Lament

Let us test and examine our ways, 

And return to the Lord.

-Lamentations 3: 40

Gun control, whatever that means, will not stop this.

Good police work, heroic action by first response personnel, none of it will stop this.

Thoughts and prayers definitely will not stop this.

I woke up this morning to a headline: "20 killed, more than 100 injured in Las Vegas Shooting."

Shortly after that, a new one came through: "50+ killed, 200+ injured in Las Vegas Shooting."

Later we find out that the shooter is dead; that he was 64 years old, a "lone wolf," which I think gives wolves a bad name.  Wolves do not kill wantonly and for no purpose.

Facts will continue to emerge, but they won't really make any difference.  The central story is that a human being became so twisted and filled with despair and hatred that it seemed opening fire on a large and defenseless crowd of people was an option he wanted to pursue.

This is the most deadly mass shooting to date, beating Orlando's total of 49 already, with the ominous + after the 50 indicating that it could get rather worse.  This time the shooter had a plan and apparently a pretty good arsenal.  He got the high ground, and he had a target rich environment, a crowd of concert goers who by most accounts could not immediately even discern the attack, a mass of people who could not flee quickly in any direction, tightly packed into a mass with no collective ability to defend itself.

Horrible realities present themselves: bodies do not stop bullets, every round could kill or maim multiple people.

Mass panic sets in and trampling and crushing happens.

Many people cannot even grasp what is happening.

Given these horrible realities the presence of a certain type of weapon makes very little difference. That crowd was the biggest sitting duck ever, and crowds like it happen every day for a startling variety of reasons. Our security measures account for bad actors in the crowd, bag searches and metal detectors keep a shooter from getting in the midst of the crowd, but what about a shooter who places himself carefully so as to do the most damage?  This could have been even worse.

Our shock and horror is impotent.

Nothing that we talk about in the next few days will change anything. There is no regulation that can be passed, no set of security provisions that can make the world safe from such random, monstrous violence.

We do not know how to confront terror of this sort.  It short circuits our normal sense of right and wrong.  Our normal security precautions are focused on stopping criminals with discernible motives.  We know how to protect our banks from robbers (and sometimes from hackers).  We know how to pursue networks of political terror groups who want to advance their cause.  We can fight organized crime, disorganized crime, drug trafficking, human trafficking, racketeering and insurance fraud, but we will never be able to protect ourselves from a random warped human being whose only goal is death and chaos, and who has lost all care for self preservation.  There is no motive here that will make any sense of this. It is just an explosion of anger and hatred, and there is so much of that around how would you sort out which type is dangerous? I think if there does prove to be a reason it might make us feel a little better; to know there is some sense in this, even if it is twisted sense.  But that is vanity and chasing after the wind.  The facts and the details will not save us, they will only lull us into thinking that we understand the cause of something horrible like this. We must think bigger and better.

This problem is of a sort that cannot be solved by anything that humans can do or say; it is a problem that can only be solved by holding tightly to our very humanity.  This sort of violence doesn't happen in a person who understands and values their connection to the people they are about to murder.  We cannot legislate ourselves out of this, we must recover our sense of community and connection with one another. This sort of violence seems to me to be a modern specialty, a result of our disconnected society.  By disconnection I mean on a human level. It is not the result of an ideology, or greed or even a warped sense of necessity, it is simply motivated by pure alienation of the perpetrator from his victims and from humanity itself.

In this age, where we are connected more and more by electronic devices, it's tempting to feel that we are part of a collective consciousness. However, that connection is largely an illusion.  Did you ever wonder why people seem so much more inclined to act badly and speak harmfully to people on social media?  Because they can safely categorize on-line relationships as disposable band not 100% real.  There is no real person with real feelings behind that twitter handle; empathy fails and humanity is not far behind it.

This is not to blame social media for this shooting, but rather to illustrate how the same disconnection that empowers trolls on Facebook is analogous to the more extreme misanthropy of someone who shoots into a crowd of complete strangers. Call it a precursor, a catalyst, or what you will but it is not unrelated; you must dehumanize your victims in order to plan and execute this sort of horror.  From the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Casino, those people were not real, they were not sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, they were not middle-aged women fawning over Jason Aldean, they were not young concert goers out for a fun time, they were not Country music fans or American citizens, they were not anything but targets.

That level of dehumanizing venom doesn't come from nowhere.  The Vegas Shooter probably got his start on a smaller scale, and most of us have probably at least dipped our toe in that water, convincing ourselves that someone or other is our enemy and not a real human being.

Jesus challenged us not just to love those whom we naturally identify with, but to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.  Applying that ethic precludes us from dehumanizing others, even if we don't like them, even if we consider them our enemy, even if they have sought to do us harm.  We must acknowledge their humanity.  As hard as that may be right now we have a chance to start: his name is Stephen Paddock, and I sincerely doubt he was "pure evil," he was a human who got broken and took out his pain on a lot of innocent people.  Do you want to hate him?  Do you want to consider him a monster?

You can go down that path if you choose.

If you deny his humanity though, you are committing the little crime that can put you on a tragic course. Maybe we could try breaking that demonic cycle.

Maybe?