14 | http://www.nationalreview.com OCTOBER 30 , 2017THE WEEK
and a methodical, obsessive video-poker gambler. He was twice
divorced (amicably); had a girlfriend (of no interest in the case);
was distant from his brothers. His father had been an FBI-most-
wanted bank robber.
In an age of toxic politics, we look for ideological motives;
jihad is the great supplier, with racism a distant though vigorous
second. But so many killers kill because they kill. “The heart is
deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can
know it?”H
UGHHEFNERended as a caricature drawn by his ene-
mies: the septua/octo/nonagenarian squiring mistress-
es young enough to be his granddaughters, enacting
Viagra-fueled orgies in a mansion that, hard-up for cash
(though nothing else), he had to sell, then rent. A 2000s reality
show about his ménage portrayed it as camp, but enough dis-
affected escapees wrote in detail about their time at his side to
preserve its sordid texture.
In a controversial sentence in Reflections on the Revolution in
France, Burke wrote of the court at Versailles that “vice itself lost
half its evil, by losing all its grossness.” Hefner senexhad no
shortage of grossness.
But it was in the prime of his life, presenting his most attrac-
tive face to the world, that he made his impact. Playboymaga-
zine scored a coup by printing a nude calendar shot of Mar i lyn
Monroe in its first issue. But the engine of its success was the girl
next door: pornographic photo-essays of normal young women.
They were not anonymous denizens of some sleazy underworld;
they would strip, pose suggestively, and give their names. The
message was: All women are like this. And you, the reader, can
and should think of them like this. And (the other half of the
package) doing so will admit you to the lifestyle portrayed here,
and the cultured big names printed here. (WFB was one of the
magazine’s many interview subjects. His appearance, he said,
was like putting a Gideon’s Bible in a brothel. True—but this
brothel boasted about the Bibles it housed.)
Hefner, in his mansions, first in Chicago, then Los Angeles,
ran a virtual brothel for hangers-on (e.g., Bill Cosby), offering
shoals of girls not next door but in his house. But he made his
mark as the pimp next door. Dead at 91. R.I.P.statement about the rural South—a plucky endeavor that pro-
duced a few fine tracks but ultimately fell short of its massive
aspirations. Petty was much better at simple stand-alone rock-
ers, such as “I Won’t Back Down,” a 1989 song that became a
post-9/11 anthem. On September 25 at the Hollywood Bowl,
Petty and the Heartbreakers played the final concert on a
country-spanning 40th-anniversary tour. As usual, they per-
formed “Free Fallin’,” a sing-along standard. Toward its end,
Petty drawled a familiar line: “I wanna free fall, out into noth-
in’ / Gonna leave this world for a while.” A week later, he left
it for good. Dead at 66. R.I.P.E
NSCONCEDin a room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las
Vegas, Stephen Paddock, armed to the teeth, fired on a
crowd of country-music concertgoers on the Strip, killing
58 and injuring over 500 before shooting himself.During the rain of death, there were numerous acts of fellow
feeling and outright heroism. Veterans stanched wounds with
their fingers and tourniquets made from T-shirts. People in flight
helped each other over low walls or into a restroom trailer for
cover. Husbands and boyfriends died shielding their loved ones.
On the wild side, one defiant man was photographed flipping the
bird in the direction of the shots; may they have missed him.
The killer’s arsenal—he had stashed some two dozen guns in
his room—included semiautomatic rifles fitted with bump
stocks, devices that channel the recoil force in order to approx-
imate automatic fire. Federal laws passed in 1934 and tightened
in 1986 have made machine guns, which release a continuous
stream of bullets with one pull of the trigger, nearly impossible
to own. The Supreme Court’s Hellerdecision, upholding the
personal right to bear arms, left these restrictions in place.
Bump stocks, which create quasi–machine guns, should be
added to the blacklist: by Congress, not by freewheeling regu-
lators. While doing that, Congress should also lift the restric-
tions on suppressors, misnamed “silencers,” which do not make
weapons anywhere near spy-movie silent but do limit damage
to the shooter’s ears.
So far there are no clues to the killer’s motives. He was 64
years old, a multimillionaire thanks to shrewd real-estate deals,OBITUARYGUN CONTROL Hugh Hefner, R.I.P.
The Las Vegas AtrocityLASVEGAS: DAVIDBECKER/GETTYIMAGES; HEFNER: CHARLEYGALLAY/GETTYIMAGESFORPLAYBOYweek-FINAL_QXP-1127940387.qxp 10/11/2017 2:45 PM Page 14