Whenever there is a man-made mass casualty event, to use the term of art, there are a finite number of narratives. There is political terrorism, lone crazy guy, disaffected youth, political crazies, religious crazies and finally, the conspiracy. The 9/11 attacks were well planned political terrorism, while the Orlando gay club shootings were just a religious crazy. Columbine and the black church shooting were the work of disaffected youth. The Connecticut school shooting was an example of a nut getting loose with a gun.
One interesting thing about the recent political crazies is the perpetrators have been acting in defense of the establishment. The BLM murders were blacks motivated by President Obama to kill whites and cops. The guy who shot Congressman Scalise was a Bernie Bro. The knife wielding crazy out west was a Bernie Bro too. Even the hoaxes are done by people who are trying to defend the status quo against dissent. The last anti-government act by political crazies was the Federal building in Oklahoma.
The other interesting thing is that the stuff getting called terrorism is almost always done by crackpots and lunatics, using religion or politics as an excuse. The well organized terror attack by competent political actors is rare and increasingly rare. The West suffered more from this sort of terrorism in the 60’s and 70’s than today. The so-called “lone wolf” stuff the authorities worry about is always a lunatic getting into Islam or Progressive politics, then deciding to start killing people for the cause.
Another thing worth noting is that after Columbine, we were told by experts that this was the coming trend. Disaffected white youth would be going nuts and shooting up public places. That never happened. Shootings at schools tend to be adults and those adults tend to be known lunatics. The Columbine style event never became a trend. The closest we got was Dylan Roof. It is an example of how the people running the media have a ready supply of ways to blame white men for everything.
The thing about all of our recent massacres is the narrative was quickly revealed, even with the media trying hard to lie about it. A Muslim nutter goes crazy and the media will write endlessly about how the motive is unknown, but the truth gets out pretty quick. The same is true of the random lunatic. In all of these cases, we quickly learn that the perp was under medical care and had a long history of serious mental illness. The political crazies like the BLM guys make their reasons known on Facebook and Twitter.
That is what makes the Vegas shooting interesting. This is an outlier case in many ways, but the fact that no one seems to know why he did it is the biggest clue. This is a guy with no social media presence. In this age, which is exceedingly rare for anyone his age. For political or religious nuts, it is an impossibility. That is the thing about these events. They are almost always the denouement to a cycle of madness. The shooter becomes increasingly deranged and then finally moves to do something big.
Similarly, political terrorism is salient only when the reason is made public. The IRA took credit for every single bombing, even some they may not have committed, in order to get their message attached to the news of the bombing. It is why ISIS, and before them Al-Qaeda, took credit for every death on earth. One of the truths about most of the stuff reported as Islamic terrorism, is that it is just random lunatics who know Arabic. They find a reason to go crazy and attack the infidel on-line and then act on it.
What we have here is a guy who was financially successful, old and boring. The weirdest thing about him, beside the fact he is a mass murderer, is that his brother appears to be nutty as a fruitcake. Otherwise, the guy is a semi-retired boomer, spending his days playing video poker at a local watering hole and tending to his real estate investments. If not for his corpse at the scene, this guy would be on no one’s list of suspects. Maybe there is much more to the story, but for now, this guy is the extremist of extreme outliers.
The one thing we know so far is the guy was a careful planner. He apparently had his wits together enough to spend months planning his work and working his plan. He studied up on firearms, learned about shooting from an elevated position at a distance. The police found notes he made calculating drop and distance so he could increase is killing rate while shooting into the crowd. This is a guy who spent a long time thinking about this and planning for the right event on which to unleash his attack.
The other thing we do know is he decided to kill white people. Even taking what the media reports at face value, this guy spent all of his planning time in order to kill white people. If he had shot up a hip-hop show, one that did not shoot itself up, everyone would have made the connection right away. There are few places as white and middle American as an outdoor country show. White people go to these things to celebrate being a honky with fellow honkies. They are one of the few black-free zones in America.
The conspiracy theorists will run wild with this, but the real story behind this thing may simply be that it is another disaffected Prog Boomer. James Thomas Hodgkinson, the guy who shot Congressman Scalise, was a 66-year old Bernie Bro. Stephen Paddock was a 64-year old, who ticks many of the same boxes. His brother looks like the sort of guy who spends his days listening to NPR and ranting about the Republicans. Given the way the media tried to hide the motive of Hodgkinson, it is reasonable to think this is similar.
