A COUNTRY STORY ABOUT MASS SHOOTING

Al and Pete were a debating society, just the two of them.  No one else wanted to join them, partly because their arguments were so complicated and unsupported that it wasn’t possible to do anything but contribute emotion, and this was a part of the country that didn’t support emotion.  “Country” in this story means exactly that — this was a small town that only existed because of the grain elevator, which was now approaching obsolescence because a much bigger and more efficient one was just about completed at the county seat.

The cafe didn’t have a name because there was only one in this tiny town and everyone just called it “the cafe.”  Al and Pete didn’t lurk in a back booth, they sat by the front window because what they did besides argue was to people-watch.  They knew everyone in town, better than folks knew themselves, because Al was the insurance agent and Pete was, well, Pete.  He’d been there since the beginning of time.  Or at least some people argued he was sitting there when the cafe was built — they must have built it around him.

Gladys owned the joint — sort of.  She ran it anyway, and she kept the coffee mugs full.  No one knew who subsidized her, though there were plenty of rumors and about why they did it.  She liked the two men sitting in the front because it made the place look open.  No one trusted signs in this town.  Not always even signs of life.

This morning the topic was the shooting in Vegas, which Al felt he had privileged knowledge about because he went to college for a couple of years before he inherited the insurance business from his aunt, who was a raving liberal.  He was quoting his favorite book:  “Games People Play” by Eric Berne.  

“I’m tellin’ you, Pete, this was a game of Uproar.”

“Remind me.”

“You know.  It’s when you losing at a board game like chess or checkers and you just stand up and overturn the the table, creating so much uproar that the game is over without knowing who won.”

“So this guy Paddock was losing?  Who was he playing against?”

“The house.  In Vegas you’re always playing against the house.”

“The people he shot weren’t even indoors!”  Pete gave a wry little laugh at his lame joke.

“He wasn’t shooting people.  He was shooting down the stock value of that joint.  And I’ll bet that shows up already.  No one wants shares in a shooting gallery for sitting ducks.  Someone was pretty mad at the Mandalay Bay.”

Pete decided to change the subject.  “No one seems able to figure out how this shooter was so rich.  He’s left almost no trace.  His family claims his very big income came from high stakes gambling.  You believe that?”

Al was ready.  “The shooter was an assassin, a professional assassin.”

“Whaaaaat?”

“Sure, I’ve seen it on television lots of times.  Quiet guy, disappears often, unremarkable, moves a lot.  Never really settles anyplace.  Neighbors don’t know much about him.  He avoids attracting attention.”

“Assassins are from Westerns.”

“Well, yeah, but I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that this very minute somewhere in a sleazy bar there is a script writer who is pleased to have found himself an assassin who drinks too much and talks too much, some guy who can pilot his own plane and who has more income than he can explain.  Spring-loaded.”

“Don’t you think this woman he sent money to is a connection to some kind of terrorists, maybe something like ISIS or Antifa?”

“I don’t get “antifa” — AntiFacists — what is that?  Kids against wealth?”

“Yeah.  Some guy with a shooting range is claiming that Muslims and women are showing up to practice in preparation for a war of liberals against the rest of us.”

Out the window they watch a brand-new cherry-red crewcab Toyota pickup with four-wheel-drive go by.  “Did you get the license plate?” one asks the other, but they didn’t because it’s one of those homage plates for some group — maybe a university.  This is a state that codes license plates to counties, but not plates that are custom, extra money.  (Don’t pay too much attention to this.  It’s not a plot point.)

Returning to the subject, Pete says, “I haven’t seen any muslims, blacks, or beaners in this town and I’ve lived here a long time.”

“Yeah, but the idea of women armed and shooting scares me.  That’s our most dangerous and defiant radical group.”  They laugh, a little bitterly.  Gladys comes to refresh their coffee and brings a plate of bran muffins.  They gave up “Danish” some years ago.

Pete remarks, “When they run the ballistics on those forty guns they found, I’ll bet they solve a lot of mysterious shootings.”

“If he was a pilot, they might be in Canada or Mexico.  They didn’t say what kind of airplane he had, or how far it would reach, but it could get him to a rendezvous with an airport that has flights to Africa or South America.  We have no idea what happens there.”

“Anything.”  Al bites off half a muffin and the other half crumbles.  He brushes the crumbs together on the table, then scoots them off into his hand — looks around for a place to dump them, finally dumps them into the unused ashtray.  These men’s wives forbid them to smoke.

Pete shakes his head.  “I’m trying not to think of all the insurance claims I’ve paid out for gun deaths, mostly accidents or suicides.”

“Yeah, around here we prefer to commit murder by putting our hands on someone to get the satisfaction of strangling them.”  He laughs to show he meant this to be a joke.

“Seriously, Al, I wouldn’t want guns to be banned because they are a beautiful mechanism, works of art, some of them.  Remember when that border patrolman and the biology teacher spent one August making a replica historic Kentucky squirrel-rifle from scratch?  Even made a barbecue and a hair dryer into a forge to melt brass for the butt plate and trigger guard?”

“It was the deal they invented for rifling the barrel that impressed me.”

Pete shook his head in admiration.  “My daughter tells me all guns, not just the long ones, are phallic symbols.”

“Except a phallus fires new life, not death.”  

Pete looks at Al.  “Hell, that’s plumb poetic.”

Gladys is back with the coffee, but the two men are staring out the window at the street where kids are passing by on the way to school, laughing and skipping.

