Paddock or Trump, who is the more dangerous psychopath!

The bloodbath at a music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Monday, shocked the world. According to the latest casualty toll over 70 were killed by the 64-year-old gunman, while some seven hundred others have suffered various degrees of injury from the hail of bullets Stephen Paddock fired from the hotel room overlooking the gathering.

Iran’s English language daily “Kayhan International” has drawn attention to some interesting facts in its viewpoint column on Wednesday titled “Paddock or Trump, Who is the More Dangerous Psychopath!” as follows:

It was an act of terrorism, yet the US and western media are not calling it terrorism. They have double standards, and have reserved the ‘terrorist’ label for Islamic freedom movements defending their homes, hearths, and honour in the face of the Zionists and the Takfiris – such as Hamas of the usurped land of Palestine and Lebanon’s legendry resistance movement, Hezbollah.

For the time being, the US authorities are investigating his motives, after finding a huge arsenal of deadly weapons from his hotel room and home.

Some have called him a psychopath, but if this same Stephen Paddock was in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, or Afghanistan, on a mission for the notorious ‘Blackwater’, massacring the innocent Muslim people of the said countries, he would neither be called a psychopath nor put behind bars.

What was, however, more shocking than the crime committed in Las Vegas (the crime capital and sin center of the US), was Donald Trump’s description of Paddock as “sick” and “demented”.

Imagine the kettle calling the pot “black”.

The quixotic US president, who has been called a “dotard” by the supreme leader of North Korea for his threats and warmongering policy, seems to have forgotten that his own record of unpardonable crimes is more sanguine than that of Paddock or any of those trigger-happy gunmen who almost daily go berserk in American cities pumping bullets into shoppers in malls or passers-by.

The world, especially the Muslim World, remembers how the roguish Trump ordered dropping of a huge “Mother Of All Bombs” in Achin in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, murdering scores of civilians on the pretext they were terrorists.

Then he ordered the firing of 59 tomahawk missiles on Syria’s Shayrat airbase, when neither the government of Syria was at war with the US nor has it threatened security in the US, but had exercised its legitimate right to bomb foreign-supported terrorists, whose targeted arsenal contained chemical components.

This shows what the criminal-infested US society is made of. Stephen Paddock, like Donald Trump, is a citizen of the US, but unlike the madman in the White House, he didn’t seem to have the patience to wait for a few years and try his luck at the presidency, which in case of his election as the Chief Executive, would have given him more murderous powers to kill anybody at will, as Donald has done, and intends to do on a grand scale by barking war at North Korea, and threatening to withdraw from the international 7-nation accord regarding Iran’s peaceful nuclear project.

Kayhan International said: We feel sympathy for the victims and offer condolences to the bereaved American families. We would like to see a safe and secure US for all American citizens and those who live in the US. But this requires a deep soul-searching and the shaking up of the entire US administration.

Gun control, alcohol prohibition and other social ills cannot be tackled when rogues and warmongers get elected to the White House.

Commenting on the Las Vegas massacre, Patrick Martin writing for the World Socialist Web Site, says in his article titled: “The Social Pathology of the Las Vegas Massacre.”

Clearly, this was not the act of a normal person. Some form of mental illness, even if not previously diagnosed, must be involved in Paddock’s crime. But there is certainly a socially induced element in this terrible event. The frequency of these occurrences cannot be explained in purely individual and personal terms. The Las Vegas massacre is a peculiarly American crime, arising out of the social pathology of a deeply troubled society.

What is the social context of this latest episode of domestic mass killing? The United States has been at war more or less continuously for the past 27 years. The US government has treated tens of millions of people in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa as targets for extermination through bombs, bullets, and drone-fired missiles. These wars have penetrated deeply into American culture, celebrated endlessly in film, television, music and even sport.

Social relations within the United States, characterized by the growth of economic inequality on a scale that exceeds any previous era in American history, fuel a culture of indifference, and even outright contempt for human life.

Patrick Martin, elaborating on his point wrote: The damage inflicted on American society by constant war and deepening social inequality has found expression in an endless series of events like the mass shooting in Las Vegas. With only 5 percent of the world’s population, the US accounts for 30 percent of the mass shootings. And the scale of such horrors is increasing: the four worst mass shootings, in terms of casualty toll, and six of the seven worst, have taken place since 2007.

Corporate media pundits and government officials are incapable of more than perfunctory expressions of shock and dismay over such atrocities, which recur with appalling frequency in the United States. Even uttering such rote statements seems to be too much to ask of President Trump, whose remarks Monday morning were both banal and palpably insincere. How can anyone take seriously a foul-mouthed misogynist and pathological liar as he begins a sentence with the words, “Scripture teaches us”?

As for his moronic statement that the killings in Las Vegas were “pure evil,” such a characterization explains nothing. It doesn’t even explain Trump himself, who gave a speech two weeks ago at the United Nations where he threatened to use nuclear weapons to incinerate the 27 million inhabitants of North Korea. Yet CNN, ever the sycophant, described his televised remarks on Las Vegas as “pitch perfect.”

Martin concluded that during the 16 years since the 9/11 incidents in New York, during which the US government has been supposedly engaged in a “war on terror,” an average of one American per year has been killed by a foreign terrorist. During the same period, at least 10,000 Americans have been killed every year by other Americans.

AS/ME