The news was full of cranks and quacks after Columbine, telling us that disaffected young white males were going violently crazy. That never happened because young people are very rarely so cynical about their future that they become suicidal. Old people, on the other hand, have lots of reason to fear the future. They not only face the grim reality of the actuarial tables, but the grim reality of present failures. For old Bernie Bros, these are the worst of times. Maybe the future of mass shootings is the suicidal Prog Boomers.
You really got to look at this. This guy has used the time delays in between the bullet hitting the ground and the report to show that there’s two shooters. One at about 450 yards and one at about 250 yards. He also shows the areas in a circle where the 250 yard shooter could be. This is not a hyped click bait. It’s some science guy why ran the distances and times in spreadsheets even accounting for the velocity drop of a .223 round. This is a great video. To me this is the exact same as building 7 is to 9-11. Data that You really got to look at this. This guy has used the time delays in between the bullet hitting the ground and the report to show that there’s two shooters. One at about 450 yards and one at about 250 yards. He also shows the areas in a circle where the 250 yard shooter could be. This is not a hyped click bait. It’s some science guy why ran the distances and times in spreadsheets even accounting for the velocity drop of a .223 round. This is a great video. To me this is the exact same as building 7 is to 9-11. Data that can’t be refuted no matter how much smoke a dust they throw up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxmEFeKy8aI
This guy just doesn’t fit the profile. Ted Kaczynski living in a shack with no electricity, recluse, no social skills = complete lunatic
The Sandy Hook shooter ? Just one look at that kid’s picture and you can tell he’s a bug. This guy’s out in the public, high roller in the casino , pilot , real estate deals , lots of interaction with people.
To get to that level of crazy most killers withdraw from the public and start listening to the voices in their head.
Have a little faith in the FBI actually doing something with this. After Hillary got a pass for her crimes the agency is rotten to the core.
No slight to the field agents it’s just the front office is totally corrupt
The OKC bombing was also an unusual case. McVeigh saw the video of the ATF killing all those people at the Davidian complex outside Waco and just kind of lost it. You kill people from my tribe, I kill people from your tribe. It was more reprisal than terrorism.
“…McVeigh saw the video of the ATF killing all those people at the Davidian complex outside Waco and just kind of lost it…”
Really? Remember the official story was McVeigh flunked the Ranger course and was out of the military selling stuff at gun shows but…a documentary film maker was shooting a totally unrelated documentary at Camp Grafton and who was there but McVeigh. Look for yourself @0:45.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVl6mwtLrsk
Longer versions for more info and context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2fN7H1uQNY
Another possibility: The motive is hiding in plain sight. He’s a Prog Bernie Bro and his motive is *Ban The Guns_!*
Sadly this theory is not original to me: https://www.steynonline.com/8162/theory-of-the-case
The above explication is a pretty good fit for the known facts, particularly if he was a rich Prog with some terminal disease or a brain tumor
No one asks “What was the motive?” for serial killers.
Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc., all killed–over and over again–because …
… serial killing is the ultimate power trip.
Turning living people into pieces of meat satisfies sick egos.
The Las Vegas killer simply did in a few minutes what serial killers do over months or even years.
There’s your motive.
Stop spending our money searching for ghosts.
the vegas shooter was involved with the US intelligence community, I believe, and went rogue at the end. all that money he was funneling through casinos was not coming from real-estate success. it looks like he was setting up for multiple shooters to be at that hotel suite with him. also looks like someone else shot him from up close, leaving paddock’s corpse behind as the ultimate patsy.
He and his gal’s history reek of Agency.
A false flag setup that went sideways?
Suspicious lack of interest.
serial killers are usually about twisted sexual drives (see dhamer and bundy and ramirez), but the guy in LV was not a serial killer so any such talk is misplaced.
Pictures of Paddock wearing a pussy hat have been circulated all week. He was quiet, but not that quiet. Getting caught up in the prog-lunacy cult is the most likely motive.
