Posted on 10/03/2017 1:09:00 PM PDT by Heartlander
The absence of any known ideological or personal motivation behind Sunday night’s massacre makes the terror of an already random act of violence even deeper.
Even before the victims are counted and the blood dried after mass shootings, the public, press, and politicians all begin searching to understand what drove the perpetrators. This is important as a matter of law enforcement—Did they work alone? Is there a remaining threat?—and to make sense of the senseless. But it also serves an important psychological purpose: If the killer can be fit into a known profile, it provides some minimal comfort to an otherwise horrifyingly random crime, some feeling that the key to preventing the next tragedy is just doing a better job of recognizing people like him (it’s almost always a him) and stopping them.
It’s one thing to tell people, “If you see something, say something,” but if no one sees anything, it won’t help. That’s one reason that Stephen Craig Paddock, the man police have identified as the shooter in the Vegas massacre, which killed at least 59 people, is such a frightening enigma. His motivations are, as yet, entirely opaque. As countless people pointed out Monday, Paddock does not immediately fit the “profile” of a mass shooter. More accurately, he does not fit any of the obvious profiles.
Here’s what we do know about the man. He was 64 years old, and lived in Mesquite, Nevada, a town 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. His brother Eric said he was well-to-do, a millionaire even, and he owned two single-engine planes. He lived in a clean, neat retirement community next to a golf course. Eric Paddock said his brother had moved to Nevada from Central Florida because he hated the humidity and because he loved to gamble; gaming was apparently his main occupation, though he had previously worked as an accountant or auditor and real-estate speculator. He had also lived in Texas, and according to The New York Times owned several other properties around the country. Police said his house in Mesquite was in good order.
“No one seems angry here. Everyone seems happy. Everyone waves,” a neighbor told The Nevada Independent. “Living in this kind of community, you don’t expect that. [It] is just unbelievable.”
Of course, reactions like this are a staple of post-atrocity coverage: With some rare and notable exceptions, few people expect that their next-door neighbors are mass-murderers in the making, and if they do believe that, they sometimes take action or move.
Yet in Paddock’s case, based on what little is known so far, the reaction seems more warranted. For example, Paddock was not a young man, as many mass shooters are, though as a white man he shares a race and gender with many other perpetrators. In the aftermath of the massacre, ISIS claimed credit, perplexing experts who noted that on the one hand, the group’s claims are generally borne out, but that on the other, Paddock was an unlikely ISIS recruit. The federal government says it has not turned up any evidence of ties between him and ISIS.
So far there is no indication that Paddock was part of any other extremist groups, whether on the far left or far right, nor that he belonged to ethnic or racial hate groups. Such affiliations sometimes lead people with superficially contented lives to do terrible things, but that won’t help explain this particular crime.
Sometimes those who commit crimes like this turn out to have been lifelong ne’erdowells, who outdid themselves with one final crime. While Paddock seems to have been solitary and itinerant, he was apparently financially successful, and he had no criminal record. This year, Paddock passed criminal background checks while buying guns, according to stores that sold the weapons to him. Other shooters are frustrated attention seekers who desire infamy, but nothing about Paddock’s background so far makes him fit that description either.
Or perhaps Paddock was mentally ill? It’s tempting to say that anyone who could have committed an act like the Vegas massacre must be unwell. “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath,” Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said when asked about motive.
“He’s a sick man, a demented man,” President Trump said Tuesday morning, though he did not offer any more detail. “A lot of problems, I guess. We are looking into him very, very seriously. But we’re dealing with a very, very sick individual.” House Speaker Paul Ryan accented the need for mental-health care Tuesday morning.
Yet there is so far no evidence to support the idea that Paddock was mentally ill, and his brother said he didn’t know of any. Besides, the idea of a link between gun violence and mental illness is, at the very least, probably exaggerated in the public imagination.
“Surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes,” an American Journal of Public Health article found in 2015. “According to Appelbaum, less than 3 percent to 5 percent of U.S. crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness.”
Paddock’s gambling habit has raised questions about whether he might have snapped after a losing streak. He was known to gamble large amounts: Eric Paddock showed FBI agents a text in which his brother mentioned winning $250,000, and the Los Angeles Times cited law-enforcement sources who said Paddock had bought at least $10,000 in chips on occasion in the last year, an amount which requires legal disclosure. But the idea of a spontaneous snap occasioned by losses is hard to reconcile with the extensive preparation that the massacre required. Authorities found 23 guns in the Mandalay Bay hotel, from which he opened fire, and there were another 19 at his home, according to police. Some reports suggest he also had tripods equipped for guns. The Associated Press also reported he had devices that can be retrofitted to a semi-automatic gun to increase its effective rate of fire.
Much of the discourse about the massacre has focused on why law-enforcement officials have not labeled Paddock a terrorist. Federal officials use that word to refer to violence perpetrated for a political cause, and so far there’s no evidence to back up its use here. As I wrote after the 2015 attacks in San Bernardino, the FBI was notably deliberate in applying the term there, even after the press had declared the attacks an act of terror. James Holmes’s theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, sowed terror, but calling it terrorism simply because it was a mass-shooting accident would make little sense.
There are elements of Paddock’s biography that, in hindsight, mark an atypical lifestyle, but hardly the type that ends in blood. He moved frequently. He did not have a typical job—but then again, there is no sign yet that he had problems with money. He was twice divorced—though plenty of people are, and Paddock seems to have had a stable relationship with a woman named Marilou Danley. According to the Los Angeles Times, she was vivacious, and the pair frequented a karaoke bar. (Danley, reportedly an Australian citizen born in the Philippines, was traveling abroad when the shooting occurred, and police are hoping to speak with her, though she is not suspected of involvement.) Paddock’s father was a convicted bank robber who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list after escaping from prison—but again, Paddock himself had no known criminal record.
