There is horrifying mystique about mass shootings that lingers long after they are gone. Perhaps this is part of the reason twisted minds are drawn to them.
In my Adelaide childhood of the 1960s and 70s two episodes cast a shadow: the disappearance of the Beaumont children, and the 1971 shooting in the Adelaide Hills when a man wiped out 10 members of his family. It haunts me still as I regularly visit this incongruously named Hope Forest area on family holidays.
Similarly, on every Melbourne trip there are flashes of the Queen Street massacre — scenes, faces and a sunken stomach return from that 1987 afternoon I was sent to the scene for the ABC, the gunman’s body still on the footpath and stone-faced survivors ushered past our redundant questions.
We ponder the ultimate power of an armed killer over helpless victims and try to comprehend the callousness. We can’t help but imagine the panicked reactions or frozen responses. We can’t get past the senselessness and the finality; the complex pasts and limitless futures of individual lives cut short, irrevocably — for what?
Now, in this age of smartphone cameras and social media we are given a macabre ringside seat. From the other side of the world we watched and heard people screaming and scrambling away from rapid-fire gunshots in the Las Vegas night even before they knew where the bullets were coming from and while police were still responding.
Disturbing and squeamishly invasive, this drama was real. This was the actuality, in real time, of people reacting to unimaginable terror — an insight that, until now, only those present could possibly describe. Will this live-to-air evidence help law enforcement agencies and lawmakers combat such plots and make us safer? Or will it increase the temptation for contorted minds? Does this intimacy help us cope or make the shock worse? Will Las Vegas always live under this shadow, like Port Arthur or Newtown, Connecticut?
Unless you are a victim, dead on the ground, the need to fathom a motive is overwhelming. Even for the victims’ loved ones, besieged with grief, the intent behind the shooting is what may explain the carnage, corral our response and determine if we should expect more attacks in support of a cause.
Still, if it was a random aberration, we know there are far too many of these brain-snap massacres in the US, along with all kinds of firearms deaths. The brazen gun culture that manifests itself with a firearm in circulation for almost every one of its 323 million citizens dramatically increases the risk of misdeeds. The number of guns manufactured in the US (excluding those for the military) more than doubled from fewer than five million in 2008 to almost 11 million in 2013.
Yet we’ve seen gun massacres here (Hoddle Street, Queen Street, Strathfield and Port Arthur), in Europe (Dunblane, Hungerford), and Asia and Africa. Wherever there are sinister or demented men (yes, they are usually teenage boys or men) and there are firearms, we see people unleash their deadly potential.
It is unrealistic to ignore the spectre of terrorism; this week in Las Vegas it would have mattered if the gunman were a Muslim claiming martyrdom because we would have known the motivation, perhaps learning different lessons and being able to fit the atrocity into a known pattern as we braced for more. With a solitary, indiscriminate assassin, motive unknown, we expect more cases but confront more imponderables. Does the fact this appears to be another loner seeking sickening notoriety make Americans feel less vulnerable or more alarmed than if it had been terrorism? Is it a relief or a complication for law enforcement agencies? Motive matters.
Gun control laws are an obvious focus no matter the motive, just as they were after the Islamist terror attacks of San Bernardino and Orlando. Whether the murderous individual is spurred on by religious martyrdom, racial hatred or personal grievance, easy access to deadly weapons will escalate the carnage. But it is no simple solution. If gun sales were halted across the US tomorrow the gun menace would persist for generations. This is not to excuse inaction or the political interests that resist change but rather to reflect the dimensions of the challenge and, therefore, the glibness of many responses.
Where the motivation is terrorism we know a broad array of everyday items, from planes and trucks to knives and box cutters, will be used to kill. An absence of guns may limit terrorist options but not prevent all attacks. One of the worries with guns seems to be how the weapons themselves seem to elicit morbid fantasies in some minds. On the day of the Las Vegas shooting, this newspaper’s NSW political editor, Andrew Clennell, filed an exclusive report about the first six months of the NSW police fixated persons unit, which works with mental health professionals to intercept worrisome individuals. Clennell reported that apart from foiling potential terrorists the unit had already “dealt with a youth obsessed with the Columbine school massacre”. For all our fears, the scale and complexity of the dilemma in the US dwarf concerns in other Western democracies. Yet, inexplicably, many responses have pivoted around anti-Trump hysteria and anti-US rhetoric. It has been groundless, hateful and crass.
In The Sydney Morning Herald, Steve Biddulph turned his sights on the calamity of Las Vegas and saw Trump. “Messed-up men define our times,” he wrote. “After all, what is Donald Trump but an ego-bound baby-man, spraying the whole planet with his verbal bullets?”
Many of the same people who often are so keen to ensure that not all Muslims are tarred with the stigma of Islamist terrorist attacks that they censor the central facts were suddenly trying to associate a particular class of people — white Trump supporters — with this attack. Clearly, this was unfair, unreasonable, unthinking, unjustifiable and unhelpful.
On the ABC website one of its prolific Trump critics, John Barron, wrote an opinion piece lumping together feelings about climate, Islamist extremism, the US President and the Las Vegas massacre. “After the Las Vegas attack,” asked Barron, “is it that right time to point out that Stephen Paddock’s profile as an ageing, white, male real-estate developer who liked casinos is similar to Trump voters — or Trump himself?”
In the US, CBS television executive Hayley Geftman-Gold was sacked after posting heartless comments online. “I’m actually not even sympathetic (because) country music fans often are Republican gun toters,” she wrote.
Here, on ABC TV’s The Drum, comedian Dan Ilic saw racial issues. “If it’s a brown person they will call it an act of terror but for this gentleman they basically label him as a man who loved to spend time on his own and listen to country music,” he said (paradoxically calling the killer a gentleman). “This is the very definition of white privilege; this white guy doesn’t get to be labelled a terrorist.”
What rot. People who plot and kill for political, religious or ideological motives are labelled terrorists, whatever their skin colour. Commentators who disingenuously inject incendiary issues of race and prejudice into such a tragedy are social vandals, reckless attention-seekers or both.
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Nothing can explain or rationalise the grotesque slaughter we saw in Las Vegas, but hateful and politically opportunistic responses at home and abroad only poison the subsequent public debate. It is hard to fathom why some allow this evil to trigger partisan hate or identity feuds.