Such is the modern conditioning inherent in the news cycle that assumptions were immediate. A terror attack had taken place on a public gathering at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. It was, as the case had been in the Bataclan shootings in Paris on 13 November 2015, a matter of inflicting mass damage in an enclosed space filled with revellers.
The toll proved terrifying. The shooter, from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, had inflicted 500 casualties, with 59 fatalities. (This number is bound to rise.) When the death toll passed 49, the efforts of Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada had shaded those of Omar Mateen at the Orlando Pulse night club last year.
Within a matter of minutes, the Las Vegas Police Department lifted the urgency of its tweets, noting that the shooting had become a mass casualty event. It proved so stretched that various services were halted. 'Due to the mass shooting incident last night, our Records and Fingerprint Bureau, at our Headquarters campus, is closed for business today.'
It was cold comfort to see that the attack was a local affair, not of official, internationally directed terrorism, but a mass shooting in its traditionally violent form. The behaviour of the shooter could not be explained as an act of anti-American delight, an instance of affirmation to a foreign ideology or code.
There was no call of smug delight surging its way through social media from ISIS, an ecstatic assumption of responsibility. Paddock had seemingly worked alone, fastidiously assessing the situation, stockpiling arms in his room, and waiting for the moment when the crowd would be most concentrated.
Las Vegas sheriff Joseph Lombardo stonewalled on the semantics. Had an act of mass domestic terrorism just taken place on American soil? Perhaps not, despite the Nevada statute defining it as such: the police had yet to ascertain what the 'belief system' of the shooter was. When specifically pressed on whether this could be deemed an act of 'domestic terrorism', Lombardo hedged: 'we have to establish what his motivation was, first.'
President Donald Trump also avoided the term. Terrorism has its loaded associations, a distinct demonology. To suggest that a US citizen might be a terrorist hardly accords with the project of Making America Great Again. Paddock was not a Muslim, which would have been a useful alibi for the restrictive policy on arrivals from specific Islamic countries.
"This was a side of the United States that has spoken for generations: the man with the gun is king, if only for a brief and spectacularly bloody period of time."
It follows that there are no such things as American terrorists, since Americans do not commit acts of terror. Such tormented logic explains Trump's assiduous references to 'senseless murder' and an 'act of pure evil'.
Shaun King, in a penned piece for The Intercept, played on this theme, bringing in the essence of identity politics. (Perhaps only in the United States can matters of colour find their way with effortlessness into a discussion of mass murder.) 'Paddock, like the majority of mass shooters in this country, was a white American.' A cruel reasoning was at play: 'Whiteness, somehow, protects men from being labelled terrorists.'
The question of toll and cost remain marked but unanswered. In Trump's America, it has become fashionable to vent the spleen, to lash out at the unmentioned, to malign without distinction. The forgotten shall speak; the ignored shall be recognised again. But this was a side of the United States that has spoken for generations: the man with the gun is king, if only for a brief and spectacularly bloody period of time.
As the Sandy Hook Promise group, named after the 2012 atrocity at the elementary school that gave it its name, noted in the aftermath of the shootings, discussion and inertia tend to be the mineral elements of the debate on gun violence. 'Over the past five years, we have witnessed how we generally respond (or don't) as a country to mass shootings like Las Vegas.'
The response tends to be 'cyclical', eventually normalising the unspeakable. It starts with searing grief, followed by a debate about banning assault weapons or encouraging the arming of even more Americans; it moves on to mental debility and the 'good guys vs bad guys'. Then come the mumblings on policy, where inertia sets in. Discuss options, draft them, but never pass them.
In terms of a durable legacy from the legislatures, change will be scant. There will be prayers for loved ones, plentiful work for the counsellors, and stump positions for politicians. Under the Obama administration, changes to gun control were cosmetic and even frustrated at a time when the Democrats had a majority in the Senate. Currently before the House of Representatives is the Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Act which actually lessens restrictions.
'By the end of the next week,' rue the members of the Sandy Hook Promise group, 'this story will be almost gone as if it never happened, even while those most impacted are still reeling from shock and grief.'
Dr Binoy Kampmark is a former Commonwealth Scholar who lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.