Oh so they have pictures of him wearing a pussy hat. Not unusual.
http://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2017/02/Hitler-Pussy-Hat.jpeg
So far, this large-scale crime is the most scantily reported event of its kind that I can recall. There is a veritable black-out of credible information.
There are many questions that may never be answered on this. Hopefully when the investigation is completed the FBI and what not will release their findings. I suspect that since there hasn’t been anything released on his political leanings they were probably more toward as our host referred to a Prog Boomer. It is one of those read between the lines things. Always notice the political affiliation of certain members are never mentioned. Or how it is always youths running wild in the streets. It has been reported that he purchased a large amount of his hardware during the month of October 2016. Maybe he was looking to cash in on the run on firearms when you know who was supposed to win, and we all know how that worked out.
I don’t understand the obsession. Evil walks the earth, end of story. There’s apolitical and irreligious nutters too, Z. I don’t accept that this could be a conspiracy either – if it were we would have the details and the narrative out already. If this were a proggie thing there would have been a moral to it for all us stupid dirt people to learn from too – but even Diane Feinstein admitted that no gun laws would have prevented this. Guns weren’t this nutter’s deadliest weapons – his intellect was. If he couldn’t lay hands on guns, he’d have concocted nail bombs, or fertilizer bombs or improvised something else. He wasn’t afraid of the cops or the juries or the judge – when guys like this decide to kill? People are gonna die and no bones about it.
People can wail and sob and strut and preen and blood dance all they want. For me, beyond the welfare of the victims I have no interest in this. I am more likely to be struck by lightning than killed by a loon with legally owned firearms of ANY calibre of ANY configuration. Perspective is key to all things.
We do have the narrative of the conspiracy. It’s the mainstream media’s narrative. White men are evil. Now conservatives will be more supportive of gun control. The idea that a likely intel contractor did this, rather than getting caught up on in it and stabbed in the back, is absurd.
It’s always amazing that people who claim to be onto the system’s very real conspiracy to destroy our civilization and very genetic legacy will believe the official narrative here. But then, they probably also believe Oswald did it, too.
Read John Ringo’s essay on Facebook. Occam’s razor.
Does anyone really believe the crap the fake media is pushing?
Sadly, yes. I know college professors (well, one or two) who’d believe that Donald Trump is a vampire, if they read in the NYT.
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Until I hear otherwise, that’s the category I put him in. Seems like he’s been planning it for years. It’s entirely possible that we’ll never know. I find it more likely, however, that he drove his online avatar deep under ground to cover his tracks. Probably fantasized about murdering lots of people, and found a way to maximize his efficiency and enjoyment of that fantasy. If he put cameras up to monitor the hall, he wanted to go out on his own terms…fantasy satisfied.
People like that, their final revenge, is everybody trying to figure out “why”? Maybe there isn’t a why beyond, “Because I wanted to see if I could do it.”
Is it possible he’s a left wing kook? 30%. ISIS? Unlikely.
For the life of me. WHY are the media concerned with WHY? Who cares what the media wants or deems necessary for us in the great unwashed public?.Nothing will change the outcome. Nothing they say will mean squat. The WHY won’t change or prevent it happening again. You can’t fix crazy. Proof? People still vote for democrats.
All the ballistics talk is stupid, an alternative to watching the NFL… if the guy had a small atomic bomb, I think he would have used it. So ballistics would no longer be the thing would it? The man wanted to kill lots of people. I’m sure he had his reasons, as no doubt Jeffrey Dahmer had for raping and murdering gay lovers, then storing their organs in his freezer.
I remember the world when crazy shit happened and you just called it what it was: “crazy shit”. Ah, but what can be expected in an age when hurricanes are “poiltical”?
Ah, those wonderful days when politics was just 20% of life, instead of 97% of life.
I’m so glad that I caught a glimpse of the pre-internet age, when all we worried about was Soviet SS-20s, and we could laugh at Jimmy Carter without being declared thought criminals.
Good times!
What I would like people to make me understand is why you believe one damn word the media says? Why condemn a guy showing no signs of any sort of mass shooter behavior just because they blurt out it in the media.
I don’t believe everything is a conspiracy but if there are signs that the evidence doesn’t add up in the media story I don’t believe a damn word they’re saying.
