Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Nothing about the Las Vegas shooting makes sense:

Legally-owned fully-automatic weapons have been used in three crimes since 1934.

So, a person who’s “not a gun guy” has either expended untold thousands of dollars to legally purchase fully-automatic weapons, somehow found them on the black market, or purchased and substantially modified multiple semi-automatic weapons — and did so with enough competence to create a sustained rate of fire. This same person also spent substantial sums purchasing just the right hotel room to maximize casualties. I cannot think of a single other mass shooter who went to this level of expense and planning in the entire history of the United States.

Snip.

He was the multimillionaire son of a notorious bank robber. He had no known history of mental illness, there’s no record of radical politics, and he had no criminal history. It looks like his first crime was the worst mass murder in American history, and ISIS is still trying to take credit for his attack. These facts are unique, to say the least.

Add to that the fact that [Stephen] Paddock owned multiple homes and two planes, which doesn’t exactly fit the spree-killer profile. Also, age 64 is quite old for an active shooter, but not unprecedented.

Most older active shooters seem to be acting on some sort of workplace grudge. Jose Mendez, 68, shot up his printing shop, while Biswanath Halder, 62, apparently had a grudge against someone in the Case Western Reserve University computer lab. John Chester Ashley (a Baptist Decon!) shot up a law office after his divorce case. John Suchan Chong shot up the Christian retreat where he worked as a handyman.

Alburn Edward Blake, who was 60 when he shot up a Wendy’s, might be the closest comparison shooter. But Blake already had a long history of weird behavior and mental instability (like legally marrying a women who he had never met and who wasn’t present during the ceremony).

The Islamic State continues to claim Paddock as one of their own:

“Responding to the call of [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi] to target the states of the Crusader alliance, and after careful observation of gatherings of the Crusaders in the US city of Las Vegas, one of the soldiers of the caliphate (Abu Abd al-Bar al-Amriki, may Allah accept him) lay hidden armed with machine guns and various ammunition in a hotel overlooking a concert,” it said.

“He opened fire on their gathering, leaving 600 killed and injured, until his ammunition was finished and he departed as a martyr.:

Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, immediately called both for more gun control, as well as defeating a bill under consideration to make suppressors more readily available for shooters. This piece explains why that position is bunk. “An automatic weapon creates so much heat that it rapidly deteriorates the effectiveness of sound suppression (or simply melts it).”

Indeed, it’s part of the usual liberal push for disarming law-abiding citizens. “They are interested not merely in stopping mass shootings, but limiting gun ownership.”

If Paddock wasn’t working for the Islamic State, and absent some reason showing up in his autopsy (ala Charles Joseph Whitman’s brain tumor), his motivation for meticulously planning and perpetrating the largest mass shooting in American history (with a death toll at 59 as of this writing) seems unfathomable.