America woke up this morning to horrifying news. Last night in Las Vegas, while thousands of people were enjoying an outdoor country music festival, a gunman named Stephen Paddock opened fire with an automatic weapon from a nearby hotel room that overlooked the concert. He fired and fired and fired. According to one of the country singers who was on stage at the time, it went on for ten minutes. As of this writing 50 people are dead. Upwards of 400 are injured. It's the deadliest mass shooting in United States history. It's also terrorism.
Now, the Las Vegas police disagree with that last point. In fact, when asked if this was a terrorist attack, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said, "No not at this point, we believe it is a local individual, he resides here locally." He then added, "We don’t know what his belief system was at this time." This is thinly-veiled code for "the shooter was a white man." This is especially obvious when you look at Nevada law and see its actual definition of "act of terrorism."
"NRS 202.4415 "Act of terrorism" defined.
"Act of terrorism" means any act that involves the use or attempted use of sabotage, coercion or violence which is intended to:
(a) Cause great bodily harm or death to the general population; or
(b) Cause substantial destruction, contamination or impairment of:
(1) Any building or infrastructure, communications, transportation, utilities or services; or
(2) Any natural resource or the environment."
So under this definition, which is, you know, the law, Stephen Paddock was obviously a terrorist. But because he's white we don't call it that. No, instead the sheriff and really our entire society call the man who had at least 10 rifles with him in his Mandalay Bay hotel room, "distraught." I mean are we not even pretending that "terrorism" is a racist designation? (Although now that ISIS is claiming without evidence that the shooter converted to ISLAM months ago, that tune will change very soon. And that shows you just how disingenuous the way we use “terrorist” in this country is. Paddock’s act is equally terror inducing regardless of whether ISIS claims it or not.)
In the immediate aftermath is exactly when we have to talk about these issues. Now is when we have to point out that if this man didn't have automatic weapons (or hell didn't have a gun) that many more people would have lived last night. Now is when we remember that no man with a knife could kill 50-plus people and injure hundreds more before being stopped. The least we can do is try something. Anything, really.