Reflections: Is Stephen Paddock the General Dyer version 2.0?

So this Stephen Paddock character managed to secrete into his Mandalay Bay luxury hotel room in Las Vegas, a heavy cache of automatic rifles, completely undetected. The baggage handlers, electronic security checks, all manner of other state-of-the-art surveillance techniques available to modern hotels in the world’s most technologically advanced nation, one that is always under some form of violent threat or the other – none of these was able to detect the presence of a nut case who, on the face of it, appeared to have escaped from a loony bin. He most certainly belonged in one. His kith and kin, of course, have attested to the fact that he was a perfectly normal, well-adjusted family man, and wouldn’t know how to hurt a fly if you handed it to him on a plate. That he was able to loose off a lethal volley of bullets from the 32nd floor of the hotel, at a sea of milling country music fans enjoying a concert, is mind boggling. 59 dead and counting. That this mass murderer finally turned the gun on himself is s
mall consolation to the next of kin of the tragic victims. 

Thus we may never learn what drove Stephen Paddock to this extreme act – was he acting alone or was he a willing instrument of some renegade terrorist outfit? ISIS was first off the blocks to take ‘credit’ for the massacre, but we’ll have to take that with a pinch of salt. They are notorious glory hunters, ISIS, ready to put their hands up for any heinous act that’s going unsolved. No evidence has come through so far that Paddock was ‘a soldier of the Caliphate, secretly converted to Islam’, though speculation is rife. That he was a regular gambler at the Vegas casinos, and made and perhaps lost, tons of money on real estate deals, and that his father was a serial bank robber, all this points to a warped personality. But is Paddock a latter day Travis Bickle (brilliantly portrayed by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver) inexorably spiralling towards mental degradation, leading up to the catastrophic denouement? One will have to reserve judgment till more facts are available.

Donald Trump, POTUS Supreme, said all the usual things we have now routinely come to expect from international heads of state on such tragic occasions – ‘we condemn this dastardly act of wanton violence, we are a peace loving nation, we will get to the bottom of this cowardly act and the perpetrators will not go unpunished, our thoughts are with the victims’ families and the Government will provide all help and assistance needed’. There’s just one catch. The murderer did himself in, so he’s not going to be able to talk any time soon. His family members swear to Paddock’s spotless character, so we are back to Freudian psychology. Perhaps he was sexually abused as a child by his teacher, he lost all his savings in the stock markets, his mother refused him a second helping of chocolate ice cream, he suffers from an Oedipus complex, or maybe he just couldn’t stand country and western music. Or perhaps it was ISIS after all. Who knows? More work for the FBI and the CIA.

All the police have been able to come up with thus far is that the 64 year old gunslinger Paddock transferred $100,000 to his girlfriend in the Philippines, and that eyewitnesses have seen him verbally abuse his girlfriend on a number of occasions. Not much to go on, and the late assassin is clearly not my first choice to spend a quiet evening with, but there the trail goes cold. So he was abusive, big deal. A vile trait I’ll allow, but not something you would say leads to higher achievements like committing pogroms on innocent multitudes. And certainly not enough clues to link all this up with a modern day General Dyer of the Jallianwalla Bagh notoriety. That’s the problem with suicide killers. They completely block off one crucial avenue of investigation, namely, themselves. Which kind of stymies the cops. Anyhow, the sleuth hounds in Homeland Security are resourceful and hopefully, the brain behind this awful event, if there is one, will soon be revealed.

All of this naturally brings the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby into sharp focus in the United States, and it will be interesting to see if the government acts with certitude on this long festering inconclusive debate on how far one can go in protecting the American citizen’s constitutional right to bear arms.

Here in India meanwhile, the identity of the baddies behind the activist-journalist Gauri Lankesh’s murder in Bangalore is still shrouded in mystery but the police recently let on, somewhat ambiguously, that they know who was behind the dastardly act. Which begs the question as to why they are being coy about naming names, and bringing the foul murderers to book. To give the cops the benefit of the doubt, there could be very good reasons behind the secrecy. Perhaps the identity of the killers is known, but not their whereabouts. The police do a complicated job and we need to give them some breathing space, while apprehending desperadoes.

In conclusion, we are dealing with two classic text book murder mystery scenarios. One, where the murderer reveals himself in plain sight and spoils it all by adding himself to the body count. That leaves the authorities coping with the puzzle of ‘who could be behind it all?’ The second is the more conventional scenario where the murderer goes after his prey in a meticulously planned manner, successfully completes his dreaded deed, and scarpers from the scene, vanishing into the ether. And the case file is finally closed, leaving everyone fuming about conspiracy theories.

Never mind what POTUS or any other head of state routinely mouths, we are stuck with these predicaments. As long as there are psychos around. To quote Godfather Michael Corleone, ‘If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone’.