It’s been nearly a fortnight since a Las Vegas music festival became our latest mass murder battlefield, setting yet another casualty record in America’s well-armed war against itself. Yet, the dead and wounded stats weren’t the only thing that made this rampage so horrific. There was this: the assassin didn’t tell us why he did it. The guy killed 58 people, wounded 489 others and then killed himself, all without leaving a single manifesto, Facebook post or YouTube video explaining himself, not even an angry post-it note. What kind of demented lunatic does something like that?
That, of course, is the question we always focus on in the days and weeks after a mass shooting. Why did this happen? What was the motive? We have to know the why in order to process the what, in all of its carnage. We have a ritual for our mass shootings. Just like taking communion or sitting Shiva, there are steps to be taken, a chronology to follow. First comes the breaking news of the shooting, followed by a preliminary body count. Then we tweet our thoughts and prayers, and move on to argue about whether it’s too soon to utter the words “gun control”. Then we are ready to hear why the shooter did it, an essential process step that leads to closure based on the knowledge that this evil was perpetrated by some pathetic nutcase who had a grudge, a vision, voices in his head, terror in his heart, or had been off meds for a month.
It’s been 12 days now since the music stopped and bullets rained down from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. We still have absolutely no idea why the guy did it. Las Vegas police have frustratingly created a new ritual by announcing daily that they have looked at more than 1,000 leads but are still without a motive. For the first few days, police spokespeople said they were confident they would eventually have an answer to that question of why. More recently, the city’s undersheriff, Kevin McMahill, qualified that assurance: “I believe we will have an answer,” he said. “But that answer may also end up being ‘we don’t know why he did it.’”
How could that be? Americans have always known the motive for our mass murders, or at least thought we did. For example:
• Columbine High School in 1999; 13 dead, 20 wounded. The two teenage shooters were supposedly social outcasts whose journals contained detailed plans to blow the school up with bombs.
• Virginia Tech in 2007; 32 dead, 17 wounded. The perpetrator was a student with mental health issues. He left behind an 1,800-word statement and 27 QuickTime videos expressing a hatred for the rich and his views on religion.
• Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012; 26 dead. The 20-year-old shooter filled numerous dark web sites with his screed on the evils of humanity and how society was trying to manipulate him into following an immoral value system.
• Orlando’s Pulse Club in 2016; 49 dead, 53 wounded. The killer told hostage negotiators that he had pledged his allegiance to ISIS and the deaths were to avenge the pain inflicted on Syrians and Iraqis.
Even in the old days, when mass murderers achieved their status through serial killings, we always seemed to know how peculiar they were. Ted Bundy decapitated 12 of his victims and kept the heads as mementos. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, claimed he was told by a neighbor’s dog to murder people. Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious serial killer and cannibal, had a childhood obsession of killing animals and preserving their bones with bleach.
The sheer bizarreness of these mass killers is oddly comforting to us. Their total otherness sets them apart from our world, a removal that coaxes us into believing these horrific acts of evil are somehow isolated and outside of our everyday lives. And that’s why the lack of a motive in the Las Vegas massacre is so unsettling. The shooter was a 64-year-old man who acquired his wealth through real estate. He enjoyed enough status at the Mandalay to get free rooms, including the suite he used as his shooting perch. He was an obsessive gambler, but had no known debt issues. He didn’t traffic in social media, had no criminal record and no extreme political or religious beliefs. Those close to him described him as a good, decent man. So, why did he do it?
I’ll tell you why he did it. The answer has been hiding in plain sight since the first bullet flew through the shattered glass of a hotel window. He did it because he could. He did it because he lived in a country that allowed him to assemble 47 guns, multiple loaded high-capacity magazines and automatic firing devices. He did it because he was able to haul his arsenal into a high-rise suite of a luxury hotel on the Las Vegas strip. He did it because nobody stopped him. Nobody stopped him because, right up until the moment he pulled the trigger, he was just another ordinary Second Amendment-loving, gun-toting guy.
And therein lies our terror. America’s worst mass murder was executed by someone who looked and acted like the guy next door. In a country that has 5% of the world’s population, but almost half of its civilian-owned guns – and 31% of its mass shootings – this should put all of us on edge. We can’t write this carnage off as the product of some radicalized lunatic who fell between the cracks of our bureaucracy. When a seemingly normal, law-abiding, senior citizen acquires a desire to kill as many people as possible, the only thing that could stop him is a lack of access to guns. Until that access is seriously restricted, all we can do is keep tweeting our thoughts and prayers.