“If the echos don’t fit then the media is full of shit”
Paddock may have just been a sociopathic killer, much like a serial killer. It is well-known to FBI profilers that the vast majority of serial killer victims are the same race as the killer himself. This tells me its personal. Paddock may have been fulfilling a life time childhood grudge, acting out a revenge against the people who are like those who tormented him as a child. That Paddock specifically targeted an event of white people, just like himself, suggests that it was somehow personal.
Paddack didn’t do it. Look at the released photo. He wasn’t shot in the head. He bled out through his mouth after being shot in the lungs. The shell casing you can see behind him was placed there afterwards. It is shiny, no blood on it. Huge #’s of people reported multiple shooters. The official story, constantly changing, is a cover-up. Why? I don’t know. The victims were white Christians, however.
I agree with you. The taxi video has one shooter close and another or others far away. I don’t believe the shots line up in time so the lower pitched ones aren’t echos. The difference is sound is in no way subtle. Listen to it yourself.
Progressive true believers have a high level of hatred especially for the designated villains. An unbalanced progressive believer might very well decide to act on the hate mantra. This perpetrator struck me an a progressive from the start.
This business with the notes found in the hotel room, where he calculated trajectory and “drop”, makes no sense. You calculate trajectory if you are trying to hit a specific target. If you are shooting into a crowd of 20,000 people you are not worried about trajectory and bullet drop, particularly if you are firing an automatic weapon that effectively becomes an anti-aircraft weapon after the first few rounds. Even more so with a semiautomatic weapon with a screwball attachment to increase rate of fire. You are not aiming because you can not keep the site picture with such a weapon. And the crowd was only 400 yards away, so why would he be worried about drop? The ballistics chart for a 55 grain .223 round (which is the round for many AR15s) shows a drop of 31 inches over 400 yards. This guy is shooting from the 32nd floor, he wouldn’t be worrying about a drop of 31 inches when firing into a huge crowd.
I don’t get this “calculations” business. Makes no sense.
He supposedly built/assembled gun rests at the windows. I’m surmising he had planned to rig up some sort of firing mechanism to fire more than one gun at a time. Perhaps that was the point of the calculations.
You really have bought into the government bullshit, haven’t you?
So history is over? There are no more real events, only staged ones? If this were a black flag operation wouldn’t the government make motivation obvious? Wouldn’t they wish you to easily be able to ascertain which group or ideology they were trying to pin this operation on? Why go to the trouble of setting something like this up, for no apparent reason? It’s a waste of resources.
If you don’t see that a cover-up is going on here, then it’s hard to take your views seriously. Furthermore, it can be a “false-flag,” but not run by the government. Most false-flags are run by rogue elements of gov’t, other actors. Regardless, someone I know was there, an ex-marine who fought in Afghanistan. He is 100% certain there were multiple shooters.
There’s doesn’t seem to be any need for any “calculations” either. You can just look this stuff up online. It’s not hard to find.
Like here http://gundata.org/blog/post/223-ballistics-chart/
I don’t even have much experience with rifles and I knew how to do that. How come this sperged out gun expert had to do some calcs on a sheet of paper?
Bullet drop calculations change as you fire downhill or uphill. The elevation differential between the shooter and the victims was about 350 feet, at that elevation the bullet drop would have decreased by about 25% if the targets were 400 meters away. If you picture the shooter, the base of the building, the target, and the flight of the bullet as the hypotenuse, you will easily see why this is so.
I think this another case of TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome. The other possible venues are fake news to hide the left’s insanity.
No they don’t. I thought this at first too. But acceleration due to gravity doesn’t change, no matter what angle you fire they gun at, so the drop in the bullet due to gravity is the same no matter what angle you fire the gun at.
You just need to use the horizontal distance (x axis) to the target in both the downhill case and the elevated case and you will get the same drop. It would have been relatively easy for the shooter to determine that, by walking it off.
Believe what you will but keep in mind from an elevated position the bullet flight is the hypotenuse of the triangle, the longest leg, and the bullet flight IS the range to target.
Of course Tapman is right and I am an ignoramus. You have to separate velocity into its horizontal and vertical components in order to figure out the time here.
Since tables assume the full muzzle velocity for horizontal velocity, they won’t work here (though they won’t be THAT far off, since the angle here is only about 17 degrees.
