A forensic psychiatrist told Fox News on Tuesday morning that CNN was to blame for mass shootings like what transpired in Las Vegas.
“I think that CNN’s going to have to answer how they demonize gun enthusiasts and how CNN actually contributes to mass shooting,” Michael Welner said. “And I think that they do.”
Welner appeared on Fox & Friends to try to answer the question as to why Stephen Paddock opened fire on a Las Vegas concert Sunday night. Offering his perspective that Paddock did not seem to fit the profile of many other mass shooters, he concluded that he must have had a cause, and that cause must have been guns themselves.
“Absolutely, people who are gun enthusiasts and who are populists or nationalists in this country are dehumanized. They’re demonized,” Welner said, agreeing with the completely unfounded assumption that Paddock perceived the attendees of a country music festival as being gun-toting Trump supporters. “His mind-set is that they deserve to die.”
Welner insisted he wasn’t speculating and didn’t know Paddock’s ideology, but nevertheless continued, “What I am saying is when you kill complete strangers and try to kill as many as possible, you’re trying to create a spectacle.” And to Welner, CNN is to blame for helping create that spectacle.
Welner has a long history of defending conservative positions in his arm-chair diagnoses of various people. For example, he defended President Trump as the “embodiment of healthy narcissism.” He blamed the San Bernardino shooting on “the state of feminism in Muslim America,” suggesting that attack could have been “the birth of ISIS in America.”
After the Sandy Hook shooting, Welner blamed the violence on video games, telling the ladies of The View, “The major myth of this that we are all making a mistake about is to focus on guns and mental health at the bottom of this. Guns may make things worse, guns may be a contributor, some people are mentally ill and deserve help and need help but aren’t getting it — I get it — but that’s not why this is happening.” He asserted then, as he did Tuesday morning, that as long as the media creates a spectacle, it’ll inspire other shooters.
So far, investigators have found no evidence that would explain Paddock’s motive for the shooting.