The only people who benefit from right wing commentators saying ‘what they would have done’ after a mass shooting are gun manufacturers

The Las Vegas gun attack on Sunday night killed at least 59 people and wounded 527. Gunman Stephen Paddock set up two assault rifles in a 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino to the south of the Vegas Strip. As country singer Jason Aldean performed at the end of the three day Route 91 Harvest Festival some 500 yards away, Paddock opened fire on the crowd. The attack caused chaos, death, and destruction.

It is one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.

After such an event, you might expect some bipartisan reflection on the violence and a commitment to honestly confronting the elements of society that led to the deaths – more than just falling along party lines, an act such as this should bring the country together.

But instead of taking part in an honest discussion about gun violence in America, the reaction of many right wing pundits and politicians to the shooting has followed a usual, predictable pattern: a bunch of tough guys and gals from behind their keyboards telling the world what they would have done in the place of the victims of the latest mass shooting.

Right wing commentators are allergic to discussing the origins of the problem of gun violence in the United States. Possible solutions and a path forward to reduce the annual mass shooting death count are anathema to the American right. Instead, they retreat into their imagination – and in doing so help to erase the possibility of a national conversation on gun violence in the US.

The National Review's Kevin Williamson told us on Twitter that civilians shooting at the Mandalay hotel room from where the gunfire came from – on the 32nd floor – would have killed the gunman. Leaving aside the fact that targeting the room and the window would have likely led to many more deaths in other rooms, who has the marksmanship skills to pull that off? Williamson didn't answer that question, instead retroactively rewriting his argument to address Charles Whitman, the 1966 University of Texas shooter who was finally stopped by three policeman and a civilian who climbed the tower he was in and killed him. Of course, a number of people had tried to shoot Whitman from the ground. Unsurprisingly, they failed to stop the gunman.

The conservative imagination factory that revs up after an episode of gun violence isn't limited to "what I'd do" fairy tales. Right wing action movie daydreams include the initiation of their chosen cultural adversaries. Former Congressman Joe Walsh, who is attempting to reinvent himself as a noxious Rush Limbaugh revamp, took the opportunity provided by the Vegas massacre to conflate the NFL National Anthem protests with the police reaction to the shooting, tweeting: "They knelt. Officers stood up." It was incomprehensible nonsense as an actual thought, but the point seemed, at least somewhat, to be that football players should have charged the Mandalay Hotel.

Those fantasies work, at least for gun manufacturers. In the hours after the Las Vegas shooting, manufacturer American Outdoor Brands, Inc., saw its stock prices leap by three percent on Monday as the death toll from the violence also rose. Every time there's a massacre that makes headlines for the utter depravity and brutality of the action, gun sales and stocks soar.

It's not out of the question to assume that at least part of those sales are based on the impulse to be the "good guy with the gun" that can take out an active shooter and provide some level of vigilante security for the next time when, not if, a shooting like this occurs. The fact that Paddock's attack effectively proves the lie of the "good guy with a gun" is irrelevant. Mass delusions of one's own capability in the face of danger, helped along by influential voices on the right, will fuel the purchases of weapons for the next week.

Right wing dreams for Vegas echo then Daily Beast columnist Megan McArdle's 2012 recommendation in the wake of Sandy Hook for children to charge gunmen who come to their schools. The object of the fantastical action movie may change, but the story remains the same. For the right wing commentariat, it's never time to actually confront the issues behind the violence.