Las Vegas Killings: America’s ‘Frontier’ Psyche Needs To Be Put On The Couch, Not Just Stephen Paddock

With no Islamic State or racist or White supremacist causes to possibly blame, and with no plausible explanation available for the mass shooting of 59 people last Sunday night by Stephen Paddock from a hotel room in Las Vegas, it is obvious that even mental health-obsessed America has no clue on why men go on mindless killing sprees.

Consider the facts already known about him: he was 64 years old, and hardly part of the young cohort who may be looking for violent causes to fill personal states of ennui; even his brother had no clue about what he was upto beyond the fact that he was an inveterate gambler, who had enough millions to support his addiction; he wasn’t someone who could be thought to have a reasonable cause even in his own mind, but, for all that, he worked like a man possessed to smuggle as many as 23 guns into his hotel room with 19 more to spare at home (if anything, he was a gun buff, who could modify a gun to fire faster); he had no criminal record or hate speech advocacy against his name that could offer clues to his act of firing endlessly at a 20,000-strong crowd gathered below his 32-floor room for a music concert. Apart from 59 dead, 500 were injured.

The unique thing about Paddock’s massacre is not that it is rare or unexplained or took such a toll, but the sheer professionalism of it. He wanted to kill, and he succeeded. This is what makes him stand out from America’s regular trysts with mass killers, where one major shooting happens every two months, and average deaths due to mass shootings kill one or more persons every day: 2017 has seen 346 deaths from mass shootings so far, but 2016 was worse at 432. So even Paddock’s exertions may not make 2017 look exceptional.

Many questions are being asked, and they will be answered in due course. How did Paddock manage to acquire so many guns without the authorities being able to figure out what he was upto? How did he manage to smuggle 23 guns in suitcases in his Mandarin Bay Hotel room without any security staff suspecting anything? Liberals will ask whether such horrific shootings should not prompt more gun control laws so that these weapons of mass destruction do not land up in the hands of quiet psychopaths.

Considering the scale of mass shootings that are unrelated to Islamist terror, one wonders if America’s priorities are right. As a country blessed with two neighbours who are unlikely push terrorists into the country, the real terror America must grapple with is the one inside its violent citizenry’s brains. The availability of guns merely makes killing easier, but does not quite explain why some people still want to kill other people they have no enmity with, or who may have done them no harm, real or imaginary.

Rather than just put Stephen Paddock on the couch, it is the overall American psyche that needs to be on the shrink’s scanner. And the one clue we get from American history is that of the idolisation of the American Frontiersman, the lone wolf, the moral crusader, the single man battling the odds in the wild west fighting Injuns and wild beasts.

The dictionary defines the frontiersman as a “person, especially a man, who lives on the frontier, especially in sparsely settled regions”.

Anyone who has watched an American western movie, which actors like John Wayne came to symbolise more than anything else, will be able to picturise this individual.

In his 1971 book, The Psychology Of The Western: How The American Psyche Plays Out On The Screen, author William Indick (you can find his book here) paints the “mythical landscape” of American heroism as portrayed in the American western movie, and which is imprinted in the minds of millions of young American males over generations. He writes: “Some of the dominant western themes include the significance of honour in the western hero’s character, the ubiquitous conflict between civilised society and the wild men of the frontier, as well as racism and violence.” In one of the chapters, Indick analyses the “principal archtype of the genre, the western hero… within the context of his various personas: the chivalrous cowboy, the honourable marshal, the lone crusader, and the rebel outlaw”. Indick surmises that this mythical American hero has played an “extremely significant role model and father figure for numerous generations of young American males”. Did Paddock, the killer of Las Vegas, see himself as a rebel outlaw or the lone crusader for things he considered right?

The problem for many maladjusted American males is that the wild west is no more; it has been replaced with a “liberal”, civilised society that places bounds on what is acceptable and what is not, not only in terms of actions, but also words.

The rebellious American spirit, driven by a moral sense of what the state can or cannot do, bristles at the thought that the state should have power over men, but the proportion of Americans who think like the “frontiersmen” of the 18th century, when the wild west was beginning to be tamed and incorporated into the American state, is shrinking.

This American psyche is what enables a gun lobby to present the right to bear arms as quintessentially American, a harkback to the old John Wayne/Clint Eastwood persona, the single man holding out against injustice, who makes his own laws against outlaws, and who doesn’t care how justice is meted out. Bang, bang, and justice is done, leaving bodies all around.

The remnants of the “frontiersman” psyche find expression in racist and White supremacist attacks, since morality now takes the form of attacking those elements who don’t conform to their vision of who constitute “the right people”, or what America is all about.

Remnants of the “frontiersman” psyche made a last-ditch attempt to turn the clock back last November by voting Donald Trump, the autonomous capitalist who can say things like they are, never mind political correctness.

Extreme ideas, from the Tea Party on the Republican fringe, to libertarians (who want the state to recede), to the evangelists who want abortion clinics destroyed are also fragments of this psyche.

The “frontiersman” psyche is not a Left-Right binary either, with only red-neck Right-wingers and Red Republican states epitomising the mindset. The Left is not immune to this affliction. The difference lies in the sophistication of the Left articulation of the “frontier” psyche, with guilt over what “White Americans” did to the Red Indians or indigenous peoples being the driving force. Left-wing “frontierspeople” battle even larger evils, like racism, or patriarchy, or even American imperialism, placing upon themselves the onerous burden of righting all wrongs, and taking on the challenge of civilising conservative societies across the whole world, if necessary by hypocritically siding with even more conservative groups, including radical Islamists.

Coming back to Stephen Paddock, if a psychologist had managed to put him on the couch, he might well have found traces of the “frontiersman” in him, though one can’t be sure. He sure fits the image of the “lone ranger” acting out his own fantasies in a world gone wrong.

America need not worry about the “lone wolf” Islamist, who is creating mayhem in Europe and sometimes even on American soil.

The “lone wolves” America needs to be most concerned about are those who identify themselves with the moral causes they choose to take up, never mind the loss of lives caused in the process of redeeming the world from evil.