By Thomas L. Knapp
“I need to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost," Master Sergeant Matthew Alan
Livelsberger (US Army) allegedly wrote in an explanatory note on his phone before shooting
himself inside a Tesla Cybertruck packed with fireworks and gas tanks set to detonate outside a
Las Vegas casino,”and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”
I say “allegedly” because, as is often the case, we’re only getting details and versions of the
story that the government and its law enforcement agencies choose to release. Those details
and versions are at best incomplete and at worst not necessarily true. But I consider that
particular sentence the elephant in the room.
The rest of the released content indicates a kind of fuzzy political motive, but Livelsberger’s
personal life and mental health also seem to have been unraveling in various ways leading up to
the incident.
Yes, incident — not, really, an “attack.” Based on what’s been publicly released about his
Special Forces experience and skill set, if he’d wanted to create a true mass casualty event, he
wouldn’t likely have ended up killing only himself (and inflicting allegedly minor injuries on seven
others).
While the whole thing clearly didn’t amount to a “cry for help” — he no longer needs, or could
use, help — it was definitely a cry of some kind rather than an attempt to kill others.
Back to that elephant in the room: More than one in four American “mass shooters” come from
military backgrounds, while only 7% or so of the general population has that kind of experience
and training.
On the same weekend as the Las Vegas explosion, army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14
and injured dozens in a New Orleans rampage using a truck.
Timothy McVeigh received the Bronze Star as a Bradley Fighting Vehicle gunner in Desert
Storm before going on to commit the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Does military “service” make one more likely to engage in violent conduct?
Or does a proclivity for such conduct cause future mass shooters to seek out such “service?”
Maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe there are other factors. But the correlation seems strong enough
to believe there’s a connection of SOME kind.

While the whole subject is likely too complex to admit of simple solutions, the problem can
clearly at least be reduced at one end — by creating fewer people who find themselves mentally
twisted and morally haunted by the experience of killing other people.
Preferably, none of those people at all.
But even just adopting a sane foreign policy that doesn’t entail decades of needless war without
end, and significantly cutting the head count of the US armed forces to match, would be a good
start.