Calling Paddock a ‘lone wolf’ isn’t racist

It’s been nearly two weeks since Stephen Paddock committed mass murder in Las Vegas and the FBI is still casting about pitifully for clues. Why did he do it? Not even his girlfriend knows, though it’s said he claimed to have been simply ‘born bad’. Plans are afoot to put up billboards urging anyone who ever met Paddock to come forward. There’s something touching about billboards in the internet age.

Perhaps because there are no answers in the offing, in place of them has swelled a great wave of outrage, not, oddly, about America’s gun laws, but about race.

The strong feeling among America’s celebrity class — the pop stars, the hip hop stars and actors on Twitter — is that it’s racist of the FBI and of the President not to call Paddock a terrorist. Ava DuVernay, one of Hollywood’s hippest young directors, tweeted this: ‘The lone wolf. The local shooter. The gunman. Any and everything, but terrorist. Wonder why.’ Ava was joined by Rihanna (79.9 million followers on Twitter) and then newspaper columnists on both sides of the Atlantic.

A piece in the Washington Post summed up the thinking: ‘If the shooter had been Middle Eastern or Muslim, the rhetoric would pretty much write itself at this point. I doubt he’d be granted a descriptor with a positive connotation like “lone wolf”, as if he were the protagonist in a classic Western.’

If only characters called ‘Lone Wolf’ were the usual protagonists in a classic Western… never mind. The real trouble with all this contagious indignation over Paddock’s ‘white privilege’ is that in a country with a real racism problem, it seems so terribly misplaced.

The Twitter activists make much of the fact that Nevada defines ‘terrorism’ relatively loosely.