Mick Hartley

There have, inevitably, been some strange responses to the Las Vegas shootings, mainly on the debate about whether or not it should be called terrorism. Plenty of examples, but this Guardian piece is typical (clue: it's racism). Never mind that terrorism involves acts of violence in support of a political agenda: it's a chance to blame not just America's gun laws, but white society in general.

Now here's another strange one, from David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) – Stephen Paddock is more terrifying than Bin Laden:

Paddock, not Bin Laden or Baghdadi, is actually our worst waking nightmare. Irving Howe wrote in 1963 of Lee Harvey Oswald that he was “an utterly displaced creature . . . without roots in nation, region, class. He cannot stand it but what he cannot stand, he does not know.” Sounds like Paddock.

How did he imagine it? Maybe, on the gun range, he’d wondered what it would be like to do this for real. Up there, firing at people you probably could hardly see in the dark and whose screams were likely to be drowned out by the sounds of your shooting. Old no longer, nor pointless, but breaking bad….

I don't get this at all.

We don't know Paddock's motives, and maybe never will. It was, in that sense, a random attack – what used to be called "an act of God". We know that there are bad people out there, and mad people out there. It's part of life's background noise, like traffic accidents, and deadly diseases. We learn to live with it. It just so happens that because of America's gun laws, this bad/mad man was able to kill 58 people, and injure many more. 

How much more terrifying, surely, someone killing people for a reason, for an ideology, for a religion. Someone who's been brainwashed into believing that the killing of unbelievers is a cause worth dying for.

Or, as a commenter puts it, 

"Paddock and Bin Laden are both dead, David. BL still has followers, Paddock doesn't."