Vegas shooter had no motive. They never do.
Cosh, A13
Here’s an anecdote you probably don’t know. It’s about an American mass murderer, a spree killer. This guy went on a shooting rampage in his hometown, then went home, barricaded himself, and exchanged fire with the police. A reporter for the local paper had been talking to survivors and witnesses. It was daytime, late morning: they didn’t have any trouble identifying the killer. The reporter came up with a long shot: he looked up the killer in the phone book, took a deep breath, and tried his number. It worked. The killer answered and they had a short conversation. “How many have you killed?” the reporter asked softly.
“I don’t know yet, because I haven’t counted them. But it looks like a pretty good score.”
“Why are you killing people?”
“I don’t know. I can’t answer that yet. I’m too busy.”
At that moment the police moved in with tear gas. You can probably tell that I am playing a rest-of-the-story game with you. “It looks like a pretty good score” sounds like the language of a nihilist spree murderer from our quantitative era of spreadsheets and follower counts. Few of you will know that this was a conversation between journalist Philip Buxton and Howard Unruh, a schizophrenic combat veteran whose “Walk of Death” in Camden, N.J., took place on Sept. 6, 1949, and claimed 13 lives.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation closed its inquiry into the mass shooting that happened in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017. Among lone spree killers, the perpetrator of this one recorded the highest “score” in American history: he killed 58 people attending an open-air country music festival and wounded 422 more. The FBI has had to confess that it cannot find a “single or clear motivating factor” to explain the massacre, which required much preparation.
This admission of failure has revived the usual ghoulish round of conspiratorial nonsense: it is supposed to be suspicious that the police didn’t find a “motive,” so they must be hiding one. But how many mass shooting rampages do end up having a motive? There are some, in the “going postal” category, that represent genuine, targeted, suicidal revenge against institutions. The post-office attack that led to the coinage of the phrase “going postal” happened in 1986, and was of this kind: it had many antecedents, but did not have a name until then.
But the revenge motive, the case of the spree killer who intends to exterminate specific people he knows, is more often attributed than it is confirmed. Remember all the talk of bullying and targeting of social cliques we heard in the year or so after the Columbine High School massacre? It evaporated, or at least became inextricable from the killers’ grandiose pseudo-political babblings and references to edgy music, once the documentary evidence left behind was studied. When a Vietnamese refugee shot up an immigration centre in Binghamton, N.Y., in April 2009, that looked like revenge or terrorism, because he had studied English there. It later turned out he had sent an “explanatory” note to a TV station, which proved to be full of mangled language like “YOU NEED TO KNOW WHY I SHOOTING? BECAUSE UNDERCOVER COP GAVE ME A LOT OF ASS DURiNG EiGHTEEN YEARS.”
That, I guess, was his “motive:” a lot of ass. We instinctively defer to this impressive-sounding word “motive” because detective books have taught us to believe that it is a crucial part of criminal investigation and of trials. “Did the killer have motive, means, and opportunity?” I’ll let you in on a secret: if you’ve got abundant, solid evidence connecting someone to the commission of a violent crime, that supposed trinity doesn’t really amount to a hill of tapioca.
The expectation that every spree killing will have a “motive” ignores the plain fact that most don’t. These crimes are typically actions so irrational that when a first-order “motive” is provided, it doesn’t have any explanatory power to speak of. In the case of Howard Unruh, who was asked point-blank why he was murdering people and said “I don’t know,” the “motive” turned out to be schizophrenia, as diagnosed by a medical discipline that is still in self-evident infancy 70 years later. Charles Whitman, who shot up the University of Texas, had a celebrated brain tumour of the same variety that afflicted Gord Downie and Sen. John McCain. In the ’60s this autopsy finding was thought deeply significant, but it now just looks like a coincidence. Or, at best, a contributor to Whitman’s nihilistic misery. For which arthritis would serve as well.
Terrorism certainly would count as a motive, and I guess the hints that the conspiracy zanies are handing out about the Las Vegas shooting are meant to point in that direction, although the zanies cannot agree whether the massacre was an Islamist outburst that the government is covering up or a false-flag government attack intended to advance the cause of gun control. (Because that would totally work.) To students of true crime, it became pretty apparent within days of the Vegas attack that it was probably just a deranged work of art like so many others, though very skilful by its own morbid standards. Someone bored, running out of money and energy and intending to die, just wanted to see how many people he could kill, and what it would look like. That’s it.