This is what I get for getting on the computer before I’ve had any coffee.
“…But acceleration due to gravity doesn’t change, no matter what angle you fire they gun at,…”
Your correct but the sight pattern does. The bullet starts dropping the second it leaves the barrel. When you sight in a gun at say 100 yards you are actually sighting higher than parallel to the ground,(a laser connected to the barrel would aim high as it’s a perfect straight horizontal line). So you are sighting in the “drop” of the bullet at 100 yards. You’re shooting, with respect to the 100 yard target up into the air in a parabola and it’s dropping down to the target at 100 yards. When you aim up or down hill this changes the grouping because of the way you sighted in. If I remember correctly when aiming uphill the bullet pattern is low and when aiming downhill it’s high.
It does go along with OCD combined with not very much experience.
Until we see the actual numbers on the note, we won’t know if they are ballistic numbers or bank account numbers. As Bad Guest noted, pretty easy to look up bullet drops, and if you’re shooting a known distance, 31 inches is pretty easy to remember if you’re a numbers guy like the shooter was.
I have my own theory of what might have been on his mind. It’s baseless and unconnected to anything really. Mostly just an assessment of his character as an Omega personality type on the Vox Day/Heartiste spectrum, and being motivated by the gap between his own self assessed ‘awesomeness’ and the degradation of our culture as a Hypergamous playground for the young and attractive, that didn’t jive with that assessment.
That volatile, emotionally over-reactive and resentful type is all I can imagine for the guy. It’s as good as anything else out there right now. (I put the longer piece that Derb mentioned this week in the link.)
The first thing I thought after the attack was Charles Whitman. Not in terms of motive (or lack of motive), just in terms of the logistics of it. Renting a hotel suite is smarter than blockading a door that leads from a library to a rooftop, but, as you mentioned, the guy had his shit together. Maybe an autopsy will reveal a “pecan-sized” Astrocytoma on the guy’s brain, a la Whitman. In any event, the stupid gun grabbers don’t realize this is probably more a matter of gun scope technology than magazine capacity or rate of fire. With a high-enough power scope, shooting is like playing a video game with an ultra-magnified target. This dude did not just “spray and pray,” as we used to say.
Joey, please explain your “The dude did not just ‘spray and pray’ comment. Why do you need a scope if you are going to shoot an automatic weapon (or worse, yet, a semi-automatic with a conversion kit that makes accuracy even more problematic)? Why do you need a scope if you are shooting into a crowd? All the evidence (except what was in his, now splattered head) indicates that he did just “spray and pray”. Are you suggesting that he had a specific target in mind, and the mass murder was just to cover up a deadly attack on a single target? He (who had no military experience) was aiming an AR15 at a single target at 400 yards and had any hope of hitting it? Explain your comment.
I don’t know how much you know about guns, but your comment believes me to believe not much. Here’s what I qualified on as background: M2, M4, M16, M249 Squad Auto. I have a lot of experience with the military variation of the weapon this guy used. I’m skeptical of you because you mention he had “no military” experience, as if that mattered while aiming an AR-15 (military experience is not much of a prerequisite with a weapon that well-made). The joke in basic training was that Forrest Gump could do it, so we should be able to, as well. Pyle/Leonard in “Full Metal Jacket”, despite being socially retarded, is a pretty good example of this as well). Did you ever go through basic training? If so, when and where? The first thing they explained to us at Benning was that a rifle, once-sighted, will fire true provided it is maintained. The only thing that causes a widening of shot group is the variables (which your body provides in terms of minor movements, breathing, etc; put your finger on one of those Smart Weigh postal scales to examine the variation in pressure that comes just as a result of respiring). My point is that he didn’t “pray and spray” in the sense of pulling a drive-by shooting (I don’t know exactly how “modded” his weapon was, or even if it was modded), but stock rear and front sight apertures would provide enough for a decent experienced shot to pull off this kind of massacre. If this guy is a ‘spergie dude who kept guns as toys but never shot at moving targets (aside from maybe berm gnomes or silhouettes) he’s either very lucky and had a very good first (and last) shoot, or he had at least something extra for magnification. It’s not like this idea is just floating around with the anti-gun nuts. I think Jared Taylor and Paul Kersey brought it up in their last podcast. But no, I also don’t think it’s some sort of “Grassy Knoll” false flag/specific targeting thing, either, a la whatever Alex Jones may cook up in the next week or two.
