A One Word Wish for 2018: Restraint

My single hope for all of us this coming year: take a step back.

Perhaps the most disturbing story I heard in 2017 was the story of Geary Danley. In the hours after the mass shooting in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, the internet was abuzz with people relaying information and weighing in on what happened.

Now that the dust has cleared, we understand that Stephen Paddock cracked the window of the 32nd floor room at the Mandalay Bay hotel at which he was staying, and proceeded to open fire on attendees of the Route 91 Harvest music festival across the street. He had at least 17 guns in his room, and thousands of rounds of ammunition, which he used to ultimately kill 59 people and injure more than 500 more, before ultimately taking his own life.

But in the early hours of Oct 2nd — before even police and the FBI had anything close to complete information — a man named Geary Danley and his family were receiving death threats. Several news outlets and groups of people on Twitter an social media outlets were identifying Danley as the shooter in Las Vegas. He was not even in Las Vegas at the time. His only connection to the shooter was that he was the ex-husband of Marilou Danley — the woman said to be dating Stephen Paddock at the time he opened fire on the crowd in Las Vegas.