Over 58 innocent people have lost their lives when a gunman, Stephen Paddock, a 64 year old retired accountant shot festival goers from his hotel room on the 32nd floor of a hotel. No one knows his motives, and maybe no one ever will since he killed himself. As you might expect, there's a lot of media attention, but I want to say a thing or two about the initial reports of this tragic event. All media channels and newspapers have similar headlines with the words 'Man kills 58 people' in different variations. This is of course not untrue since he is a man and he killed those people. But let me tell you how the headlines would've been if that man was slightly brown, black or had facial hair:
As you can see, it's the same event, the same tragedy, and the same number of lives lost. However, the narrative is quite different depending on who the perpetrator is. If the suspect is a white male, the story is completely different. In fact, the headlines normally read:
It's not only the media, but politicians too. This is what the mayor of Las Vegas tweeted:
So how come the mayor of Las Vegas came to the conclusion that Paddock is a mad man? Does she have his medical records? Of course not. Because he is a white man, there can be no other explanation except that he was mad. She denies his basic right; to call him by his voluntary actions - a murderer and a terrorist. His own family did not say anything about him having any medical conditions. In a report by the Telegraph newspapers, "Relatives described Paddock as “just a guy” who was never in a hurry and retired to the Nevada desert to enjoy a dry climate and Las Vegas’s casinos. - "We can’t understand what happened," a distraught Eric Paddock, Stephen’s brother, told reporters outside his home in Orlando, Florida.
According to his own family, Paddock was just a regular guy who decided to massacre innocent people. There is nothing else to it. Just because he is a white man doesn't mean there has to be a medical explanation for his actions. When a suspect is a white man, he is humanised, despite his terrorist actions. I have yet to see one media outlet that labelled him as what he is; a terrorist. The most 'out there' headline called him a 'gunman' as if he just went into a bank and was holding people hostage. When the suspect of a similar terrorist attacks is of a different race, and especially if he has any connections to the Middle East or Africa, or maybe his neighbour's dog once saw someone that looked like a Muslim, then they demonise that suspect without any reservation. That is the world we live in; a world where two men can commit the exact same crime, but where one is painted as a human being, and another as monster who only lived to die.
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