Las Vegas: Motives of a Killer

It seems like mass shootings are a trend in the US. In a study by Mother Jones where an "in-depth investigation into mass shootings" was done, since 1982 there have been around 83 mass shooting in America (Mark Fullman). 2017 has already seen 7 mass shooting so far, the first being the Fort Lauderdale Airport Shooting. However, this most recent shooting is the deadliest one of them all. So far the death toll has reached a shocking 59 people with over 527 injured. The only shoot

On October 2, Shephan Paddlock, a 64-year old man from Mesquite Nevada, opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers from his hotel room. The gunfire went on for minutes and didn't end until the police busted open the door of Paddlock hotel room. There they found him dead, believed to have taken his own life. Paddlock didn't have any history of criminal behavior or mental illness. The question remains, why did he do it? How do we prevent these things from happening? And what makes someone who seems completely "normal" snap?j

Here I'm not really going to talk about gun laws or whether this was an act of terrorism but rather focus on the sociology of it all.

I want to start by disarming the thought that you are more likely to commit violent crimes if you have a criminal record. Just because you have a criminal record doesn't mean you are violent or prone to violence.

According to sociologists ...... the shooters tend to be a young man from upper and middle-class backgrounds with basically no criminal history.

As Sociologist Sally Raskoff said "Social isolation, lack of social support, and class privilege are not often mentioned in our society’s discussions about why these mass shootings occur. They should be, though, because such events are more likely to occur in a society where there is social isolation, a cultural context of masculinity linked to violence, accessibility to weapons with the capacity to kill many in a short time, and an ineffective mental health infrastructure." (2013, Thinking Sociologically about Mass Shootings)

We always consider these shooters mentally insane, saying they snapped, or something went wrong. We never sit down and think maybe killers don't snap into madness, maybe it's developed. In cases where a kid is born into poverty, raised in streets, and turns to a life a crime and gang banging we blame the environment for their life choices. We expect them to misbehave, but for these mass shooters, it is always a surprise although they usually fall into the category of middle/upper-class man and sometimes women.

In order to do anything about these killings we have to stop ignoring these facts and instead of looking at them as isolated situations we must evaluate them.

A criminal can be from any ethnic group, class, religion.