How Big An Exit Wound? Trump and The Shootings

In the wake of this weekend's "shootapalooza" The Omnivore made an observation: if the twin tragedies were enough to take down the hyper-resilient 8chan--even for a little while--might they be bad enough to seriously wound Trump?

The Omnivore was asked if he was linking the two.

He wasn't--not . . . exactly.

The El Paso shooting combined several highly visceral and disturbing elements into one tidy, abomnibal package:

1. The shooter hurt and killed a lot of people. This was a "high score" shooting that was not quite as appalling as gunning down kindergartners but came close enough.
2. The shooter published a manifesto and got cheered on by the GamerGate /pol/ crowd on 8chan (should any GG'er be offended, The Omnivore is oh-so-happy to obligie. You earned it, you cute little sea lion, you!). The spectacle of an explanatory document combined with the stamp of incel-approval is skin-crawling.
3. The shooter's personal political stripe--his language--his take--comes straight off of Fox and straight out of the president's mouth.
4. Trump was silent for quite a while (golfing) and then gave a speech that was decent (in that it was teleprompteriffic)--but then pulled the predictable reverse when he didn't get sufficient boot-licking for it. He won't call it terrorism. He won't blame guns. He won't talk about how Hispanics are or are not "invaders."

In the wake of the shooting, 8chan lost its hosting--gained its hosting--and then the hosting-assholes (who also do Gab and The Daily Stormer) lost their support contracts from non-nazi businesses (did they nazi that coming?). This is pretty tectonic: 8chan survived the Christchurch massacre under almost identical conditions.

So what does this mean for Trump? Well, it means two things.

1. There Seems To Be Greater Acknowledgement Of Trump's Language

If nothing else, normal people are able to clearly see that calling immigrants invaders kinda classes them as an enemy army. They can also see Trump laughing off a yelled-out suggestion that people shoot them (he allowed it for "the panhandle"). 

They can see that he didn't refer to this shit as terrorism. They may understand that he and his media have pretty much sounded the "we're bein' over-run" alert for, well, his whole campaign since the bottom of that elevator.

Now that the language has a bodycount ordinary people may well be disturbed.

2. The Whole Guns Thing Is Still A Problem

After back-to-back shootings with high capacity high-lethality weapons--both of which produced a mountain of bodies in seconds (police responses were fast, people around were armed, etc.) the realization that the force-multiplier that an AR-style weapon gives a bad actor is, well, pretty extreme.

Even with a shining example of this--even if you think that Trump doesn't have "a racist bone in his body" or that "all this 'invader stuff'" is just lefty-finger-pointing--you still come away with the realization that Trump and McConnell don't yet seem to be motivated to do a damn thing about assault weapons.

Now, some people--the Trumpaloo voter--will wrap themselves in the comforting blanket of "it won't change anything" and, The Omnivore agrees: banning assault weapons sure won't "solve the problem."

But at this point? At this point is  your suburban voter still that disengaged? We banned fucking Lawn Darts, for God's sake. Banning assault weapons (whatever they are) might not fix everything. It might not fix anything--but at this point it's telling that Congress and the president won't even try it.

The Bulwark is thinking something similar.

The Omnivore isn't overly  hopeful that we'll see a big decline in Trump's numbers--but if this shooting was enough to takedown 8chan in the collateral damage zone, maybe it's enough to unstick the floor of Trump's numbers a little.