It's not really a story, more of a snapshot with the scant information I have available. It's an age one expects individuals to be steeped in firmer values from the past or associates with a Beatles song, a time to take a breather from the stresses and strains of raising your own family, welcome your grandchildren and wind down in expectation of taking life a little easier in your remaining years.
Outwardly he appeared frighteningly normal: a couple of divorces under his belt, but that's no big deal in the modern throwaway society we have come to know and expect. No money worries, no arguments over family relationships, no grudge against a former employer. Just a normal, middle-class, suburban male on vacation to enjoy a Country and Western concert alongside 22000 others.
Yet this man stood apart. Is there some concealed mystery in his past, some genetic connection to his gangster, psychopathic father with suicidal traits, who abandoned his son at 14 years of age? Maybe he was worrying about the onset of old age in a world from which he had become dissociated, downgraded by the newer generation, no longer content with life's vices of gambling, drinking or prostitution. Time had moved on, yet the only individual he seemed to care about was his 90-year-old mother, for whom he bought cookies and a walking frame. She was from the old school: respectable, loyal, dependable, an existence he yearned to regain yet whose virtues now proved elusive.
Or maybe the concern for his mother makes the crimes all the more horrible and inexplicable. Is this just another example of the threnody of the human condition, the banality of evil, the senseless crime?
In short: he killed because he could. A loner who had lost the interconnection of daily lives which keep society moving, the cleaners, the launderers, the emergency service staff who would clean up his bloody mess, and why shouldn't they in their leisure time enjoy a respite in the form of a Harvest Festival of music? Yet this man, sequestered in his den of evil, curtains billowing inwards against the shattered glass, his vantage point chosen specifically to maximise the carnage in his last hour on earth spewed indiscriminately his bullets of hate, knowing full well he would forfeit his own meaningless life in the process and never be forced to confront the consequences of his actions.