The evidence reminds us that the attempt to attach a motive to mass killing—as with many individual murders—is, as often as not, a mistake.

By Adam Gopnik @ Daily Comment @ NewYorker.com, Aug. 9

A document, recently released—“LVMPD Criminal Investigative Report of the 1 October Mass Casualty Shooting,” to give it its official name—offering the local-police-department summary of the Las Vegas gun massacre of last year, makes for reading that is both hallucinatory and tragic, and in another way absurd [....]

The report takes on the supposedly baffling question of Paddock’s motive, and what comes through is that—unless some astonishing new connection or fact appears in the future—his intention appears to have been purely nihilistic. Paddock wanted to kill a lot of people because he wanted to kill a lot of people. Feelings of frustration and insufficient power, the frequent ignition of such killings, may have moved him, too, and yet they seem to have been more unrooted than such feelings usually are among mass killers [....]

t’s hard for us to accept that it was as inconsequential as this, but all the evidence suggests that it was. And it reminds us that the attempt to attach a motive to mass killing—as with many individual murders—is, as often as not, a mistake. Killings, whether their perpetrators are fairly called “mentally ill,” can be motiveless in significant ways. Many of the most famous assassinations in our history were so strangely under-motivated that there’s still an odd imbalance between the reason and the act, including Lee Harvey Oswald’s killing of John F. Kennedy. Pure opportunism seems to count for a lot for a man with a weapon [....]