The New Neo

First let me address the general topic of the conspiracy theories that have been flying around ever since the Las Vegas killings.

I think that in a way the talk is understandable. After all, nature abhors a vacuum, and at the moment Paddock’s motives are virtually unknown. So perhaps one of these conspiracy theories will even turn out to be true. At this point we have so little evidence of Paddock’s motives that we cannot rule such theories out, although I strongly suspect they will remain in the fantasy realm.

But lack of evidence, or even the existence of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, does not stop conspiracy buffs who look for it—and think they’ve found it—nearly everywhere. With Paddock, there probably will always be big holes in our knowledge. In fact, I have come to conceptualize Stephen Paddock as the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 of mass murderers. That’s the flight whose demise was recently, three years after the plane went down, declared by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report to have been “almost inconceivable” in its mystery.

Although so far Paddock’s motivation has been almost equally mysterious, it is not inconceivable. In fact, lots of people are guessing at the motive or motives (as I did yesterday and will continue to do today).

For example, a great many people have wondered why Paddock might have chosen the country music festival for his carnage. Generally, people seem to believe there must have been some ideological reason. And his actions definitely seem to have been long-planned, and therefore premeditated. But I believe that although Paddock planned his attack quite meticulously, the details of exactly which venue he would end up attacking were decided somewhat late in the game. I believe that the festival was a target of both opportunity and planning—planning for its general outlines, opportunity for the specific event.

In other words, I believe that Paddock’s basic motive was to kill a lot of people and then kill himself (something I wrote about yesterday). It almost didn’t matter to him who those people would be, as long as there were a lot of them. I believe he had decided that a good way to maximize his kill number would be to use high-powered and speedy firearms, have lots of ammunition handy, and to fire from a difficult-to-detect and protected perch up high into a very dense crowd.

Paddock frequently stayed in Vegas hotels. He was well-known there and the casinos liked his business; among other things (according to his brother) he was a very lavish tipper. Therefore he would have known a lot about the Mandalay and its rooms and the view from different rooms both in that hotel and others. He would also have known when and where open-air concerts were scheduled, and the best vantage points from which to kill people at the venues.

I believe Paddock decided a while ago—most likely a few months ago, when he reportedly bought some extra weapons and added them to some he already had—to become a mass murderer. But I believe it was only recently that he decided that his victims would be the people attending this particular concert. He booked the room accordingly, which would have been no problem given his relationship with the hotel. The festival concert had to have been advertised in advance, and it represented the perfect opportunity for him.

This became my theory quite soon after first hearing some of the details, and I’ve seen nothing so far to change my mind. Of course, my mind could change if some evidence against this theory were to be revealed, but so far it has not. In fact, a few moments ago I read something that backed the theory up (if the report is true, of course), at least to my way of thinking:

Police are investigating the possibility that Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock may have originally targeted another music festival in the city.

Paddock had apparently attempted to book rooms at the Ogden, a luxury condo tower that overlooked the Life is Beautiful open-air festival, which ran across 15 Las Vegas blocks from September 22-24.

He requested specific suites at the Ogden and another unidentified hotel, but moved on when he discovered they were booked, an inside source told CBS.

That raises the grim possibility that he’d intended to turn either location into sniper nests, like the one he built in the Mandalay Bay hotel on Sunday, prior to his horrific killing spree.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I believe that any festival, or any gathering, that was to take place under the high windows of any hotel with good sightlines would have suited Paddock’s needs.

As for why Paddock wanted to become a mass murderer in the first place, I believe that (unless an autopsy locates some organic cause such as a brain tumor in an area that deals with aggression and/or judgment) he was a psychopath like his father before him, and ultimately became an even more violent one. His father was a psychopath of the con man variety; he’s usually been described as a bank robber but that was just one of his many modi operandi (I may write more about the father in another post). Not all psychopaths are violent by any means, and I think Paddock was a relatively law-abiding one—until he wasn’t. As commenter “FunkyPhD” wrote:

I suspect that the more we learn about Paddock, the more we’ll find out that he was just a sociopathic, black-hearted nihilist, who wanted his suicide to be spectacular. He served no ideology, was checked by no transcendental beliefs, and had no children or parents [NOTE added: except that Paddock had an elderly mother and some brothers and their kids] or friends or family to shame. He was tired of life, which was easy for him, and”“like Oswald”“bitter that the world failed to exalt him for his genius, and was therefore determined to punish his fellow human creatures for their indifference. He wasn’t in pain, or in despair, or even lashing out for some unforgivable injury or slight. As Dostoyevski so brilliantly showed, when there is no meaning or purpose or duty or responsibility, destruction of the human community is not only permissible, it is also the ultimate act of freedom.

