The only potential motive out there is the fact that ISIS has claimed responsibility. They usually do that when it is true. The professional profilers are overwhelmingly saying no because he’s an old, rich, white man.
Now news is leaking that he may have had an escape route.
I sure hope the possibility that they are telling the truth is being considered by the authorities.
Please share widely!
Does it really matter? Another angry man (what else, besides anger, motivates such horror?) massacres as many innocents as he can.
Any approach that correctly identifies crazies such as Mr. Paddock before they commit their crimes will, by necessity, falsely identify thousands of innocents — and will shred whatever is left of our freedoms and rights. I value our freedoms and rights far more than I value the false sense of security that draconian “preventive” measures might provide.
Freedom has never been cheap.
There have always been and will always be a certain microscopic portion of our population that behave as Mr. Paddock. Terrorist groups such as ISIS and the NRA prey on these susceptible outliers. I am not defending either group, I’m instead reminding us that these are individual acts born of individual pathology.
What we have not done before, and do not need to do today, is ARM these terrorists with automatic weapons fed by high-capacity magazines containing lethal ammunition.
If each item that Mr. Paddock purchased while assembling his arsenal was tracked in a national online database, monitoring software could have alerted authorities. There are few enough people with a legitimate need to acquire such things that it would not be burdensome or intrusive for authorities to follow up on those who do.
It seems to me that the horror of this incident is a result of Mr. Paddock’s pathology coupled with his easy access to guns, ammunition, and time. ISIS has very little to do with it, even if their claims prove accurate.
Many Americans (too many, in my opinion) believe that the acquisition of arsenals like those of Mr. Paddock is a fundamental freedom. I suggest that events like the massacre in Las Vegas are an obvious and inevitable consequence of that belief. That’s why I find the “thoughts” and “prayers” of those Americans so offensively hypocritical.
When we fill a room with natural gas, the building will inevitably explode. The time for “thoughts” and “prayers” and somber words is AFTER the gas has been shut off and the room ventilated.
Unfortunately it probably does matter. If he was ISIS, it might mean a whole new level of response.
Indeed.
That’s because our government is controlled by Republicans, and Republicans hate terrorists only if those terrorists are Muslim, black, or foreign-born..
Angry American white men are just “disturbed individuals”. No need to investigate further.
It’s close to that, anyway.
And the reaction to this event seems to be proving your point thus far: everyone is jumping to the conclusion that the issue here was mental health. We actually have no more reason to assume that than to assume that it is ISIS. We have profiling history on one side of the ledger and ISIS’s claim of responsibility on the other, at this time.
The NRA does some pretty heavy-handed lobbying and campaigning, but they do not go around blowing things up and killing innocent bystanders to make their political point, so let’s not call them a terrorist organization.
The NRA openly and brazenly promotes policies and regulations that benefit ONLY terrorists.
That’s good enough for me.
But it is true. There is just no getting around the fact that the NRA’s policies also benefit the millions of Americans who – extraordinarily- think that it is more important that they be able to do recreational target shooting with semi-automatic rifles, than it is to save the lives that will inevitably be lost because those weapons of war will been misused by others.
Ok, fair enough. My comment is certainly hyperbolic.
Still, I’m tired of lame defenses of an indefensible organization.
I don’t care whether a delusion is shared by one person or a million people, it is still a delusion. Shall we also encourage people to acquire tanks so that they can play “army” in their spare time?
These weapons are designed to be killing machines. They are not toys, they are not designed for recreational use.
The entire premise of these Second-Amendment crazies is itself ignorant and insane. This was well-established constitutional law until the crazies took over the courts.
Pretty much everything about our Second Amendment hysteria is indefensible.
You are right. The NRA is not a terrorist organization. In fact, you know that you just made that up. No one said that it was.
Yes, I’m certainly being hyperbolic.
I’ll walk back the characterization if we can find something comparable.
