This past Sunday, fright was covered over the entire United States as 64 year old shooter Stephen Paddock killed 58 civilians and wounded over 500 civilians. People are taking to social media and praying for the victims of this mass shooting, but many people argue that this event can be described as terrorism. However, this is not the case at all, yet.
First, a good place to look is the definition of the word “terrorism”. New Oxford defines terrorism as, “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” The key message in this definition is the term “political aims”. Sources do not know the intentions of Paddock in his shooting on Sunday. This could have been a message to the government, or a hate on a specific group of people, but sources do not know the concrete evidence of why Paddock decided to shoot at this particular concert.
This may automatically prove the Las Vegas attacks as mass murder and not terrorism. However, no one knows of his intentions, because Paddock was found dead after the shooting was over. He was the son of bank robber Patrick Benjamin Paddock, who was on the FBI’s most wanted list until 1977. These can be traced back to Paddock’s issues in Las Vegas, but there is no specific reason for why he decided to commit mass murder. So it can’t be defined as anything but mass murder at this point.
However, many people are automatically saying that this is not terrorism because the man was not part of a terrorist group against the US currently such as ISIS. This is definitely not true though. One does not need to be part of a terrorist group in order to cause terrorism. Contributing editor and author of Rethinking Political Islam Shadi Hamid tweeted following the attacks: “Not all mass shootings are terrorism. We have to wait and see if there were political motivations/objectives. No evidence of that yet,” says Hamid, “Just because we rush to ascribe motive when the shooter is Muslim doesn’t mean we should ruse to ascribe motive when the shooter is white.” He is not only speaking about how we shouldn’t automatically assume terrorism until we know the motives.
While this event was indeed tragic for the entire country to hear about, we must not mislabel events for what they are until new information is released.
