When asked to make sense of the latest mass shooting — the one that left 59 dead and 527 wounded — Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo replied tersely, “The world has changed.” I don’t know if that’s the answer, but it felt right in the moment.
In the same press conference, Sheriff Lombardo also insisted he “wasn’t going to get into the head of a psychopath.” I appreciated that greatly. The question really isn’t why Stephen Paddock did what he did; it’s how. The mystery of Paddock is such that even when we know all there is to know, we still won’t know anything. Paddock, age 64, was the son of a bridge-playing bank robber who made the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list. His father was described as “psychopathic” and “armed and extremely dangerous.” His mother raised Paddock and his three brothers on her own. Paddock himself appears to have been a gifted gambler, successful enough to buy numerous rental properties with the proceeds. He had two ex-wives, two single-engine airplanes, and a girlfriend who worked at a casino and could reportedly light up a room. He wasn’t political. In recent years, he took pains to make sure his mom had a walker.
Singer/songwriter Tom Petty — also in his sixties — would coincidentally die the following day. I don’t know if Petty’s father qualified as “psychopathic,” but he beat the crap out of Petty as a young kid. He reportedly left his son’s body covered in wall-to-wall belt-inflicted welts. Petty never forgot. I don’t think he ever forgave. He wrote some pretty great songs along the way. But for reasons we’ll also never understand, Petty never saw fit to take 23 guns to his room on 32nd floor of the Mandalay hotel and equip at least 12 of his semi-automatic rifles with a device known as a bump stock — perfectly legal, by the way — that effectively transforms the guns to fully automatic. Everyone reacts differently to the cards they’re dealt. Paddock is described now as “pure evil” or “sick.” Obviously. But to the people selling him guns, he was just another perfectly normal guy.