First of all, my sincere Texas and Ohio prayers for all those lost over the weekend. May God welcome them to His paradise. I pray God will heal those wounded, and comfort all families impacted by this cowardly act of evil.

Secondly, hats off to first responders, and to the local populace who are stepping up to help, especially with blood transfusion donations.

After studiously witnessing 30+ years of these tragedies (some would say ‘staged events‘) the end game would appear to be something along the lines of: Violent game enthusiast + ‘mood-stabilizing’ drug therapy = Formula for disaster both political and theatrical.

In other words Big Entertainment plus Big Pharma is a toxic mixture ripe for evildoing. The two go hand in hand.

By the time the Aurora movie theater shooting occurred in July 2012 (listed down below) it was obvious to some of us, that attempting to address the angle of Big entertainment / Pharma was immediately shut down, especially by those with vested interests – ie. big Hollyweird producers in lock-step with the #44 regime.

Fortunately in this particular instance, Texas Governor Abbott is on to something and shouldn’t let it drop once media coverage of this tragedy dies.

There aren’t any immediate or lasting solutions to this out of control mess, being as it is, a ‘behavioral habit’ that a certain group of people are engaged in to be heard; a statement that ‘I’m relevant too!’ These Antifa-deranged young men are filling a void of powerlessness and unworthiness, being a ‘no-one’ without accomplishments tormenting their soul.

Which very likely is what connects them to each other under the copy cat syndrome.

Robert Stacy McCain, American Spectator: ‘Hopelessness and Hate’…

The back-to-back shootings in El Paso and Dayton, occurring within a span of 14 hours, caused some commentators to lump them together as part of a singular phenomenon. However, Crusius and Betts had almost diametrically opposed political views.

Crusius posted a four-page “manifesto” ranting against immigrants and citing as his inspiration a March shooting rampage in New Zealand. Betts, by contrast, was an avowed leftist, a Trump-hater who used his social-media accounts to express support for Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Satanism. While the El Paso massacre was clearly intended as an act of terrorism, no one yet knows what inspired the slaughter in Dayton, where those killed by Betts included his own 22-year-old sister and her boyfriend.

The biggest clue to the motive of Legan, who attacked the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California last month, was an Instagram post urging people to read Might Is Right, an 1896 book by anarchist Arthur Desmond. Using the pseudonym “Ragnar Redbeard,” Desmond wrote a sort of synthesis of Darwin and Nietzsche and, while white supremacy is one element of the book’s theme, Desmond’s main arguments are against Christianity and democracy.

An FBI agent investigating the Gilroy massacre was cautious about ascribing motive. “We continue to try to understand who the shooter was, what motivated him, and whether he was aligned with any particular ideology,” Special Agent Craig Fair said at a press conference last week, explaining that the FBI was researching Legan’s online activity to understand the killer’s “mind-set, ideological beliefs, intentions … to get a holistic picture of him.”

Excuse my question, but in the case of the Texas kid – Why El Paso? The city of Allen, a Dallas suburb, is barely 22 miles up the Sam Rayburn Tollway from where I’m currently sitting, and it is quite a handsome suburb to boot. So what / who actually gave him his instructions? Why did he take that AK-47 he bought a few months ago?  Why doesn’t anyone notice the signs? Where are his folks in all of this?

Sarcasm would aver perhaps, that he likes to drive the 10 hours across 660 Texas miles to shop in his favorite Walmart. A drive in the park to El Paso, so to speak.

Back to seriousness.

In the 70s and 80s we had movies like Dirty Harry or Death Wish or Nightmare on Elm Street, yet counterbalanced by a culture that reviled such things. Hollywood was still vested in putting out didactic shows like The Brady Bunch or The Waltons or Little House on the Prairie. Judeo-Christian values may not have been adhered to by many, but they were still respected as a whole, as a duly working set of guardrails on social behavior.

Since then we’ve dismissed the notion of guardrails and are pursuing a course toward tribalism – our side good, your side bad. It’s permeated the culture from the Antifa goon to the field of Presidential hopefuls with nary a functioning brain between the 20+ lot of ’em.

What happened this weekend is desperately sad and wicked. But personally I’m afraid we’ve replaced our bedrock foundation with one made from sand.

