After the Las Vegas massacre of concert-goers by a heavily armed gunman firing from high in a hotel, it dawned on me that, while there are often fictional treatments of family annihilators or terrorist attackers, mystery writers rarely dwell on the more typical American mass murderer represented by the Las Vegas shooter: a white male using legally purchased firearms. Of course, the who-done-it element is missing, since the shooters are almost always captured or suicides. Second, the means is known; only details on the extent of planning, the existence of confederates, police response, etc., are hashed out after the fact. The victimology and opportunity can offer some hope of detection and prevention if there is a relationship to the killer or his expressed grudge, such as a gathering of workplace, racial, governmental, religious, or familial "enemies." But what if the killer chooses strangers in a place that optimizes kill zone, as in the Las Vegas, 2012 Sandy Hook elementary and 1966 Austin clock tower massacres? Then the opportunity becomes any time and anywhere people gather, and the victims are anybody. So the only mystery left to decipher is the motive. The "armed white male" can be amended to "angry armed white male" or "disturbed armed white male," but what explains the destructive fury? In this country, there are a lot of unhappy loners, losers and loonies, and many own scary arsenals. They all don't aim their bullets at crowds. Unfortunately, no matter how deeply we dig for motive, for a "trigger event," grievance, violent creed or mental aberration, that mass shooting motive is likely to remain incomplete or incomprehensible. So mystery fiction, without satisfying solution or justice to offer, avoids this kind of crime. But the real world pays a terrible penalty for ignoring mass shootings. It's time to talk about the fact that, on average, there is a mass shooting (4+ victims including shooter) every day in America. While dwelling on the everyman "who" and the unknowable "why" is likely to be nonproductive and nonpredictive, we can discuss the very concrete "how." For more about the reality, not the fiction, of gun violence, see these statistics: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts
