An Unlikely Retirement: The 2017 Las Vegas Massacre as an Exercise in Project-Based Deviant Leisure. Issue 4 (November 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Arntfield, Michael; Williams, D. J.
• Is Part Of: Homicide studies. Volume 22:Issue 4(2018)
• Page Start: 410
• Page End: 421
• Publication Date: 2018-11
• Subjects: Las Vegas Massacre -- Stephen Paddock -- project-based leisure -- deviant leisure -- edgework -- mass shooters -- flow theory; Homicide -- Periodicals; 364.152
• DOI: 10.1177/1088767918786765
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1088-7679

Abstract

In recent years, homicide scholarship has been the beneficiary of an increasingly interdisciplinary framework that has come to include a leisure science perspective in attempting to explain murder as a pleasure-seeking avocation for offenders. In this article, the authors employ a leisure-based approach to the Las Vegas Massacre as a foundational case study on multiple murder as project-based deviant leisure. Homicidal leisure-based projects, as suggested here, may also amount to intuitive extensions of other higher-risk hobbies known as edgework. A leisure approach to understanding some forms of multiple murder provides valuable new insights while also integrating important tradition.