Some of Paddock’s acquantainces and neighbors suggested he was something of a loner or a recluse. “He was weird. Kept to himself,” a former neighbor told The Washington Post. “We never saw anyone outside there,” another told the Independent. “I questioned whether anyone lived there. The blinds were always drawn.” Yet plenty of others disagree: “He was always normal.” “He was just a nice guy, and that was it.” “He was friendly all the time.”
Eric Paddock, who lives in Florida, has been a major source for information about his brother’s life, and a widely circulated interview that CBS News posted Monday seemed to tap into the strangeness of the situation. There’s no situation in which learning that your brother committed the worst mass-shooting in modern U.S. history won’t be disorienting. (He also says he didn’t know Stephen Paddock to be “an avid gun guy,” and while that’s a subjective determination, the size and type of the arsenal police found suggests more than a hobbyist’s interest.) Yet Eric Paddock’s reactions seem to capture a more essentially perplexing part of his brother’s crime:
“Not an avid gun guy at all...where the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background,” gunman’s brother says pic.twitter.com/EMSKLQGYFM — CBS News (@CBSNews) October 2, 2017
“The fact that he had those kind of weapons is just—how the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background or anything like that,” Paddock said.
Sputtering, shaking his head, and widening his eyes, Paddock tried to reconcile the person he knew with the killer: “He’s a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite and drove down and gambled in Las Vegas. He did … stuff. He ate burritos.”
The banality of that existence makes the Las Vegas massacre even more frightening than even the record-breaking death toll would suggest. The lack of any obvious motivation makes the terror of a random act of violence even deeper and more random. If an ordinary guy, with no obvious ties to extremists groups, no ideological motivations, an apparently placid personal life, stable finances, and no psychological abnormalities—the kind of guy who eats burritos, has a couple beers at the karaoke bar, waves to his neighbors, but largely keeps to himself—can emerge as the deadliest shooter in modern U.S. history, what hope can there be to identify suspects like him before they attack?
Violent crime is most often committed by younger males. The likelihood of a first time offender committing a violent crime, let alone mass murder, decreases with age, and is rare in the over 60 population. So what might cause a guy leading a heretofore comfortable life to become a mass murderer? Something that created rage in him. Physical and/or mental deterioration such as a psychotic break or brain tumor. A severe destabilizing event of some sort. Some long simmering fury that he finally decided to act upon. Medication issues of some sort. Bottom line...whatever the cause it is not likely to be a garden variety motive.
“Most mass murderers, aside from Islamist terrorists, tend to be white.”
Not true at all,
Maybe you mean in the US and You mean spree killers.
And then the above is not even necessarily even true.
We don’t know enough about Paddock to know if he’s an “enigma” or not.
His bank robber father was judged to be psychotic as well as criminal.
Stephen Paddock may just be a chip off the old block, only more so.
Would the Atlantic state there was 'no obvious motive' at a Guggenheim Event Slaughter?
If the killer drove from Nevada to Nashville or Branson or Dollywood it would have made things a lot clearer.
But he didn't. He shot at the largest gathering he could see from his hotel window and that makes coming to a conclusion not quite so easy.
There's a built-in bias on political sites to assuming everything is political. Maybe the bias reflects the truth in this case, but some people are just crazy and beyond the usual political categories.
Yes, I mean in the US. And yes most domestic mass murderers and serial killers are white males.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/
There is a reason.
That may be true, in fact it makes sense. Still, most here are white and I took no offense from the author saying so.
1) What was the motive?
2) Who else was in on it?
3) How long were they planning it?
“...though as a white man he shares a race and gender with many other perpetrators”.
“most domestic mass murderers and serial killers are white males.”
So “many other”. And, you, “most”.
Just pointless idiocy.
BINGO!!! Since the media has said he’s a right winger....that pretty much says he was a LEFTIST!!
Don’t hold your breath.
If “it” don’t fit The Narrative, we (regular Joe’s) won’t hear none of it.
Gingrich mentioned it on Hannity. there is no way this dude did not have a motive. ashoots people, no manifesto, nothing... He is like , there is a strange “not coming together as a nation like after 911”
Yes, how about that, which is typical result of successful stealth communis masked antifa like operations.
Hou can bet if he voted Republican Trump card carrying, it would be all over the freaking news and out the mouthes of the seditious FBi.
As for the Vegas police, pathetic. They are like, the FBi is doung this, that and the FBi said this and that, ... they have no control over this and peotecting their citizens, they are federalized under Homeland.
There are also the photos of the anti-Trump protestor wearing the pink pussy hat who might be Paddock. At first it was discounted because the protest was in Reno, which is quite a long drive from Mesquite.
But today the Daily Mail (UK) reported, “A SWAT team also raided a second property owned by Paddock in Reno on Monday.”
He has a home in Reno.
This needs to be investigated.
We aren’t lucky, and it will be concealed by our corrupt, leftist bureaucracies.
Facts are neither pointless nor are they idiocy.
Would the press ‘wonder’ under those circumstances that maybe just maybe - - it might - - just might - - be political?
(the killer's ‘woman’ is married to a uber liberal ‘move-on’ activist... AND the large number of arms he had in the hotel room points to a likelihood that more than one person was involved. Maybe a person who backed out at the last minute?)
And what do we hear? How much the guns weigh... gun control... all the usual democrat talking points. I feel that if the facts were reversed and the people murdered were white liberal elites OR any democrat victim group that the FIRST comments would be about the situation being political.
I could be wrong.
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