There’s a reason apparently that #44 and his Hillary Rob’em cohort expressed themselves with outrageous retorts as we all well remember in ‘guns, bibles and religion’. But how about this lot:

More Robert Stacy McCain, American Spectator: Hopelessness and Hate…

Such caution was entirely absent in the reactions of politicians to the El Paso and Dayton shootings. Appearing on MSNBC Sunday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) blamed President Trump for having “created a national emergency of rampant white nationalism across the country.”

On CNN, meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont) blamed Trump’s “language that is racist, that is virulently anti-immigrant” for having inspired “mentally unstable people in this country who see that as a sign to do terrible, terrible things.”

Such comments, however, ignore the fact that similar shooting rampages had been occurring periodically long before Trump’s presidency. From the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in the suburbs of Denver to Micah Xavier Johnson’s 2016 sniper attack on police in Dallas, it’s possible to recite a lengthy list of such incidents that could not possibly have been incited by Trump’s rhetoric.

And as for “mentally unstable people” doing “terrible, terrible things,” perhaps Senator Sanders should recall that it was one of his admirers, James T. Hodgkinson, who opened fire on Republican congressmen at a baseball practice in June 2017.

Complete piece in link down at bottom…

One has to wonder whether Sanders has had the decency and courtesy to apologize to Steve Calise for his outrageous inflammatory rhetoric. In the meantime I’ll close with this, just for the record.

Here’s a random list that I’ve followed as far back as I can remember when moving to Texas from Cape Cod Massachusetts back in the early 1990s … The fact that there are 4 incidents on Texas shootings (the three below plus this weekend) I’ll leave to you to figure out … politically-speaking, of course.

23 killed … Oct. 16, 1991, a 35-year-old man crashed his pickup through Luby’s Cafeteria, a packed restaurant in Killeen, Texas. He shot and killed 23 people before turning the gun on himself. Twenty-seven others were wounded. /  13 killed … April 20, 1999, two teens at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado went on a shooting spree, killing 13 and wounding more than 20 others before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. /  32 killed … April 16, 2007, a Virginia Tech student shot 32 people to death on the Blacksburg, Virginia, campus before killing himself. Another 17 people were injured. Days after the worst school shooting in the nation’s history, NBC News received a package from the student that contained a video of him ranting and complaining about being bullied. / 13 killed … April 3, 2009, in Binghamton, New York, a gunman killed 13 people and injured four others at an immigrant services center before killing himself. Obama called it ‘an act of senseless violence.’ /

13 killed … Nov. 5, 2009, a U.S. Army Medical Corps psychiatrist, killed 13 people and injured 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas. He has been sentenced to death. /  12 killed … July 20, 2012, a gunman opened fire during a screening of “The Dark Knight Rises,” in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring more than 70. The shooter was sentenced to life in prison without parole after a jury rejected his insanity plea. /  27 killed … Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman killed 27 people, including his mother, 20 elementary school kids and six school staff and faculty at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He also took his own life. The shooter suffered from extreme mental health issues that weren’t treated, and was preoccupied with violence, a report from state officials found. /  14 killed … Dec. 2, 2015, 14 people were killed in an attack at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, a state-run facility that provides services to developmentally disabled people and trains social workers who care for them. The husband-and-wife assailants were eventually killed by police in a shootout. /

26 killed … Nov. 5, 2017, a gunman entered a rural Texas church and opened fire, killing 26 people. At least 19 people were hospitalized with injuries. His victims’ ages ranged 5 years old to 72 years old. The gunman was later found dead inside his vehicle thanks to two local residents, Johnnie Langendorff and Stephen Willeford who chased him down and ‘offed’ him. /  17 killed … Feb. 14, 2018, police responded to reports of shots fired at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A former student was taken into custody after the Valentine’s Day massacre that left 17 dead and wounded at least 14 others, both in and outside of the school. The suspect 19, had recently been expelled from the school for disciplinary reasons. /  12 killed … May 31, 2019, a gunman opened fire at the Virginia Beach Municipal Center, killing 12 people. Police fatally shot the suspect, a longtime city engineer. All of those killed were city employees except for one person, who was a contractor. The gunman had submitted his resignation earlier that day.

Over and out.

Time for today’s MAGA Pill – President Donald J. Trump – KAG!

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Full Robert Stacy McCain, American Spectator: Hopelessness and Hate

Monica Showalter, American Thinker: Labeling El Paso killer Republican Left dishonesty

Sundance, Conservative Treehouse: El Paso Mass Shooting – 21 year old gunman in custody