On October 1st an American armed with legally purchased, owned, and modified semi‐automatic weaponry opened fire on a music festival crowd from the window of his 32nd floor Las Vegas hotel room. Fifty‐eight people were killed, 489 people were injured, and the gunman shot himself in the head before police used explosives to blow down the door to the room. It is currently the most deadly mass‐shooting in American history, and as horrific as it is to be able to rank such an event, it gets more horrific as it’s the only the second most deadly mass‐shooting perpetrated by a single gunman in the world.
Now, as to not cause yet another hypocritical Republican tantrum, there will be no politicizing the tragedy and discussing gun control in this post since now is not the time to have that discussion. So let’s ignore the just under a year and a half of time there’s been to not have the discussion since the last most deadly mass‐shooting in the United States. And we’ll certainly ignore how after airplanes were used as weapons on September 11th the Republicans created the Transportation Security Administration almost immediately to ensure airplanes couldn’t be turned into weapons again—and that the TSA spent $7.55 billion doing so in 2015 alone. That said, based on observing their inaction in the face of guns being used as weapons, and given the repeated context of these massacres, Republicans appear fine with Americans, and in the Las Vegas incident 4 Canadians, dying in mass‐shootings. They also appear fine with the victims dying at the hands of a fellow American. They even have a special, almost dismissive and diminutive term for the shooter: the lone wolf.
I’ve always been fascinated by the metaphor of the wolf—this vicious killing machine lurking in the dark woods ready to eat my face and all my family for the pure satisfaction of doing it, this fearful, despicable, wicked creature deserving of sneer and scorn—this big bad wolf. But I never saw any of this from the wolf. What I saw was a beautiful animal, potentially dangerous—yes, but no more dangerous than any other large predator, no more deserving of my hatred or mistrust than a polar bear (who sells pop in the winter) or a Bengal tiger (who sells gas all year ’round). One of humankind’s oldest animal friends, the dog, traces its roots back to either the first wolves who were not afraid of humans or the first humans who were not afraid of wolves—or as I like to think of it: the first animals who were not afraid of the other met somewhere in the middle.
But now it seems this ancient friendship is muddied, superseded as it were by the ever‐growing human need for control, for obedience. The wolves who did obey evolved into today’s dogs. The wolves who didn’t, didn’t. They’re still wolves. But they’ve also somehow become entangled within the descriptions of mass‐shootings and other incidents of single perpetrator domestic terrorism within the United States. I don’t care for the term lone wolf. It offends my inner wolf—the part of me who knows more people will be killed by their own countrymen in America before breakfast than wolves have since the turn of the century. Americans kill each other at an average rate of 44 murders per day. The number of confirmed fatal wolf attacks in America in the last 17 years: one.
I like wolves. Something of their story speaks to me—a biased one filled with vilification—something about being not only sought out but killed for what you were born into this world being. As someone who identifies as queer I have the good fortune of being able to in a country where I will not forfeit my freedom, personal safety, or life by doing so. In other parts of the world to be queer is to risk imprisonment or death. And as someone who identifies as a queer wolf, when I hear a shooter described in that same cliché way, as another solitary canis lupus, it offends me as much as if they said it was some crazy faggot on the roof with a rifle.
Let’s remember where the threat is coming from, ditch the euphemism, and address the issue by calling it out as what it is. Some of America’s own citizens are demonstrably more able and willing to kill each other in increasingly violent and numerous ways without any help from wolves, so the word you’re looking for when it comes time to describe the individual responsible for a mass‐shooting is terrorist.