Sex, religion, and violence

Bret Stephens today:

....the idea that white supremacy is what haunts Asian-Americans rests on empirically thin ice. Like so much else in public discourse today, it’s another capital-T ideological Truth in search of lower-case-t factual truths to validate its predetermined, overstretched hypotheses. 

That it has the laudable goal of “raising awareness” and “combating hate” does not relieve journalists of the responsibility to report facts scrupulously, not play to fears in the service of a higher good.

In the meantime, readers deserve to know how the perpetrator was able to buy the murder weapon on the day of his killing spree. 

They ought to learn more about the religious mania that allegedly fueled his toxic anxieties. 

They deserve to know just how widespread the sex trade is in massage spas, and why local authorities seem to look the other way. 

And they ought to see where the evidence may yet lead, including the still-open possibility of hidden racial animus.

See also Evangelicals Must Confront Their Toxic Sexual Politics.

‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where it regularly happens

This story just in:

BOULDER, CO—In the hours following a violent rampage in Colorado in which a lone attacker killed 10 individuals and injured several others, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Monday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place. 

“This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop them,” said Kansas resident Andrew Thompson, echoing sentiments expressed by tens of millions of individuals who live in a nation where over half of the world’s deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the past 50 years and whose citizens are 20 times more likely to die of gun violence than those of other developed nations. 

“It’s a shame, but what can we do? There really wasn’t anything that was going to keep this individual from snapping and killing a lot of people if that’s what he really wanted.” 

At press time, residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as “helpless.”

Gun nuts say we need more armed citizens.