In Las Vegas, some white guy old enough to know better shot the hell out of a crowd of music goers from his 32nd-floor hotel room. Over 500 injured, and 60 dead. They say he’s a lone wolf, but personally, I don’t like the term. Makes him sound cool, don’t you think? And leave the animals out of it, too. So yeah, as thousands of people were chilling out in the evening listening to country music at some concert, he sprayed bullets at them from the overlooking Mandalay Bay Hotel. I’ve seen the cell phone videos posted online. Young women cut down as they tried to flee. Children shot in the face not knowing what was going on as bodies piled up on the ground amidst trash and discarded belongings. Panicked screams and hysterical crying as no one knew who was shooting at them or why. Some thought the gunshots were at first fireworks, and it was only when those around them begun dropping like flies they realised something was wrong. Everyone thought it was a terrorist, and by that, I mean a Muslim. But no, just some old white American with a beard and plenty of money in the bank who then shot himself to avoid the consequences. Was he angry? Was he deranged? Was he ill? Or was he just a bad motherfucker who decided he didn’t like this place and wanted to teach us a lesson before he left? Maybe we’ll know, maybe we won’t. It seems as though not a year goes by without this kind of thing happening. Massacres. Mass murders. Genocides. If it’s not caused by religion, it’s evil, and if it’s not evil, it’s just plain fucking apathy. We can be a beautiful bunch when we want, and yet we can also scrape the barrel, I mean, we can stink like the shit in a sewer. And yet despite the horrors that keep coming, life goes on. In the face of such tragedies, we have no choice but to move forward. What can we do but go about our lives doing the best we can while crossing our fingers hoping it never happens to us? As time flies, maybe we’ll discover what made him do it. Maybe we won’t. It’ll happen again, though. Someone else. Somewhere else. These events will reoccur because this is what people do, and people are bad, baby, people are bad.
Author S. K. Nicholas 
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