I’m glad someone is here with experience on military automatic weapons! A few things have been bothering me, so I hope you can explain them:
1/The sound of the weapon as heard on the Taxi driver video. It doesn’t sound to me like a poodle-shooter 5.56 from 32 stories up, it sounds more like a SAW close by; and
2/No flashes are seen from the 32nd story room where the lone gunman was pumping out rounds in any of the videos. Don’t know how that could be; and lastly,
3/How do you accurately aim a semiautomatic rifle with bump-stock for simulated auto fire? I’ve done it (just using my beltloop tho, not a bump stock like he had on lots of rifles) and couldn’t aim worth a damn. Scopes wouldn’t be at all useful as far as I can see, so this has me puzzled.
Taxi driver video:
https://youtu.be/mBbOFwWquAw
Thanks for any light you can shine on these questions!
To address your questions, in order.
1) I’ve heard the weapon, and its rate actually sounds slow compared to a SAW if you have the trigger depressed (I have literally melted barrels with my 249, which is why we carried spares in Iraq). I don’t know if he was using a “poodle-shooter” but I do know, as fierce as that fire sounds, it is a “poodle shooter” compared to real military arms, like the SAW, the .50 with the butterfly depressor, or the mini-guns used on the UH’s. If this guy had the kind of firepower people are talking about, he could have leveled a building (we actually got to destroy a couple of old buildings slated for demo in Germany on a field exercise, and I’m telling you now that if two or three guys with SAWs could turn Silesian granite to bacon bits in under two minutes, there’s no way the Vegas shooter had a SAW, since not only would there be a pile of bodies but the structural carnage would also have turned everything in sight to asbestos-fine powder; there’s a reason why, if one SAW goes missing from a US armory, the entire base is shutdown and we literally had to lock arms and do a “Hands Across America” frog march from one end of the base to the other. If he did have a SAW, then he either paid an insane amount of money for a factory-direct connection from someone who needs to be charged as an accessory, or it’s time to admit the conspiracy theorists might have a leg to stand on (and someone in some government fed him his arsenal). Anyone who helped him (like an armorer) would probably get life under the UCMJ and head to Leavenworth USDB.
2) Flash suppressors can disguise the natural flame signature, but maybe also the light pollution of Vegas or cloud cover had something to do with it.
3) As a civilian I only own a couple Walther James Bond pea shooters (I’m half-deaf from the heavy stuff, and if there’s anything from a revolution to a robbery, I just want to take a sonofabitch with me, so I haven’t had much truck with civilian equivalents of the M- series stuff we used in the Army.) Based on the little bit of shooting I’ve done since, I like the Bushmaster XM (which I think is what the Beltway snipers used; John Muhammad did have some military experience, which is probably why he gravitated to it). But from what I understand, the bump is a way to use recoil in order to simulate the rate of fire you get with the military equivalent arms. Since our selector switches gave us the rate of fire we wanted in the military, we never had to worry about bumps (though an accidental discharge in the field or even firing on burst when not authorized can lead to your ass standing on some pretty plush carpet to explain yourself). So my honest answer is I don’t know much about bump. “Dunning-Kruger” always comes into play in the gun control argument, because liberals who hate guns too much to even familiarize themselves with them propose to change laws to keep people from legally acquiring them. This does nothing to stop nutjobs, and hamstrings the rest of us. I know a guy from my time in the service who can make armor-piercing bullets in an ice-cube tray. The Managerial State can’t ban the means to wreak havoc because the mind will always find a work-around.
You simply can’t use a scope realistically with a bump-fire stock. The whole rifle is oscillating back and forth in your hands. You’d be lucky if you could see the target reticle at all in daylight, no less keep it pointed at anything particular at night.
Thanks! What you said makes sense (which is a lot more than I can say about some of the “reporting” on this incident.)
I’m still puzzled about the sound, though. The nearby weapon in that taxi driver video sure sounds like a heavier weapon than a 5.56, and it sure sounds close by; but you’re right, a SAW would have resulted in a lot more casualties.
