The Fox News theory: Maybe the shooter was a homosexual
As we reset the nation's days since the last mass shooting clock yet again, scores of the nation's least insightful but most shouty pundits are weighing in with the reasons why this mass shooting, too, was not the result of a nation chock full of unstable people with ready access to the machines of murder but because
reasons, where
reasons are anything and everything aside from that most obvious point.
Some of them seem to be of the opinion that the murderer Had A Good Point. Not the shooting people part, but the part where the kids these days kind of had it coming, what with their "having sex" and "gay studies".
The colleges themselves reinforce this idiocy with foolish, anti-intellectual classes like “porn studies,” gay “studies,” and other such non-academic nonsense. The colleges also reinforce this moral corruption by allowing gay clubs, lesbian clubs, and celebrations such as “sex week,” sex toy displays, and visits to campus of people in unsavory and sometimes illegal professions. [...]
All these clubs and absurd classes need to be eliminated. They are part of the root problem that caused this murder spree.
So theory the first is that society had it coming because
sex, which tracks uncomfortably closely to the rationale the murderer himself gave. This, for the record, is why Breitbart columnists should themselves not be allowed to own guns.
But there's much, much more—below the fold.
Theory the second comes from the Stupidest Man on the Internet, same link, and that so many of you know exactly who that title refers to speaks to his legendary status. His theory is that it was The Liberals, because it is always The Liberals.
[S]ome might argue that Rodger was a prototypical liberal male, only carried to a pathological extreme. Consider the profile: socially awkward, convinced of his own brilliance but not notably successful in life, hungry for revenge against those who have done better despite their obvious inferiority, eager to gain power over others, but through political influence rather than firearms–is this not a typical liberal on Twitter, or elsewhere on the internet?
It could also be James O'Keefe or, say, the Stupidest Man on the Internet, but I'm struck by the declaration of a "liberal" as someone who attempts to achieve "power" through political influence "rather than firearms." Firearms is the more proper way? No, I think it is just bad sentence structure.
Speaking of people convinced of their own brilliance but not notably successful in life (his ears were burning), political influence-wanter Joe The Plumber does not give a damn what may have influenced the shooting, so long as we keep the gears greased for the next one.
"I am sorry you lost your child. I myself have a son and daughter and the one thing I never want to go through, is what you are going through now," wrote Wurzelbacher, who became something of a mascot for John McCain's failed 2008 presidential campaign. "But: As harsh as this sounds – your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights."
Theory the third, then, can be summarized as Fuck You. Your children don't matter as much as my guns. Not your children, grieving parents, and not the next ones.
And then there is Fox News. The Fox News take is much like the Breitbart take, but with better production values and fancier titles for everyone involved. Theory the fourth, courtesy them, is that it was not the guns but homosexuality that murdered those kids
Dr. Robi Ludwig, a psychotherapist and reality show host, said her theories about Rodger’s motives began to evolve the more she listened to his disturbing rants. “When I was first listening to him, I was like, ‘Oh, he’s angry with women for rejecting him,’” she told Fox’s Jeanine Pirro. “And then I started to have a different idea: Is this somebody who is trying to fight against his homosexual impulses?”
“Was he angry with women because they were taking away men from him?” she asked.
Wow. All right then.
So the theories we have are that it was college sexiness, not guns; that it was liberals, not guns; that it was Fuck You, but not guns, and that it was the homosexuals, not guns. There are probably others, because it is never guns. It is never about whether we should be making more effort to keep guns away from clearly unstable people. It is never about whether we should be making an effort to keep guns away from clearly unstable people because most of the most fanatical gun fetishists of the movement themselves are very often people who are just as unstable, aka the people who show up with their guns at Cliven Bundy's ranch because something might happen that requires them to patriotically kill government officials, or the people who show up at the neighborhood Chili's armed to the teeth in case an unnamed something happens that might require them to patriotically kill someone themselves, or the woman who keeps a cabinet of weaponry because even though her own son is obviously unstable and a threat to others, she is more worried about the government doing something that will require her to patriotically use those weapons at some distant date.
You will have their weapons when you pry them from their cold dead fingers, and until that time there is absolutely no price that will be too high to pay.
When the next school shooting occurs, we will be having this same conversation no matter how many small bodies are carried out under plastic tarps. When the next good person with a gun walks into a Jewish community center or southern church and turns into a bad person with a gun in the span of a tenth of a second, we will still be telling the victims that their blood is a paltry price for the rest of us to pay in order to ensure we could easily kill someone else, too, if we felt our own reasons were better. Every stray bullet punching through a bedroom wall, every drunken brawl turned into a murder because there was one extraneous chunk of metal strapped to someone's waist, every notice in the paper of the terrible accident when young insert first name here found the loaded gun that their paranoid parent kept next to the bed for safety and isn't it a shame how these things keep happening and there's nothing we can do because Fuck You, that's why.
All right, so the clock is reset. We now await the next one. Perhaps the next one will be caused by the kids today with their loud music, or the emotional isolation imposed upon us by the cultural impositions of the cell phone, or video games, or superhero movies, or the unforgivable crime of knocking on a front door; anything but the weapon explicitly designed to allow the user to kill another human being from a distance. We're still not serious, even after all this. As a matter of plain national policy, we still don't give even the tiniest little damn how many shootings there are or how many get killed. You can tell because we don't do anything. Ever.
And you can tell because of the phalanx of barely stable themselves pundits furrowing their brows in the days after every single event and imploring that we get rid of all this sex, or these movies, or these games, or music, or phones these days, or acceptance for homosexuals, or the upsetting liberals with their upsetting ideas—that we should hush them all so as to not provoke a potential killer, while at the same time demanding the killer be given all the weapons they might want just in case.