It’s been a month since the Mandalay Bay massacre and legislatively nothing has happened besides “thoughts and prayers.” There’s no ban on bump stocks. There’s no “extreme vetting” of firearm purchasers. There’s no extra tax on ammunition (or on primer, powder, and bullets for those who re-use old cases). There’s no push for increased spending on mental health. As the right is so fond of saying, Congress is serving up a big old nothingburger.

Is this is a surprise? If Sandy Hook didn’t effect any sort of change what would? What could? And that got me thinking. Maybe, just maybe, Stephen Paddock’s motive for murder was to highlight the need for gun control.

Think about it.

It’s been a month and we are still being told that federal and state law enforcement have no clue as to his motivation. All anyone says is that the attack was meticulously planned and executed.

Maybe he was trying to do something; in the sickest Joker level way possible. It’s not without precedent — in real life or in film or books. People do terrible things all the time for reasons that make a sort of twisted sense. Maybe he was trying to make a point.

Here is one guy. ONE guy who accumulated an arsenal. He not only amassed an obscene amount of weaponry but also a considerable quantity of ammunition. He was then able to successfully transport twenty-three weapons, a large amount of ammunition, and 50 pounds of explosives. To a hotel. Just think about that. He successfully moved an arsenal into and through a hotel; and not some rinky dink mom and pop no-tell motel. The Mandalay Bay has cameras and security everywhere. The lobby, the halls, the elevators, the parking garage, everywhere.

But he did it. By himself. And he planned it so that he would have everything in place in time for the Route 91 Harvest festival, a concert that attracted over 20,000 country music fans.

Country music fans as a demographic are typically pro gun. Adults who’ve gone to a country music concert in the past year are 68 percent more likely than the average person to own a handgun, 74 percent more likely to own a rifle, and 83 percent more likely to own a shotgun.

So to recap. One man with 23 firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and 50 pounds of explosives turned a hotel room into hunting blind. His prey: approximately 20k stereotypically pro-gun human beings. Hunting season opened when he began firing his bump stock equipped rifle.

If you were in that crowd and went through that horror maybe — if you survived — you might change your gun policy views. Multiply that by 20,000 with each of those having a friend or family member who might also change their tune after being directly effected by a mass shooting. If you wanted to have an outsize impact on the gun debate and were sick enough to go through with it, well this might be one way to do it.

Do I actually think Stephen Paddock did what he did to make some sort of larger point about the utter inadequacy our gun regulations? Or that he was lampooning the primacy of gun culture in the United States? Or that he sought to caricaturize the NRA’s facile proposition that assault rifles are appropriate weapons for hunting (they are, if what you are hunt are humans)?

No, I don’t think Stephen Paddock’s motive was any of those things. But even if it was, has anything happened since he killed 58 people and injured 527? A month has gone by.

Sandy Hook wasn’t enough.

Now it appears that Las Vegas isn’t enough either.

What will it take?