Which is another thing that puzzles me: a field full of wounded & dead, yet no loud sobbing/crying/moaning. Someone else pointed this out, but they’re right; it’s strange.
I guess I’m still too used to TV, where people get shot & are immediately dead, so make no sound- well, except for the guys that get shot in the arm or shoulder, and keep right on going like it hardly bothers them (usually the Hero.)
Too much of this whole incident seems like a bad TV script, come to think of it!
So, if you went bird hunting, would you shoot at the flock or pick a target?
You use “shot,” not bullets for birds (unless you want to ruin the meat), so that the question is answered by the type of ammunition you use, not by a personal decision. If this guy had been using a shotgun, he basically would have been pissing into the wind, since their accuracy dissipates with the spread/widening of the target radius. But when you’re trying to kill humans your object is the opposite of when you’re trying to shoot birds (unless you want to kill and eat people, and preserve their meat, which, who knows, maybe Idi Amin or Robert Mugabi or someone like that might). They found this out in Germany during the hyper-inflation years, because starving city people from Berlin would wander onto farms and use Lugers against birds (no pro poacher would do something that stupid). See “Wolf among Wolves” by Hans Fallada.
In bird hunting, you always pick a target. As a kid hunting quail, used to see guys just fire at the flush and bring nothing down. Over and over. Never learned. Personally, think the guy was using the prior stays to scout, no differently than we’d do in the couple months prior to deer season. He wanted to see how densely people were packed in the venue, how they moved in and out, when the crowds peaked, how much visible security was there, PD and private. This was a methodical guy. Then he just solved for the trajectory components–guessing about a 25-35 inch drop–adjusted for the elevated position and put as many rounds into that solution point as possible. Paddock was no Simo Hayha, but he figured out his methodology and probably stuck to it. Have no significant experience with the AR platform, but have shot bolt guns for distance and accuracy all my life. Even with my old (but nicely re-arsenaled) Enfield, can put a surprising number of hits on a 200 yard target in a “mad minute”, reloading from 5 round stripper clips.
What type of bird hunting? Distance? Are you using a shotgun or .22, Legal or not? Not too good n analogy….soapweed
Only time ever used a .22 for bird hunting was the (illegal) removal of some nuisance geese. Subsonic, head shots. Long time ago, so the Federal statute of limitations has expired.
Even shooting at a crowd from the distance he was shooting from would be much more efficient with a scope. Using iron sights in a high fire rate situation with lots of smoke generated at the end of the muzzle can make it hard to maintain visualization of even a relatively large target.
I want to know if he used any kind of suppressor (not for the sound, since silencers that are whisper quiet are only in movies) but a flash suppressor to keep maybe a SWAT sniper from seeing his muzzle flash.
I haven’t seen any description of his arms other than that they were expensive and customized. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were fitted out with flash supressors and muzzle brakes. But if he was using bump stocks, a good muzzle brake would be counterproductive.
“… the people running the media” might be male, but they’re not really white.
They may not be really male either.
or people
And male is correct…not a man. A crazy male. And a democrat if voting records haven”t been revised.I have maintained for years now that if we could remove guns from democrat voters, crimes involving guns would drop 90%.
No one lives for 64 years in this modern world without leaving lots of tracks. The FBI will be able to recreate his persona (and develop a theory of his motivation/actions) with a high degree of accuracy. The interesting question is . . . will they release it to the public? If they try to sell the wishy-washy “we may never know” meme, then they are hiding something. And if it plays out that way, which is worse; a one-time wacko mass killer or a persistently duplicitous FBI.
From what little has been revealed, he strikes me as one of those spergy weirdos we all run into. These are usually guys who made a living in something STEM related. They have poor social skills so few friends. As a result, they end up believing some crazy stuff, but no one notices as they are harmlessly nuts.
It is entirely possible he simply went nuts, not having a reason to live. The fact that we have seen none of the “Well, he was always ranting about X” type stories makes me think that those stories don’t exist. That’s what is so odd. It’s like no one knew him, remembered him or interacted with him.
There are likely no less than a 100 agents working overtime to scour the planet for every detail available, plus lots of the general public will be weighing in with their interactions. There’s no way this guy remains an enigma long term. He bought dozens of real estate properties and therefore must of have had many interactions with people that have high sensitivity and awareness of behavior patterns. He also spent a lot of time recently on cruise ship vacations. Again, there must be lots of people that interacted with him on those trips. My guess is that the FBI already has a pretty detailed timeline of his movements and actions in the weeks leading up to the attack.
