The title of the post comes courtesy of the science fiction author John Scalzi and his blog post, “2017, Word Counts and Writing Process“. It’s buried down in one of his well-written paragraphs, of which this particular post is chock full of. But I responded to this because I’d seen something too familiar before, this collection of crosses for each of the Las Vegas shooting victims, right after the Pulse shootings here in Orlando (see below).

The person who committed the Las Vegas shooting atrocity was an evil, soulless old white man who probably saw this as nothing more than just another gamble he was hoping to win. Regardless of what drove him to do this, there is no one responsible for this except him.

And Las Vegas, or more precisely, the Las Vegas gambling culture and the business community that has grown up to service the culture, share responsibility. The shooter was a long-time gambler who’d managed to gain the blind trust of the gambling business community, who in turn implicitly aided his shooting spree by turning a blind eye to his activities and giving him three days to set up in one of the most luxurious hotels on the strip before he cut loose with his lethal barrage. The blood of those 58 dead are on their hands as well.