Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock and James Holmes were all behind mass shootings.
Adam Lanza, Stephen Paddock and James Holmes were all behind mass shootings.
Opinion
Losers, loners and lunatics are all behind the mass shootings bringing America to its knees, and they're almost all men, so why not just stop granting firearms licences to male persons, Candace Sutton asks.
As the USA recoils from yet another mass shooting, the usual doomed debate by the anti-gun lobby flops around uselessly at the feet of the lock'n'load crew, the National Rifle Association.
There's a smugness behind the expressed horror at the carnage because the powerful NRA knows that nothing will change because no president wishes to commit political suicide.
Oops, another d***head got hold of a gun and decided he'd make a big fellow of his little self and shoot some people.
Or, in Stephen Paddock's case, 47 firearms obscenely rigged for wholesale slaughter.
A makeshift memorial for the victims of the Las Vegas shooting. Photo / AP
Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock.
Jeez, how did that happen? There's only 300 million firearms in America and an uncalculated number of male losers.
As is their practice these days in the wake of a mass shooting, the National Rifle Association's social media accounts have gone dark.
The NRA's website, Twitter feed and Facebook page fell silent and will presumably wait it out as time moves on and Hillary Clinton shuts up.
They used to trot out the line "Guns don't kill people, people kill people", but that has gotten kind of old.
Well, how about this instead: Guns don't kill people, men kill people. American men mostly, where in the land of the free 12,000 people fall victim to gun deaths.
America stages 31 per cent of mass shootings, despite having only five per cent of the world's population.
Yes, three gun toting women are among America's mass killers.
Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, pictured when he was younger. Photo / ABC
Omar Mateen, the shooter in the Orlando nightclub killing. Photo / File
But when it comes to mass shootings, it's overwhelmingly men: Sandy Hook, Pulse nightclub Orlando, Columbine High, The Dark Night movie theatre shooting, Virginia Tech, Washington Naval Command, Oikos University, to name a few.
The Washington Post has compiled a handy recording of shootings of four or more people by a lone shooter since 1966.
The starting point is when ex-Marine sniper Charles Whitman killed his wife, his mother and then 14 more people from a 27-storey tower at the University of Texas.
In 131 mass shootings, there were 948 victims. All but three of the shooters were men and brought an average of three weapons to the task.
In the numb days following a mass shooting, experts pick over the motives and minds of the males who are often not around to be questioned or forensically examined.
In every case, it is clearly madness that any of these people should have had access to a weapon.
James Holmes, who killed 12 moviegoers in an Aurora cinema. Photo / File
Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho.
They are all clearly cuckoo.
Adam Lanza, who gunned down 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School before killing himself in 2012 was a social outcast estranged from his father.
Columbine high shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - who laughed as they killed 13 people before committing suicide in 1999 - were bullied misfits.
Omar Mateen, the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooter, of 49 victims was sexually confused, a drunk and a social misfit. Police shot him dead.
Seung Hui Cho, the 23-year-old student, who killed 32 people before killing himself at Virginia Tech in 2007, was a stalker and a loner.
James Holmes gunned down 12 people including a six-year-old girl in an Aurora, Colorado cinema where The Dark Knight Rises was screening in July, 2012.
Before the massacre, Holmes had seen three mental health professionals and was a "broken" man who didn't like other people.
A woman sits on a curb at the scene of the Las Vegas shooting. Photo / AP
He survived and is serving life without parole.
George Hennard, who carried out America's fifth deadliest shooting was angry, withdrawn and hated women and ethnic minorities.
In 1991, he drove his pick-up truck through the front window of Luby's Cafeteria in Texas and gunned down 23 people before killing himself.
Six years earlier, in 1984, James Huberty shot dead 21 adults and children at a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, before being killed by police.
Huberty was a domestically-violent undertaker who had suffered polio, "blamed God" for taking his mother away and held conspiracy theories about foreign banks and the Soviet Union ruining his businesses and society.
Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper of 1966, had a gambling and drug problem, had been discharged from the Marines and separated from his wife.
Before killing his mother and wife, and going on his shooting rampage, he left notes saying he wanted to "relieve both his wife and mother of the suffering of this world, and to save them the embarrassment of his actions".
I'll bet their relatives were grateful for that sparing, Charlie.
It has not yet emerged what mental, physical, social, financial or other failing motivated Stephen Paddock to stage his lethal, almost cinematic slaughter of people gently easing into the simple Sunday night pleasure of a country music festival.
Maybe he was just a simple d***head with a grandiose vision of what he should be remembered for, because he hadn't really achieved much.
The point is that men, and in particular American men, have proven time and time again they cannot be trusted with guns.
The thousands that do own and use weapons responsibly will object to being tarred with the same brush.
But as weakness, mental instability and inadequate personalities are not against the law, keeping the world safe for everyone's family members requires extreme measures.
Men carry out mass shootings. The majority of murderers and serial killers are men.
If it was any other group in society which had these statistics, there'd be an uprising.
