just run away from. This seems more than “marginal advantage” to the people targeted.