"Before he opened fire late Sunday — killing at least 59 people at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip — the gunman Stephen Paddock lived a quiet life for years in a small town outside Las Vegas." —Twin Cities Pioneer Press

"Family members said that Paddock spent much of his retirement in recent years staying in hotels in Las Vegas and gambling. They said he listened to country music and went to concerts at Vegas hotels." —The Inquirer, Philly.com

"He’s just a guy who played video poker and took cruises and ate burritos at Taco Bell." — Paddock's brother, according to The Washington Post

I don't want to know.

I don't want to know anything about this man, or any individual who commits such an unspeakable horror.

He's not human, at least to me. And he does not deserve to be treated like he is.

I'm not sure why the news media does this, this humanizing of the most horrific of criminals. Maybe to try to understand somehow, to try to make sense of why a person would go out and commit the biggest mass shooting of modern America.

But we will never know. Not only because the gunman is dead, but also because we will never have the insight into such a twisted mind. We will never understand the thoughts that went through his head, or why he thought he had the right to take the lives of others, as if it was his god-like power to decide.

And I don't want to. I don't want to try to understand, because it's completely incomprehensible.

I especially don't want to know about their life prior. I don't want to know that he liked country music. I don't want to know that he lived a "quiet life" outside the city. I don't want to know anything about his personal life, or any pieces of information that make him attempt to appear human in my eyes, to appear relatable.

We need to not publicize the killers. We need to not give media attention to the pieces of scum who commit such outrageous terror. It does nothing but confuse the consequences of their actions, keep the wound fresh, and give a spotlight of infamy, a spotlight which could lead to copycat acts of terror.

The only time when a killer's identity should be publicized is if the suspect is at large.

A quote from another article from The Washington Post summarizes it all pretty well.

Following the Aurora, Colo., shooting of 2012, then-CNN media correspondent Howard Kurtz said, “I don’t care about whether he was disappointed in school. I don’t want psychological studies of him, because anybody who shoots up a movie theater with men, women and children is crazy — is so much of a sociopath that, I think, it’s almost fruitless for us to figure out, well, what was it about it that made him snap.”