I concur; or at least that’s my working theory at present.

Stephen Paddock would have been about 14 years old when Charles Whitman famously climbed that tower at the U. of Texas, and he would have been ten when Oswald blew the top of JFK’s head off in Dallas from his sniper’s nest above. These are very formative years and the incidents probably made a deep impression on Paddock (as they did on all of us at the time). He probably realized that a sniper position could keep him relatively safe and protected for a fairly long time and maximize his opportunity to kill. Although Paddock doesn’t seem to have possessed any special marksman skills, his choice of a large and densely packed target, coupled with his protected position, would be his way to achieve success in what I imagine was his desire to be the single shooter who killed the largest number number of people in a mass murder in the US.

As for the question of why Paddock had so very many firearms and so very much ammunition in the room, I believe it was because he thought he might last there a long, long time and hoped to kill a lot more people than he did. Apparently it was only 9-11 minutes before a police officer came to the door and Paddock killed himself, which I believe was much faster than he had originally predicted. He also may have had so many weapons because he felt he needed backup in case some of the weapons jammed or heated up or otherwise malfunctioned.

There are ordinarily three goals in murders such as this. The first is the one we all notice: the desire to kill large numbers of people. Sometimes the motive and targets are specific (revenge, money, politics). Sometimes—as I believe is the case with Paddock—they are not.

But there are ordinarily two additional motives. The first is to commit suicide, because in these cases the perpetrator almost certainly knows it’s unlikely he’ll escape alive and he is prepared to shoot himself before the authorities get to him. He does not want to be taken alive. And the other is to hurt one’s family—the other survivors who have to deal with the reaction of press and public, and try to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives.

[Part II will come soon, and will deal with the motives of Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower mass murderer.]

And why should we care? After all, there’s a very good argument to make for not giving shooters such as Paddock the attention they probably craved in life.

But there’s also a desire to make sense out of something so vile, something that still lacks any motive that we can see. Some mass killers who’ve previously led obscure lives leave manifestos because they want us to know them at the end. Paddock doesn’t seem to have done that, although I assume his computer might reveal more than we know now (which is next to nothing). So far there is no “sense” to be made. But more understanding of his life trajectory and motives could point to something that might help prevent or alert us to the next one.

Because there is very likely to be a “next one.” Unfortunately, the impulse to kill and the ability to kill is part of humankind, and that won’t change. The weaponry might, and among the many present-day choices are vehicles and/or explosives and/or firearms and/or knives and probably others I haven’t thought of. And some that haven’t been invented yet.

We don’t know much about Paddock at this point (most of the information I rely on in this post is at that link), so anything I’m about to write here is extremely speculative. But these are my hunches, guesses, theories, for what they’re worth.

Paddock was a guy who kept a very low profile. But there are two unusual things about his life, and they tie in with each other (or might tie in with each other). The first is that his father was a notorious criminal, a bank robber and prison escapee who lived away from the family under a different name for many years. The second is that Stephen Paddock was a gambler. If he had a home—and he apparently had several in various Sunshine states but didn’t stay too long in any of them—it was the gambling centers of Las Vegas and to a lesser extent Reno. So in a sense he was home when he committed his crime, although he was in a Vegas hotel.

Does psychopathy run in families? Maybe, say the researchers. Paddock’s shocked and talkative younger brother Eric says that his father was on the run by the time Eric was born and therefore not much of an influence on their lives, but since Stephen was eight years older than Eric we can conclude that their father probably was a much greater environmental influence during Stephen’s formative years until the age of eight. And of course their father would have been a genetic influence for all his children.

