Who was Stephen Paddock?

The worst mass shooting in US history, breaking a grisly record set just over a year ago. With depressing regularity some murderous arsehole turns his guns - and it is almost always men - on defenceless people and makes a pathetic name for themselves. Today Stephen Paddock, an otherwise unprepossessing Nevada native from a retirement village outside of Las Vegas has that infamy, though typical of all mass murdering gunmen he took his life before the police reached him.

We don't know a great deal about Paddock or his motivations. We don't know why he chose to kit out a hotel room at the Mandalay Bay with heavy duty weaponry, or the twisted narrative he concocted to justify these murders to himself. Sadly, because these things are far from uncommon, we almost do not have to. There is some suggestion of psychological problems, "weird behaviour" and large gambling transactions, but none of these in themselves are remarkable. Perhaps the gambling got out of control and Paddock snapped, but nothing about the crime suggests anything other than cool-headed premeditation. Assembling an arsenal with the appropriate range and selecting the right room overseeing the concert required methodical planning.

As we have seen in previous shootings of this character, an abiding motif is the gunman imposing themselves on the world. Where a situation has got out of control, a murder spree is the most extreme way of stamping individual authority, of forcing everyone not only to sit up and take notice but respond to a situation of their making. Typically if certain people or groups of people are held responsible for the situation the gunman finds themselves in, they are usually targeted. If it's impersonal forces then the victims are usually people unfortunate enough to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yet there is something slightly unusual about Paddock's crime. Typically mass murderers, whether non-political or of the white supremacist/IS kind, are there among their victims, as if the proximity to murder inflames them further and gives them the last minute rush of supremacy before either the police close in or they assert final control by turning the gun on themselves. Paddock, however, kept at a distance, as if his mind could only cope when his victims were reduced to small stick people in the street light. The screams, the terror, the blood, all this was at a remove, almost a concession to recognising the enormity of what he was doing. He wanted to do it but, unlike other mass killers, didn't want to be part of it. Yet this distance enabled him to inflict more suffering and take more lives. As military thinkers know well, separation makes killing easier.

Sad to say, we know this is not going to be the last time. Everyone knows this is going to happen again, that there are many more Stephen Paddocks. Yes, the stupid gun laws leave a lot to be desired and do nothing to stop an inadequate with a grudge from going out in an inglorious blaze of murder should they choose. But there are wider questions here of dog-eat-dog individuality, alienation, toxic masculinity, and a culture that glorifies redemptive violence. This is what Paddock was, a repository and an embodiment of all this shit. And as the roots of American mass killing lie close to inner city gun crime, military worship and the imagined hatreds, it's going to take more then pious sermonising and gun control to prevent similar tragedies from happening again, and again, and again.