Las Vegas gunman finally bet on a sure thing
At the moment of slaughter, the Las Vegas killer, a retired white male loner who described gambling as his job, had what he always wanted, total power and complete certainty.
His guns were on bipods, which allow pivoting, and his non-stop shots would be steady, not that it mattered with a crowd that size. Even errant shots would have hit people. It would have been hard to miss human flesh packed in so close 32 storeys down and the helpless humans had to take what they were sent.
It was like hunting moose from a helicopter, so sadistic, so cowardly. It’s why we don’t admire snipers. The enemy, the panicked lumbering animal below, doesn’t stand a chance.
As it turned out the bullets killed 59 people and injured or caused injury to 527, which is the kind of toll you see in war. They’re butcheries of innocents — a My Lai kind of event — and are called war crimes.
I will not use the killer’s name nor place him in a scale of modern U.S. mass murderers because the next American murderous male is out there. He’ll want to up this killer’s score and make his own name glitteringly famous, a shorthand for monsters.
Let’s do an Eric Harris, a Dylan Klebold. It’s Columbine time. I shan’t indulge it.
He is said to have used “bump stocks” to turn his semi-automatic rifles into automatics, meaning an “AK-47-type rifle” basically, a machine gun that can fire 400-800 rounds a minute.
One of the hallmarks of mass shootings is that when media refer to guns, resentful gun-owners send out voluminous un-paragraphed emails explaining gun intricacies and terminology, as they will to me.
Gun hounds feel so misunderstood, so “stigmatized” to use a word too often sprinkled about these days.
They are a tribe. They campaign against the use of “machine gun” because they know that even mentioning it in terms of public spaces makes normal people shudder. In the same way, a gunman is a mere “shooter.” Bullets are referred to as “rounds,” a dry inoffensive word for a metal spike that tears a path through the body.
As trauma surgeons will tell you, the bullet isn’t really the problem, it’s the damage it did on the way. Your body is a shotgun shack, every little room pierced.
The killer put a lot of work into making it easy for himself. He probably had a sore index finger from pressing the trigger steadily down, the kind of problem I have if I spend too long online, clicking and scrolling.
He was wildly over-gunned, with 23 guns in his hotel room and 19 still at home. He may have been under time pressure, as he had bomb materials that may have gone unused (or may not have).
He wanted to kill all 22,000 people on the concert grounds, possibly having stalked them through his gun scopes for hours before letting loose.
For all the usual nonsense about him having raised no warnings, he was just like his own country. There were plenty of red flags. As the Onion put it, the U.S. “had become increasingly isolated in recent years, often making other nations uncomfortable in its presence. It clearly had some mental health problems, and it’s spent decades stockpiling guns and ammunition.”
The killer was silent, secretive and hostile. Gambling full-time is not normal, even if people in Nevada find it so. Having a psychopathic suicidal bankrobbing conman father is not normal. A secret arsenal is not normal.
Also, he was 64. There are two ways to age: become wiser and gentler, or rage at the passing of the years, hate the world, blame other humans for a failed life. I doubt his gambling had ended well. It tends not to. Big winners lose big, eventually.
Here I’m speculating about failure. Many older white men suspect the world they once ran without competition from women or minorities is being handed over. Men who age well are happy to see the world improve. Others, notably American politicians, are just sick about it.
Like everyone at this point, I am speculating. Was this killer an individual or a representative of a rotting part of American life? Was he an outlier or a signifier? I don’t know.
I know it will happen again though. We all know that Americans will do nothing to stop it.