America's Plea: If He's Not a Terrorist or Poor, Paddock Better Damn Well be Mentally Ill
The F.B.I., Las Vegas Police and journalists are all scrambling to find a motivation which sent Stephen Paddock on a killing spree, leaving 59 dead and over 500 wounded. The search for an answer to why he did it is so dire that billboards have been set up around Las Vegas, reading " If you know something, say something ." The message is clear: it is simply impossible that Stephen Paddock was sane and without any particular motivation. The agent in charge of the Las Vegas F.B.I. office went so far as to say " we will not stop, until we have the truth " For philosophers, such statements pertaining to the possible existence of immutable truth hammers at the core of our discipline. Here we have a representative of a state institution proclaiming that there is an indisputable truth about Paddock out there somewhere in the universe to be discovered; if we just work hard enough and piece together all of the clues, we will find it. Leaving post-modernist a...