We’ve had so many mass shootings in America in recent years that they’ve blurred into one another, all following only minor variants of the same bad script.  No matter whether they target schools, workplaces, or entertainment events, or involve personal grudges, mental illness, or fanatical branches of religion, they all turn out to have been perpetrated by self-centered jerks who've decided their problems should be the world's problems.

I had a degree of personal connection with this sort of thing during the San Bernardino shootings, which took place not far from where I lived and worked at the time.  

As I delved into this incident’s background, I discovered that although the shooters espoused militant Islamic beliefs, they were really just pathetic sad sacks at jihad.  What seems to have actually driven them is a combination of emotions and beliefs that is far more widespread today.

In a world where most people are reduced to the status of mere spectator-consumers, their feelings of smallness and insignificance can become near-constant sources of pain and rage--sometimes out in the open, and more lethally, sometimes bubbling away beneath the surface.  At the same time, the rampant me-centric, I-am-the-center-of-the-universe idfulness of our times reduces inhibitions about flying off into a mindless tantrum about it.  In a land of abundant firearms, all that’s needed for another episode of carnage is some specific spark to set them off.

For the husband-and-wife team that committed the San Bernardino shootings, the spark came in the form of some remarks made at an office holiday party that they found offensive to Islam (or at least the militant variant of it they adhered to).  They had actually held jihadist views for quite some time, actively stockpiling an assortment of weapons that might be of use to them in this cause, but had somehow never gotten around to actually doing anything with them.

Years earlier, they had discussed attacking a local college that most people have never heard of, but which one or the other of them had attended.  Of all the possible targets in the world, or at least their part of it, what grand strategic purpose might an assault on this one have served?   The choice of such an inconsequential target, which happened to have personal connections, is much better explained by some perceived personal slight—possibly something as simple as a bad grade.

The San Bernardino shooters also fantasized at one point about shooting up the 91 Freeway, which is near where they lived and worked.  Again, what about this particular target suggested to them that an attack on it could have made an important strategic contribution to global jihad?  There are lots of other freeways within easy driving distance that are probably more important to US commerce or defense or whatever.

Not that hatred of the 91 Freeway is all that uncommon.  My guess is that most people who have gotten stuck in a traffic jam on it—which would include most people who have ever driven on it—regard this road with, at best, intense distaste.  But we don’t go around dreaming up schemes to attack it.

After considering the backstory of the San Bernardino shooters, it’s hard to escape the impression that, having adopted militant Islamism to impart a sense of meaning to their lives, letting so much time go by without actually doing anything in service to their ideology eventually just made them feel doubly small.

In this context, the perceived offense given by somebody’s words at an office party must have looked to them like a gift from heaven.  No more dithering over what specific action to take, or summoning up the nerve to actually carry it out.  This was an insult that seemed to demand a response from any self-respecting Muslim—a decisive and immediate one, which their hot rush of anger rendered them capable of finally delivering.

Curiously, after their “mission” was completed, they went home. Did they have lunch?

Didn’t anyone tell them that after committing heinous crimes, it’s customary to make a getaway?  Didn’t it occur to them that their home would be the first place the authorities would look for them?

Even more strangely, in short order they went back to the scene of their shootings, where they were virtually guaranteed to run into cops—lots of them.  Why?  The only sense I’ve been able to make of this action is that they went back specifically to die.  

Consider this:

Obviously, their supposedly glorious deeds at the office party hadn’t taken place against a chorus of stirring music, and there hadn’t been any dramatic cinematic effects in exquisite slow motion.  It had been an ugly business of turning living people into corpses.  And when it was done, they had been able to just walk away, without so much as a scratch.  What was heroic about any of that?

In the letdown of this realization, I believe they felt the only way they could experience the flush of satisfaction and purpose they had yearned for, over the span of their years of idle fantasizing, was to go out in a hail of gunfire, finally “martyrs to Allah.”

In all likelihood, they died unaware (or at least unwilling to acknowledge) how profoundly unheroic and pathetic their personal exercise in psychodrama really was—how little it had to do with religion, or even ideology, and everything to do with their own resentment at feeling like nobodies.

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The case of the Las Vegas shooter seems at first glance like it couldn’t be more different from that of the husband-and-wife team in San Bernardino.  The motives of this individual (whose name, like theirs, I will deliberately omit to avoid helping in any way to elevate the stature of anyone unworthy of it) had nothing to do with ideology of any kind.  He also does not appear to have suffered from any serious form of mental illness.  To date, official reports have been unable to account for his actions.

What if he mowed down all those people with automatic weapons fire simply for the thrill of it?

Consider his job history:  going from an accountant (someone watching from the sidelines as other people did daring things with their money) to a real-estate investor (taking risks with his own funds), and then on to making a profession of playing $100-a-hand poker, a pattern of seeking ever more adrenaline-charged thrills is clear.  And to quote the words of his own brother, he had “done everything in the world he wanted to do and was bored with everything.”

Of course, lots of people live their lives as incorrigible thrill seekers without ever contemplating mass murder.  What about this particular man led him to choose to turn a country music concert into a killing field?

Again quoting his brother, he “would have planned the attack to kill a large amount of people because he would want to be known as having the largest casualty count.”

Aha, something for the record books.  Now we’re getting into the realm of action taken in an attempt to “be somebody”—possibly the biggest thrill of all.  And that would be a core drive shared with the San Bernardino shooters.

What’s especially unsettling about the Las Vegas shooter’s case is that in his life, he had experienced a significant amount of professional and economic success.  If even a man like this considers it necessary to create horrendous mass carnage to overcome his sense of being a nobody, what hope is there that the millions upon millions of Americans below him on the socioeconomic totem pole can be counted on to restrain themselves from similar actions?

Some observers have used the clinical term “narcissism” to explain how anyone could put his own wants so callously in front of so many other people’s basic right to live.  But is it really necessary to ascribe this attitude to a formal category of mental illness?  It is, after all, entirely in keeping with the pervasive, self-centered idfulness of our times.  What’s different about it may be only a matter of degree.

And in our gigantism-afflicted age, the urge to rise above our personal anonymity and smallness appears to be as widespread as it is desperate.