This summer I had the unplanned occasion to visit the two deadliest sites for mass shootings by a single gunman in the United States.
On a rare rainy evening in Las Vegas, I strolled alone five miles, from the McLaren car rental terminal to the Linq hotel. As I walked the desolate southern end of the Las Vegas Strip, Southwest flights with optimistic gamblers roared over my head close enough for me to see the pilots’ faces. At the Welcome to Las Vegas sign, tourists queued patiently for selfies with an Elvis impersonator. I passed by the old Glass Pool Inn made famous in Casino and Leaving Las Vegas.
Approaching Mandalay Bay, the golden windows seemed to have lost their glittery luster since I first saw them in 1999. I looked to the 32nd floor corner where Stephen Paddock fired more than 1000 rounds down on a crowd of concertgoers in an open cement lot across Las Vegas Boulevard, killing 60 people. Standing in the breach, thinking of terrified people taking precious little shelter, one gets a sense of his cowardice in shooting helpless victims from a makeshift sniper’s nest.
Pausing at the site brought to mind my own mortality, of senseless death, and strange claims of bravery by apologists of extreme violence. Terrorism can never be held as an act of courage because it’s fundamentally an act of taking, not giving. It’s selfish, not sacrificial. Courage is a universal human virtue just as theft is a universal vice. In our bones, rational people know that indulging in one’s murderous rage is not courageous.
It’s far more difficult to master one’s passions, to face the inherent struggle of life head-on. Thoreau is right.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
Henry David Thoreau
As I scanned the Mandala Bay windows, I thought of how I’ve done the same in Dallas, looking toward the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy. In a moment of awestruck, I wondered why, and what I might do if I were in the crowd. Or more terrifying, if I looked down on a hapless crowd with dead malice in my heart.
The City of Dallas has done our nation a great service in preserving the place for people to grieve, to never forget the horror of innocence lost through violence. Televised. Dealey Plaza has an air of the sacred, set apart from the world, outside of time, inside an outdoor cathedral with walls of steel and brick and noise and bustle.
Not so in Las Vegas. There isn’t a memorial.
I attended the University of Texas in Austin in 1996, thirty years after Charles Whitman’s shot and killed 15 people from the Main building tower, which at the time had been the deadliest shooting by a lone gunman in US History. In 1966, nearly four years after Kennedy’s assassination, Whitman took a high perch and fired down on victims going about their day. As the first mass shooting in a public place, his violence precipitated the creation of police SWAT tactics, and the continual rise of militarized law enforcement.
Two months after visiting Las Vegas, I walked along Orange Avenue in Orlando looking to the entrance where Omar Mateen sustained a three-hour killing spree at the Pulse nightclub. He continued unabated, killing 49 people, and injuring 53, until first responders breeched a rear wall with overwhelming force to end the violence.
In both Orlando and Las Vegas, revelers planned a fun evening of music and dancing, never imagining the extraordinary danger they’d soon face. Both shootings happened at night to an unsuspecting and vulnerable crowd.
I have friends who abandoned plans to be at each location the night of each shooting. The next morning in Las Vegas, a flight attendant friend recalls a quiet flight out of town full of collective trauma. One girl in particular stared out the window vacantly in soiled clothes. She had no luggage, having abandoned it and gone straight to the airport from the scene of the shooting. Upon landing, she burst into tears, overwhelmed from the safety of home and her survivor’s guilt. In Orlando, a friend happened to take an alternate route home after his service shift instead of his routine of grabbing an 3am donut across the street from Pulse. Their stories makes the events feel personal.
Reflecting on these events and firearms in general, I think reasonable people recognize legitimate and matched defense against an unjust aggressor as both a right and grave duty in preservation of the common good. Unfortunately, civil discourse inevitably departs from legal and moral debate, and into the realm of rights and justice, us and them. Both sides argue ad nauseum, I’ve nothing interesting to add except my wonder that the foaming rage of society’s bellwether issues might be deeply rooted in individual temperament. Too often logic and compassion give way to the exposition of strange alligator brain circuitry around safety and protection like autonomic disgust, gag reflexes, in-group/out-group suspicion and personal identity within these groups.
Instead, I’m wondering about deeper questions.
Why does the blood of martyrs galvanize movements?
We see the best example of explosive growth following Christian martyrs who give their lives, in stark contrast to terrorists who take lives. This is true in ancient and modern times, throughout the world.
Spending time at the Pulse memorial, amid the images of smiling friends and sorrowful artifacts, one laments the grave evil of taking life. In our natural repulsion to violence, we can look past differences to see individual people. In the faces of victims and their grieving families, we recognize injustice and vulnerability, and if we’re lucky, the very face of Christ.
Even for non-Christians and non-believers, Christ is the ideal of human vulnerability, a sinless life given in exchange for every injustice ever committed anywhere at any time. Even if people cannot articulate their feelings of injustice, they feel it in their body as easily as a child senses unfairness in a game.
Why is there not a memorial in Las Vegas?
Planning has been underway a long time, yet the movement hasn’t yet coalesced in memory of loved ones. The answer is probably rooted in circumstance:
- Superstition – Las Vegas is fundamentally a gambling town, where Frank Sinatra implores Luck to be a Lady Tonight, and the MGM redesigned its lion entrance that scared the whales away. Like a barren concrete desert, the otherwise prime real estate is forever marred by tragic loss.
- Destination – Many of the victims traveled to Las Vegas to see the concert. I can’t imagine the pain of family members in making arrangements to bring their loved ones home, let alone have the creative energy to participate in an appropriate memorial.
- Shadows – The marketing mantra, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” plays into the secretive nature of sin. The attitude gives license, a wink-wink-nudge-nudge inside approval of boorish behavior. Perhaps in Las Vegas, a mass killing is on the end of a wide spectrum of degradation best left unspoken, like another hole in the desert.
Why are we drawn to visiting sites of terror?
Insisting on the preservation of life is an act of love, a fundamental principal of morality. An act of defense may have the unfortunate double effect of preservation of life and taking of life, where one is intended and the other is not.
Like Oklahoma City, these memorials are best when they reflect deeper values of life. The macabre is alluring because it foretells our own future. We cannot look away.
Feature image is México by Graciela Iturbide (1990) at the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid. The image captures the startled flight of a murder of black crows from the safety of a live oak, perhaps from gunfire, allegories of death, danger, a bad omen and in stark contrast to the Holy Spirit commonly depicted as a white dove.