That the Americans haven’t had a mass shooting for a while. There doesn’t appear to be any shortage of the usual gun violence, but I would’ve expected that given the currents of turmoil that Americans wade through each day, that someone, somewhere, hasn’t gone all in and dethroned the Vegas record holder.
This lull in domestic massacres is even more of a surprise when you consider the fact that double down Donnie’s running the show. Because from where I sit, it looks a hell of a lot like the president of the Americans likes to fancy himself a tough guy, and has tacitly and openly suggested that a little violence is a fine idea. As long as that violence is directed toward people that didn’t vote for him.
Between the pandemic, the protests and the president it just seems inevitable, and so I’ve got to say that I’m impressed with the restraint the Americans are demonstrating. But, although I’m impressed, I can’t shake this feeling that a shoot em up moment of epic proportions is still in the cards.
Maybe the half assed attempts at social distancing and crowd limitations are partly to blame, because you’d need at least a group of sixty to best the concert carnage, and at the moment those sized gatherings are kind of frowned upon.
Except in Florida, or at a Trump rally, or at a protest, or Sturgis, or an Evangelical event, or every second off campus rental house. So, selective frowning I guess.
But, if I were a betting man I’d wager that the odds of a full scale, record setting, second amendment event are probable. Also, the probability percentage will increase as our Southern friends get nearer to their version of an election. Some of my confidence in a shoot em up is based on observable behavior. Like the fact that Americans seem to be fond of bringing their guns with them to social events, and have now decided that it’s a fine idea to bring those weapons to other people’s social events. Events that you disapprove of and wouldn’t ordinarily attend are now much more attractive when you bring your A.R. as an accessory.
Like protests.
I suppose it’s a bit of a stretch to call a BLM protest a social event, but technically speaking I think it meets the necessary criterion. There’s a a group of like minded people gathering in a specified location. These people are enthusiastic and pumped to be attending. Everyone is recording the gathering on their phones, and eventually you need security to make sure the event doesn’t get out of hand.
Sounds like spring break, only with fires and looting.
So, I’m thinking that the best odds for the aforementioned shoot em up is one of these protests. First we need a spark, and the favored ignition source at the moment seems to be the police shooting a black person. Statistically speaking, the odds are ridiculously in favor of this happening on an almost daily basis. It doesn’t really matter anymore if the shooting is justified or not. It just needs to happen. Sparks don’t give a shit if the tree deserved to be burned or not.
So a spark. Then the protest starts and a shitload of biased, amped up people arrive on scene. Most of them convinced of the purity of their advocacy. It’s a white knight gathering which is kind of ironic at a black lives matter protest.
Anyway
Now we need to add a dash of anarchy to the brew. This dash of disorder comes in a variety of flavors. We have the looters and the firestarters. We have the brick tossers and the window smashers. We’ve got the proud boys or some facsimile trying their best to quietly amp up the violence, and we’ve got the police.
The police are an important ingredient. For starters they have to be there to apply some level of risk reward for all the rest of the ingredients. Otherwise those ingredients tend to go mental and the cause becomes secondary to the thrill of smashing plate glass windows and snagging some Jordan’s. This behavior is typical by the way. Crowds of people in any event from a protest to an English soccer match don’t have a great track record for sane behavior.
Herd mentality is not a desirable thing, regardless of what double down Donnie thinks.
So now we have the cops trying to control the herd. They’re outnumbered, they’re armed and they’re also amped up. Regardless of face shields, handguns, helmets and vests, they still have to feel vulnerable and threatened when they’re trying to reign in this herd mentality.
Did I mention they were armed? Yes I did and I think that if I were dodging bricks and Molotov cocktails that my finger would be on the trigger. Regardless of what you might think of the cops, a reasonable person should concede that expecting godlike restraint from the police in the midst of chaos is a lot to ask. It just seems to me that the more police you have and the more protesters and protests that it’s only a matter of time until one of the cops feels threatened enough to drop his baton and grab his Glock.
So, if you continue to mix varying amounts of the same ingredients together, then it seems inevitable that eventually you’re going to produce something extremely distasteful. A disaster where everyone is armed and no one is sure exactly who to shoot, or who’s shooting at them.
And that makes me wonder if the Vegas record will stay intact. I suppose the rules committee will have to meet and decide if the shooting is a valid record, when the people the shooter is targeting are shooting back. Technically a civil war is a mass shooting. Hell, Gettysburg and Antietam were really just passionate Americans demonstrating that passion without any police to restrain them, and none of those American disagreements are counted in the mass shooting record book.
I guess I’ll have to wait for the official ruling to see if a mass shooting causality record means just one shooter or one armed group of shooters.
Sadly though I think a ruling is going to have to be adjudicated in the very near future. There’s just too many ingredients and too many cooks.