Before he spoke to reporters about a cratering special session Monday afternoon, Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper stepped back from politics, from taxing and from spending.

At least 58 people were dead in Las Vegas, and more than 500 had been injured in an apparently random act by a lone gunman Sunday night.

Hickenlooper has seen that kind of senseless tragedy first-hand. He saw it when James Holmes killed a dozen people and wounded at least 70 others in an Aurora movie theater in 2012. He saw it again in 2013 when 18-year-old Karl Pierson shot 17-year-old Claire Davis and then killed himself at Arapahoe High School, another deadly random act. Earlier than year the governor’s prisons chiefs, Tom Clements, was executed by parolee for reasons that still haven’t been proven. Eight people have died in wildfires during his seven years in office, and nine others perished in Colorado’s historic flood in September 2013.

“Before the sun came up this morning I was texting with Gov. (Brian) Sandoval and trying to see if there was any useful experience I could share with him in what is clearly the greatest challenge any governor can face,” Hickenlooper said. “Certainly, I think he sees it that way. Hard to imagine the scale of the devastation that took place there, watching the clips, hearing the witness accounts.

The governor paused and sounded emotional in a halting way that’s rare for him.

“It’s sobering beyond belief,” he said.

Hickenlooper commended the first-responders, hospitals, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo and Sandoval as “the right people at the right time there.”

He couldn’t find the words to characterize the shooter, Stephen Paddock. “It was a difficult way to get to see how that kind of person – a person who obviously has … I can’t begin to generalize it. It’s very hard for me read it.”