SomervilleTom I agree with all of your analysis, except that if you are counting committing an act of terrorism as a “pathology”, I part ways.
I am not sure pathology is the word. None of us yet knows why this act was committed. If it was an act of terrorism, i.e., a public act of violence committed against innocent civilians for the purpose of achieving a political end, I do not think “pathology” is the right term.
Well I also think it actually does matter for international big-picture reasons.
I’m curious about the “international big-picture” reasons you have in mind.
As nearly as I can tell, the rest of the “international” world joins me in thinking that:
1. Our approach to private ownership of guns is insane, and
2. Episodes like this latest massacre are an inevitable consequence of that national insanity.
Suppose we discover that Mr. Paddock had some secret connection to ISIS (bearing in mind that there is absolutely NO evidence of this).
How does it change anything? I’m not trying to be argumentative, I just can’t imagine any “international big-picture” reasons that would make any difference at all.
I am addressing this as a question of foreign policy, not gun laws.
I was referring to the arc of the evolving ISIS threat. For example, Raqqa is falling, and more attacks like Nice, Paris, Boston, and so forth may follow. It is far from impossible that Las Vegas is exactly that.
Incidentally, you are 100% incorrect that there is “absolutely no evidence” that the killer (I do not and will not use his name) has connections to ISIS, This is because ISIS with few exceptions has ultimately been accurate when it has claimed responsibility for attacks. It is obviously not dispositive, but it is a data point.
Information about him planning an escape as is now trickling out is also slightly odd if this were a mental health situation, This simply does not ring to me as a mental health situation. It sounds like a premeditated murder by a very focused, competent, and determined mind.
I’m not trying to be argumentative here either (particular since I agree with you on nearly everything).
Again, I am not focusing on the gun issue here. My post is not about the gun issue. Period.
Now, as to the gun issue, I’m with you: Why are people on here seemingly bending over backwards to defend an organization that is shamelessly exploiting the paranoid streak in right-wing politics to perpetuate itself on behalf of a monied and self-interested industry, causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, and putting our democratic fabric in peril?
This is not your father’s NRA.
Even if we stipulate that Mr. Paddock was somehow connected to ISIS, I don’t see any relevance to foreign policy.
Perhaps we have differing understandings of what constitutes a “mental health situation”.
History is chock-full of people who committed premeditated murder(s) while focused, competent (though I’m not sure what that means in this context) and determined — each of them pathological (even if not “insane” by legal standards).
There is simply NO scenario that I can think of — even in a military context — where Mr. Paddock’s actions are not pathological. In my view, a person who commits such an act while calm, focused, and determined is MORE unbalanced than a perpetrator who acts in while in the grips of passion.
It seems we agree on the gun issue, and the foreign policy issue strikes me as a reach.
MOST serial killers, and ALL ‘successful’ ones (those who killed over the course of many years) were focused, competent and determined. This does not exclude a ‘mental health situation.’
The difference with the Las Vegas shooting, possibly telling, from other ‘mass shootings,’ it seems to me, is the distance put between the killer and the killed. Dylann Roof killed at close range…. probably looking them in the eye. Adam Lanza, too, killed at close range. Even the Charlottesville hit-n-run killer was right there, in proximity. In Paris the gunmen hunted people through streets and in concert halls.
High powered, indiscriminate, rifle fire from the 32nd floor is something different. It seems that this is an important aspect of the crime: he killed nearly sixty people and wounded over 500, from a distance away, but killed himself after briefly shooting through the door at police coming to get him… did not want to kill the police? Was he unable to do so at close range? As I understand it, he still had plenty of ammo left… What’s the difference between a bullet for himself from his own gun or a bullet from the police, if he can take some of the police with him…. if killing was the point?
I invite you (or anyone) to offer a scenario where the actions of Mr. Paddock were anything except “pathological”.
I can’t imagine a scenario where a person of sound mind meticulously plans and executes (pun intended) an attack like this.