IT'S NEVER TOO SOON TO TALK ABOUT IT

The Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock

What is bearable?  I’ll start with a closeup.  A young female bartender is in the bar when the shooting victims are being brought in directly from the street slaughter.  A man drags in another young man and says,  “Here.  I’m going back out to look for more victims.”  It’s pretty clear that this waitress, who is used to taking care of people and has a Sharpie in her pocket for making notes on her arm if things get too busy to remember everything, knows how to look for vital signs.  This prone person is just losing his, but she holds him even after his heart stops.

The cell phone in his pocket rings.  She answers it.  It’s his friend and the friend tells her the dead man’s name.  She writes it on his arm so he can be identified later.  The friend says he’ll find the girl friend, who is unharmed and sheltered someplace else, and notify the family.  She takes the family’s phone number.  Soon the girl friend calls and she must tell her he is dead.  On the man's cell phone, she consoles the family.  She has no title, uniform, training — but she is smart and she just does it.

She and the person dragging people in from the street believe that an effort should be made to save every person and that persons should not die alone, and that their loved ones should know as soon a possible.  These ideas are cultural as well as personal and have been described in many narratives on the news and in stories.  They used their abilities and knowledge to the utmost.  

Other stories are about people who knew more, who had more resources.  One victim's leg was ripped open badly enough that he was bleeding out.  A rescuer had a vehicle nearby and took the victim to it, stopping to take the victim’s belt off and use it as a tourniquet.  He knew which hospital was close and got the victim there soon enough to save his life.  They exchanged names.

The President may have said to himself, “Thank goodness.  Now maybe they’ll shut up about Puerto Rico.  We can say it’s too soon to talk about this tragedy.”  He thought about visiting Vegas, even though he went bankrupt there as well as in Puerto Rico.  People understand going bankrupt in Vegas.  And there’s air-conditioning.

A few members of Congress may have muttered,  “There will be far more deaths due to the failure to re-authorize CHIP,” but there was no way any sane legislator could say that.  Any more than those who had been riveted all week by the combat footage from Vietnam and then the camera-pans across the fields of graves (which was the time to visit the refrigerator or the bathroom), could connect that with this use of combat arms.  It's cultural.  Killing is public, being dead is private.  Rapid fire is combat, heroism, power, power, powpowpow.  It gets in your head.

Trevor Noah had a new insight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw1RrmlrTtM   The public and legislators tend to treat a massacre in the same way as a hurricane, as though it were an unpreventable natural disaster.  There’s nothing humans can do to control hurricanes.  In fact, preparations can be exceeded as inadequate.  But they are predictable to some degree — the paths of hurricanes can be charted and shown on media.  The emergency supplies, helicopters, hospital ships can be sent as promptly as cruise ships.  In Puerto Rico, they weren't.

The Vegas shooting could not have been predicted except statistically.  But the emergency responders had a plan, had known it could happen, and did their work fast.  They were efficient.  But the many things we could all do to prevent or at least diminish mass shootings are never done.  The most obvious act is to close the gun show loophole -- they thrive because no needs to background check buyers.   It's trafficking. Instead congress wants to legalize the selling of guns to mentally unstable people and the Governor of Nevada refuses to enforce the voter authorized ban on silencers.

This Vegas shooter was not obviously mentally unstable.  Let’s try to imagine this man.  We know he was “retired,” 67, white, living in one of those housing developments where no one knows anyone else and few houses are actually paid for completely, a high rolling gambler (online poker), with a “girl friend” living in, though she was strategically in Japan.  The only sign of trouble seems to have been a criminal father, a real bad guy tagged by the FBI.  But this Paddock, Jr., had a LOT of guns and knew how to rig them to be machine guns, military guns.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/las-vegas-shooting/las-vegas-shooter-gambled-least-160k-recent-weeks-n807191

“Mandalay Bay shooter Stephen Paddock gambled with at least $160,000 in the past several weeks at Las Vegas casinos, according to senior law enforcement officials.

There were 16 Currency Transaction Reports, or CTRs, filed for Paddock in recent weeks. The Treasury Department and the IRS mandate that casinos file the reports for "each transaction in currency involving cash-in and cash-out of more than $10,000 in a gaming day.”

“The reports don't show whether Paddock won or lost or both on the days in question. They do show that on same days there were multiple transactions.”

So far no one has been identified who witnessed twenty-plus combat weapons being taken into the two rooms he occupied.  The room cleaners did not report seeing them, but since there are gun show events weekly in Vegas, they might not have thought it was unusual.  Clearly, gambling and gun shows go together.  http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/lots-of-info-but-no-explanation-for-las-vegas-gunman-s-massacre-1060293187540?cid=eml_mra_20171003

Paddock had been there three days.  House police and SWAT teams had to check several floors to find him and one cop was shot through the door before SWAT got through to Paddock.

The shooter committed suicide.  So far there is no note or other explanation.  No record of reaching out for help or to blame.  No particular expression of racism — his girl friend is not white.  There is no evidence of being “sick, sick” or “pure evil,” as the President put it.  Some are pointing out that if one says it’s “bad taste” to talk about mass shootings immediately, we are constantly silenced because there are mass shootings constantly.

The least useful argument this time around is that if the victims had been armed, they could have prevented or cut short the shooting.  That might have worked if someone was in the same room as the shooter at the time, and have been willing to shoot HIM, but no one with a sidearm 32 stories down on the ground, not very sure which room the shooter was in (or which one of two), in the middle of a melée would have had any advantage.  This guy had figured the odds.
  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/03/as-las-vegas-grieves-investigators-struggle-to-piece-together-the-motives-behind-shooting/?utm_term=.cf86c2884313

More later.