At least 58 people were killed and more than 500 others were injured last night during Jason Aldean’s performance at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, after a lone gunman, Stephen Paddock, opened fire on the crowd through the windows of his 32nd-floor room at the Mandalay Bay hotel. Las Vegas now replaces last year’s horror at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub as the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. But like the recent white supremacist violence in Charlottesville that claimed the life of counter-protester Heather Heyer, there has been a certain hesitation to define the incident as “terrorism.”
In a live address from the White House, President Trump called the Vegas massacre an “act of pure evil,” but stopped short of describing it as an act of domestic terror. So did almost every news report I’ve seen or heard, repeating that Paddock possesses no connection to any foreign terrorist group. (ISIS has reportedly claimed responsibility, though Nevada authorities and the FBI say there is no evidence—yet—that Paddock had ties to the organization, nor does he fit the profile.) Local police, too, say they aren’t treating the incident as terrorism. But perhaps we, the people, should be.
Many people point to the semantics: Terrorism is defined as some variation of “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” This last piece is key: According to the dictionary, violence must be politically motivated to truly constitute terrorism. Paddock’s motives are not yet known, which is how some would explain not calling him a terrorist. But whether or not Paddock ever meets the technical definition of terrorist, we know without question that he “created and maintained a state of extreme fear and distress” among the innocent crowd in Vegas. By definition, he terrorized them. But nobody is saying that word, either. When words fail, it seems platitudes prevail.
posted by f.sheikh