Smashing his 32-story hotel room window Oct. 1 with a hammer at Madalay Bay Las Vegas, 64-year-old former accountant Stephen Paddock opened fire with automatic rifles on 20,000 concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest Music festival. Living in Mesquite, NV, Paddock kept an arsenal of arms-and-ammo, at least 20 weapons, including automatic and semiautomatic assault rifles and a variety of handguns. Killing at least 59 and injuring 500, Paddock committed the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. His 62-year-old live-in girlfriend apparently fled the country before the FBI and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms [ATF] agents could question her. It’s inconceivable she knew nothing about Paddock’s arsenal, whether she knew his plan to commit mass murder. When you consider his diabolical plan, spraying automatic weapons fire into dense crowd was like shooting fish-n-a-barrel.
Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told the press today that a coordinated investigation was in works with the FBI and ATF, refusing to speculate about a motive. News media expect law enforcement to tell the public why Paddock committed mass murder. President Donald Trump called Paddock’s massacre the epitome of “evil,” avoiding any blame to U.S. gun laws, allowing U.S. citizens without felonies to purchase firearms with routine background checks. Paddock’s actions raise real concerns of how ordinary citizens can stockpile weapons needed to commit mass murder. Gun violence in the U.S. has killed more citizens than lung cancer and heart disease combined. Yet the gun lobby has successfully prevented tougher gun control laws to prevent psychos from getting dangerous weapons. Paddock had no arrest record prior to his ballistic episode.
Pschopathic killers don’t need motives, like his girlfriend broke up with him or his stocks crashed to lash out at innocent victims. Paddock lived in a $369K single-family dwelling in an affluent retirement community. “I can’t even make this up,” said Eric Paddock, the mass killer’s younger brother. Eric claims his brother was a multimillionaire real estate investor, living comfortably around golf courses and tennis courts. FBI Agent Aaron Rouse said the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] already claimed responsibility, knowing nothing about Stephen Paddock. Taking responsibility for a psychopathic mass killing shows ISIS’s desperation for relevance after losing Mosul, Iraq and being driven out of Raqqa, Syria. Unless the FBI can show a connection between Paddock and ISIS or any other terror group, the mass murder falls into the category of a psychotic or psychopathic killer.
Affluence or real estate holdings add to the intrigue, especially because it confounds motives for throwing one’s life away. Shooting himself in the head runs counter to Islamic terrorists preferring to going down in a hail of bullets for the cause. “No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about any of that stuff. He was a guy that had money. He went on cruises and gambled,” said Eric Paddock, refuting the idea that his brother was brainwashed by ISIS or any other Mideast terror group. No one other than ISIS has claimed responsibility, attesting to its current failed state. There’s zero evidence that Stephen Paddock was influence by anyone other than his own demons. Unable to find Paddock’s live-in girlfriend attests to her refusal to help authorities piece together what happened to the former Lockheed-Martin accountant.
If there’s any red flag in Stephen’s background, his father was on the FBI Most Wanted List for bank robbery back in the late 70s. How that factored into his ballistic episode is anyone’s guess. What’s known to date is that he took a room on the 32nd floor facing the outdoor concert venue where he proceeded on the evening of Oct. 1 to spray 20,000 music-revelers with bullets. While it looks like a freak occurrence, acts of mass murder are not that uncommon. When Timothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City April 19, 1995, he killed 168, injuring 680, the deadliest mass murder in U.S. history before Sept. 11. Paddock sealed his fate in the annals of U.S. mass murder, killing more with automatic and semiautomatic weapons than anyone one in history, his new claim-to-fame
Whether Stephen Paddock was wealthy or not does not detract from a psychotic break from reality that morphs an ordinary person into a mass killer. While there’s nothing wrong with finding single motives, the reality is always that mass killers break from reality before they commit heinous acts. Paddock learned much from the media hitting a soft target like concert venues, a favorite practice of Islamic terrorists looking to create mayhem to advance their cause. Taking credit for Paddock’s mass murder shows the utter desperation of ISIS to remain relevant as its self-anointed caliphate crumbles. When the FBI finishes its investigation, don’t be surprised to find out that there’s no single motive for committing the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Psychotic breaks happen more frequently than you think. Add to that an arsenal of assault weapons and you have the lethal mixture.
