The reporting on the mass murder of Parkland, Fla. is the one millionth example of most of us passively letting the left dictate how reality is to be described and discussed.  Let's start off by declaring without hesitation that Nikolas Cruz is not a "shooter" or a "gunman."  He is a "mass murderer."  On the U.S. Olympic team, there are shooters.  When one of us goes to the "shooting range" to practice, we are shooters.

See the difference?  Not subtle, is it?  Would anyone want to openly disagree or debate this?  Evil sub-humans like Cruz and Omar Mateen, etc. are mass "murderers," not "shooters" or "gunmen."

Heavens...we might be seen as being "judgmental," as the murderer has not yet been proven guilty.  OK, then let's used the good old phrase "alleged murderers" to describe the Cruzes and Mateens of the world.  Note that you seldom see the phrase "alleged shooter"...just "shooter."  (By the way, when a murderer uses a knife, do we see the term "knifeman" used in reports?  Yeah, go ahead and Google it.)

This is no little, trivial thing.  Even the left loves never stops reminding us, "words matter."  The problem is that we've bought into the nomenclature of the left, and our doing so has shifted the conversation dramatically in their favor and kept us from focusing and thinking and seeing clearly, and it prevents us from solving our problems – in this case, what seems to be the growth of mass murders.  This is destructive because it focuses our minds on the "shooting" – i.e., the use of guns and not the crime of mass murder.

Think of it this way: sadly, we've also bought into the left's labeling of themselves as "liberals" and "progressives."  Can someone explain what is liberal about the left?  What was liberal about Obama, or Hillary?  They're not in favor of more "liberty."  No, they are authoritarians...often borderline totalitarians.  The term "liberal" comes from the word "liberty."  Harry Truman was a liberal...and over 70 years ago, he decided that we should drop a couple of atom bombs on our enemy to stop a war that had raged for too long.  That was a good thing...and almost everyone who follows  American Thinker would vote for him were he running for president today. 

Here is a good explanation of maybe why mass murderers have been proliferating: in 2016, more than $190 billion were spent in advertising in the U.S. based on the proven fact that bombing the public with images and imagery will, over time, change people's behavior – e.g., buy more deodorant.  Why do you think the left prohibits TV advertising for cigarettes?  Leftists are rightly convinced that fewer people will smoke if the public is not bombed with favorable images of smokers.  It works.

Hollywood is as much to blame as or more to blame than anything in the proliferation, almost "popularity" of these mass murders.  Read this excellent piece by Brent Bozell:

Matt Philbin of the Media Research Center reported that an astounding 589 incidents of violence were featured [in] 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle,' 'American Assassin,' Stephen King's 'It' and 'mother!'  And that's just four movies.  It gets worse: There were no less [sic] than 212 incidents of gun violence, and the body count is at least 192.  In over 100 incidents of gun violence, some kind of automatic weapon is used (which is why the numbers are undercounted – researchers literally couldn't count fast enough).

'It' is the monster hit of the fall, with a reported domestic box-office take of $315 million and counting.  The movie has only three gun scenes, but one features a penetrating captive bolt pistol, which is traditionally used to stun animals prior to slaughter.  Victims are stabbed and bludgeoned, and the killer clown even bites off the arm of a little child.  'Mother!' includes an atrocious scene in which a crowd dismembers and eats a baby.

'Kingsman: The Golden Circle' was the No. 1 film that weekend.  It's the sequel to the hyperviolent 'Kingsman: The Secret Service,' which contained one of the grisliest murder scenes that Hollywood has ever produced; in it, the antagonist activates some kind of demonic neurological wave that causes church parishioners to slaughter one another until they're all dead.

'Kingsman: The Golden Circle' includes 118 incidents of gun violence (70 of them with automatic weapons) and another 164 incidents of other violence.  Philbin lists the instances, saying, 'There are body slams, punches, explosions, ripping off limbs, ripping out vocal cords, putting people in meat grinders, cannibalism, lasso violence, slicing people in half and eyes randomly exploding from people's heads.'

The Hypocrite in Chief of this production is actress Julianne Moore, who plays the drug-lord supervillain.  Moore went on Jimmy Fallon's late-night show to receive the usual love bombs.  Fallon said, ''Kingsman' alone is fantastic!'  Moore responded: 'Thank you!  It's a fun movie, right?  It's really, really fun.'"  

And compare the kind of violence in films described above with that depicted in films prior to, say, the mid-1970s or 1980s.  Track the popularity of mass murders like Parkland with the change in quantity and nature of killings shown in movies since that earlier period.  I know, I know: there was Samuel Peckinpah and Quentin Tarantino, but their movies were often denounced as being vehicles for the sake of broadcasting violence.  Today, rampant violence is the new norm for entertainment (movies, music, internet, and videogames).

In his fine book Boys Adrift, Leonard Sax writes about video games, specifically "Grand Theft Auto," one of the most popular video games of all time:

When military combat gets boring, he [a male "gamer"] can carjack some geek's Corvette and drive around an astonishingly detailed simulation of 1980s Miami, right down to the music he can play on the (virtual) car's indash radio.  Your son drives around the city for a minute, then slams on the brakes, bringing his (virtual) car to a screeching stop.  A pretty young woman is walking toward the car.  She smiles and asks, 'You want a good time?'  She's a prostitute.  Your son lets her in the car and has (simulated) sex with her – then shoots her in the head with a pistol he stole earlier from a police officer he murdered.  As she dies, blood pouring from her head, he retrieves the money he gave her.  After all, in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (from which this scene is taken), the player gets extra points for shooting the prostitute and recovering the money.  Megapoints are awarded for shooting police officers.

Do you think the stunning, vivid, meticulously choreographed violent imagery produced by Hollywood and the cool disrupters of the video game industry might be having an effect on the growing popularity of mass murder?  Might it be just enough to push an already unbalanced person over the edge to take action?  Do you think the left wants us to understand all of this?  What would happen overnight if we started calling "liberals" the true leftists and authoritarians that they are?  And how would our thinking about the atrocities of Las Vegas, Pulse nightclub, and Parkland change?  Would we be focused on the NRA?

Enough!  They are murderers, because calling them shooters or gunmen is not descriptive of what they've done and why what they've done must be stopped.  And those trying to wreck the country are leftists, not "liberals."  It'll take some time to get used to speaking clearly but with a little practice, we might be able to pull it off.  And this is no trivial thing.  As the man said: "The first step in solving any problem is properly identifying it."