So there’s a criminal and possibly psychopathic father, and Stephen himself seemed drawn to the risky business of gambling. On the move, married once (briefly?), no children, holding various legit jobs until making a financial killing (to coin a phrase) in real estate, at least according to his brother. I wonder, though, whether Stephen might have actually made his money in a shadier enterprise and gave the real estate explanation as a cover story. Something about his constant moving and the very low profile indicates at least the possibility.

So he might have been a shady character right along, who kept a low profile and let no moss grow under his feet, and found his natural home in casinos, where he felt most comfortable.

What made him decide to become a killer? After all, he’s older than most mass murderers, and isn’t described as having been particularly rageful, or rageful at all. My guess is that politics was not the issue, but that’s just a guess (like most of what I’m writing here). I think he wanted to die for some reason, and decided to let his destructive impulses out prior to killing himself. And I think he did that because he was a psychopath who wanted to kill, to go out in what he considered a blaze of glory.

If I’m correct about that—and I have no idea whether I am—he would have most resembled Columbine shooters Harris and Kliebold, of the mass killers that come to mind. That may seem like an odd thing to say, since they were high school students and he was well into his sixties. But here’s what I’m basing the statement on [emphasis mine]:

”¦Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular…

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting “the most deaths in U.S. history.” Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn’t been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn’t just “fame” they were after – Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term – they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Well, I don’t know if Paddock was that ambitious, but I think his impulse was most likely similar.

The other comparison that comes to mind is to Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper of 1966. The similarities there involve the high-up sniper perch, and the seeming lack of obvious or conventional motivation (even Whitman—who kept voluminous journals—didn’t understand why he had these aggressive impulses and was trying to puzzle it out). On autopsy, Whitman was found to have had a brain tumor that may or may not have been the cause or at least a contributing factor in his aggression, and doctors have been arguing about that ever since. I wonder whether an autopsy of Paddock will reveal any brain changes that might possibly explain (or at least partially explain) his sudden turning.

I have little doubt we’ll learn more about the shooter as time goes on. But I doubt we’ll learn enough to understand all that much. Perhaps Trump’s characterization is the best explanation we’ll ever have: “an act of true evil.”

Terrible terrible news:

A gunman perched high on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas Strip casino unleashed a shower of bullets down on an outdoor country music festival below, killing at least 50 people and wounding more than 400 as tens of thousands of frantic concert-goers screamed and ran for their lives, officials said Monday. It was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

President Donald Trump called the attack “an act of pure evil.”

Country music star Jason Aldean was performing Sunday night at the end of the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival when the gunman opened fire across the street from inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino.

SWAT teams quickly descended on the concert and the casino, and officers used explosives to get into the hotel room where the suspect was inside, authorities said. The gunman was found dead at the scene and was identified by Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo as Stephen Paddock, 64. A motive was not immediately known.

Police said Paddock was found dead with as many as 10 firearms.

We know very very little about the shooter at this point. He’s a white man, said to have a criminal history and be from the area. Predictably, ISIS has claimed he’s acting on their behalf; they’re eager to ally themselves and take “credit” for just about any evil, but that doesn’t mean their claim is true although it could be.

I think it’s a safe guess that Paddock was an angry guy whose ambition was to go down as one of the biggest mass murderers in history. He succeeded in getting the US record in terms of shootings:

The shooting at the sold-out Route 91 Harvest festival was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Forty-nine people were killed when a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016.

I’m no firearms expert, but it seems to me it would be pretty easy to kill people in a large, massed crowd, even if firing from as far away as the 32nd floor of a building, because of the huge crush of people. You wouldn’t have to be a particularly good shot.

That SWAT team no doubt prevented further carnage.

I will update this post as more news develops.

UPDATE 11:40 AM:

It is being reported that—as might be suspected—the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. My guess is that (if the report is correct) this occurred at or near the time that the police were engaged in breaking into the shooter’s hotel room (sniper’s nest) with explosives.

The shooter’s brother reports being shocked by the events and knowing nothing about his brother’s possible motive, saying, “He’s just a guy.”

But a guy who apparently wanted to go down in history for something, even if (or especially if?) that something was evil.

Prayers for the wounded survivors, the dead, and their families.

On Trump’s response.

UPDATE 12:05 PM:

As so often seems to be the case with these events, the most complete coverage so far is in the British press.