The Sociological Analysis Of Stephen Paddock And The Las Vegas Massacre

Since 2016, there has been over one thousand people killed in relation to shootings in the United States. The worst shooting being the massacre that occurred October 1st 2017 in Las Vegas. Fifty-eight people died, with over four hundred people suffering injuries. Stephen Paddock was the man behind the gun, shooting into the crowd of the Route 91 Harvest music festival. An article by CNN by Emanuella Grinberg entitled Something went 'incredibly wrong' with Las Vegas gunman, brother says, details the tragic events and goes deeper into who the killer was, and tries to find a sense of why he committed this crime. The article discussed how Paddock came from a history of violence because his father was a bank robber. In addition, it highlights Paddock’s

So a criminal, they theorized must silence the urge to follow their moral compass and obligations to commit the crime (Linden, 2016). Much like the classical model, the criminal is conscious of the idea to commit the crime and has to made a conscious decision to commit an illegal act. David Matza and Gresham Sykes, developers of the neutralization techniques, theorized that the suspects did not fully reject their moral obligations, but replaced them by an illegitimate obligation (Linden, 2016). With the Las Vegas shootings, the police have not discovered Paddock’s motive for killing fifty-eight people and injuring more than four hundred people. However, it can be examined with respect to the sociological theory, that Paddock had a moral compass that knew this crime was wrong. But, Paddock had replaced the moral part of himself that said not to kill those people, with an illegitimate obligation that allowed him to commit his crimes. With restricted allowance on guns and ownership of guns, it would be harder for Paddock to obtain the firearms used. As even the illegal rifles would be harder to obtain. Japan dealt with this technique of neutralization with their gun control laws. There gun laws did not prevent criminals from acquiring illegal firearms, but they found that many mobsters and warlords kept to non-gun violence as it went against Japan’s modern-day moral code, updated since the new firearm and sword laws of 1958. Moreover, the citizens of Japan say themselves “within the social system” and “still play[ed] by certain rules of society” even when breaking the law (Aoki, 2017). It may take time, but any new gun control laws can be integrated into the USA’s society and moral beliefs, making people less likely to use a gun for violence, much like what has happened in