The headline read “Las Vegas shooting death toll rises, no apparent connection to terror”.

If you haven’t heard by now, at least 58 people were killed and over 500 more were injured in Las Vegas on Sunday night after a gunman opened fire from the thirty-second floor the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino onto a crowd of people attending a music festival below.

But it wasn’t terrorism.

Video of the incident is nauseating. The metallic ring of semi-automatic rounds can be heard pelting the crowd of concertgoers, as they cry out in horror and confusion.  People, bloodied and injured, can be seen on the ground, while others try to lay over top of their loved ones, attempting to protect them from the hail of bullets still to come.

If one word comes to mind upon watching these videos, that word is “terror”. 

And, yet, mainstream media doesn’t want to call this an act of terrorism…at least not yet.

The definition of terrorism is a legal, political and social one that is ever-shifting and difficult to pin down. The U.S. federal government has multiple definitions of terrorism in use between various branches and departments. In Canada, terrorism is defined as any act committed either in whole or in part for political, religious, or ideological purposes with the intent of public intimidation.

On a whole, terrorism is loosely defined as acts of violence with political, economic, ideological, or religious motives that seek to convey a message about such motives while striking fear in the general public. 

In Nevada, though, the law is clear. Nevada state law defines terrorism as acts that involve the use or attempted use of sabotage, coercion, or violence, which are intended to cause great bodily harm or death to the general population. 

According to the state law, at least, this incident should quite clearly meet the legal definition of terrorism. This was a person who used violence to kill, injure, and create widespread panic and fear. 

So why is the media so reluctant about calling a spade a spade?

It likely has a lot to do with the assailant himself. Stephen Paddock fits that legal description perfectly. He was a white, 64-year-old male, recently retired accountant, and a U.S. citizen. Moreover, his motives for the attack remain unknown. 

However, Paddock doesn’t fit the official bill of what the mainstream media is so often quick to label a “terrorist”.  Of course, the media’s profile of what constitutes a “terrorist” is extremely limited and typically informed by racial and religious “other-ing”, underpinned by rampant Islamophobia. 

Paddock is a white male who cannot so easily be “other-ed”, and so the media is squeamish about assigning such a label to him.

This, of course, is problematic. 

We should be wary of a definition of terrorism that is so narrow, that such acts may only be ascribed to those with foreign-sounding names, dark skin, and a particular religious ideology.

The fact that this assailant was white, without clear ties to any international terrorist organizations, means that media outlets and commentators are treating him as “psychotic” rather than "radicalized”. They point to him as an isolated case of mental illness, rather than symptomatic of a deep-seated social threat. 

The hard truth is that this is the latter—and it is being manifested through domestic terrorism at the hands of white males.

We have to remember that white males have been killing people on U.S. soil at an alarming rate, for much of recent history. It is not difficult to think of examples: Timothy McVeigh, Jim David Adkisson, Robert Lewis Dear, Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, Dylann Roof, Richard Poplawski and James von Brunn, just to name a few. 

To be clear, the vast majority of mass shooters in America are white males—97 percent of them, in fact. These are the people who have committed horrible acts of terror, killing countless individuals while creating a social sense of fear and unrest.

It is not a coincidence.  It is not a “one-off” or an isolated incident. It is a repeating pattern of domestic terrorism that cannot be ignored any longer.

It must be addressed. It must be treated as a threat to civic life and it must be eradicated—with the same fervour that is applied to those who are so quickly labelled “terrorist”.

And the only way to do this is to treat the problem as it is—as terrorism—and to remove the tools of terrorism—firearms—from the terrorists themselves.  

Access to arms must be controlled and monitored. The National Rifle Association needs to be regulated and taken to task. Legislation that's aimed to make guns, semi-automatic rifles and dangerous firearm accessories—like silencers—more accessible to the general public must be vigorously opposed. The importance of vocal resistance to the continued dissemination and widespread availability of firearms among a civilian population prone to violence cannot be underscored enough. 

Enough is enough. Thoughts and prayers aren’t working anymore. Ignoring the problem and refusing to talk about the acts of terrorism committed by white men isn’t working anymore. Dodging the issue of gun control and reframing the debate to inane nonissues like hotel security is only allowing this to happen over and over again. 

So it starts here. It starts today with calling Stephen Paddock, and all the other assailants who have come before him and the ones who are sure to come after, exactly what they are—terrorists. 

Plain and simple.