How many Stephen Paddocks are out there?
As the media grope to find a motive for the Las Vegas mass shooting, the New York Times published one of the more interesting reviews of his life, which is notable for his single-minded focus on flying solo — figuratively and literally.
Here’s the bottom line to me: Aside from making a lot of money, the man’s life was unremarkable. He was very smart and very disciplined. But then a lot of people are. Thousands are. As the Times’ headline noted, he was “a nondescript ‘numbers guy’.”
I don’t think law enforcement is going to find out much more about what drove him. He wasn’t one to write things down. He wasn’t one to talk to people, either. He was isolated. And by definition, if you’re isolated, people are not going to know much about you.
So we’ll likely have to settle for the historically futile conversations media and lawmakers will be having on gun control, with little reason to believe those conversations will be any less futile this time around.
Here are some links to material I’ve reviewed in the past few days (in addition to the article cited above) that I think are worth noting:
News articles
- “A Sick Country Filled With Guns,” by Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept
- “Repeal the Second Amendment,” by Bret Stephens, New York Times
- “How 2nd Amendment Distortions Kill,” by Robert Parry, Consortium News
- “Australia Offers to Help the U.S. With Gun Law Reform,” by Dominique Mosbergen, Huffington Post
Video
- Law enforcement officer on the note found in Stephen Paddock’s hotel room, 60 Minutes, CBS:
Academic articles
- “Guns in the Home and Risk of a Violent Death in the Home: Findings from a National Study,” American Journal of Epidemiology
- “Editorial: Gun Violence”Risk, Consequences, and Prevention,” American Journal of Epidemiology
This excerpt from Scahill’s article in The Intercept sums up my own feeling about where the gun-control discussion is likely to go:
Watch what happens in Congress in the coming days. Empty platitudes. Bullshit proposals: “We must do something about this.” And, of course, a lot of prayer. But none of that is going to change to the fact that we live in a sick society that believes guns bring us security. A nation that has been taught by powerful, twisted people that guns aren’t part of the problem. That everything except guns — and how easy they are to get — is the problem.
Fareed Zakaria’s program GPS on CNN today (Sunday, Oct. 8, 2017) devoted the entire hour to a discussion of gun control, and is worth streaming (no link online as of this writing). In a panel discussion on that program, David Frum outlined what is probably the best solution to the problem that will come from a conservative point of view: that what’s needed is a change in public perception. Frum used the following analogy: the public needs to come to consider gun ownership in the same way that a mother would never shut the door and windows in the baby’s room and smoke cigarettes — it’s something that you can do, that you’re able to do, that may not technically be illegal, but that you just don’t do. That’s a weak argument, in my opinion; feel free to express your own opinion in the comment section below.
Some people feel that, like a utopia on earth that might be technologically achievable, we don’t have it because we don’t want it. Just like, as a nation, we were unable to answer Rodney King’s question, “Can we all get along?” in the affirmative:
We don’t have it because we don’t want it, and we can’t just get along. And there are thousands more Stephen Paddocks out there. Like any of us with the smarts and the will in this country, they can find the weapons.