My guess is that you are wrong. I’m not trying to be adversarial, I just don’t think the FBI had any profile on him at all. You assume that the FBI is a kind of Gestapo with open files on everyone who lives in the US. Paddock did not have a backround that would have interested the FBI. The FBI (unlike the NSA) doesn’t indulge in “tracking” everyday people like us. Their investigations are subject to the same procedures that restrict, for example, your local grand jury.
The FBI is a law enforcement agency, just as your local police department. Look, I understand we’re all on edge here, but just for the sake of argument let’s suppose the FBI investigators are doing their job. They’re not all James Comey, and not all the assailants are named Clinton.
He doesn’t seem to have had any particular political or religious axe to grind, at least from the facts currently available. I wouldn’t be too terribly surprised if it turned out he just decided it was time to go, and decided to check out with a bang.
People who do mass killings for political reasons are generally quick to shout them from the rooftops. What good would they be if you didn’t? There was none of that here. I don’t think there’s any meaning to this at all. I think he simply did it on a whim.
Best theory I’ve seen.
Micheal Savage had an interview with a guy who lived next door to him for, I think, 9 months. He went out an had beers with him and he said he was in no way a ranter about anything. Just normal guy who liked to play poker machines. He says no way could this be the guy.
I think the guy was a patsy. I also think he was involved laundering money or some other type shady business and they picked him to be the fall guy. Ann Coulter has a good article on him where she comes to the same conclusion and points out that he was found wearing gloves and that it would be easy for someone, the real shooter, to fire away then place the gloves on his body.
I can’t imagine anyone dong something like this with no earlier tendency to talk about politics. The whole thing stinks.
Most interesting clues are the apparent timing of the weapons purchases. Appears he had some sort of “break” last summer. That and the sheer number of rifles he brought to the suite. Even allowing for breakage and overheating, this was serious overkill. And most appeared to be high end AR platforms, not some cheapo Bushmaster from Walmart. A conspiracy theorist would posit that he was the host of a “shooting party” but got stood up. Personally, vote for OCD
Agree and disagree. The FBI can indeed build a very detailed profile of almost anyone, quite apart from their footprints on the internet.
Of course the FBI hides the core elements of their investigation. That’s not “hiding something”, it’s their job. Do you honestly think that criminal investigations and provisional findings of the FBI are ‘public domain’?
What’s happening to us, anyway?
I hate the Empire as much as anyone, but when it comes to investigating people who aren’t named Clinton. they still (I hope) are professional.
ISIS likely doesn’t worry too much about whether an attack is carries out by highly organized operatives or the lonely muslim loser who reads one of the pamplets, it’s win win for them. Alternatively, the prog media will never implicate itself in its role as incubators of genocidal hate for future prog suicide killers.
And Paddock is driving the media and the local Progressive population here (measured by Facebook feed) absolutely nuts. I’ve made my living in a business that at its core attempts to convert event risks into priceable probabilities and embed those in an aleatory contract…insurance. Have actually tried to explain that this is exactly the type of event you can’t legislate around to the local Prog populace–the data and information asymmetry is simply too profound. The reaction is “bbbbbuuuutt…..guns!” or some variant. Kids carrying guns around the streets of Chicago? You can get a data grasp on that…in fact, but for the lack of enforcement will, it would a simple problem to solve, albeit politically unpalatable. The only real clues (and perhaps ones that apply to our current disconnected society) are that he seemed to form no lasting attachments, moved around a lot, had an extraordinary capacity for focus and had no desire or care to share his thoughts on social media. My vote is psychopath with a wrapper of OCD and who decided playing video poker until he was on an oxygen bottle was a crappy future and decided to go out have some “fun” (as a psychopath might understand fun). Unless he decided to deliberately leave a clue for someone to find, the final part of the “fuck you” is remaining an enigma. I’d agree, the current state of societal affairs encourages rather then discourages these sorts of breaks. Watch the skies….(not for chemtrails)
Information martial law has been declared. This means they are protecting an oppressed class. My guess it was ISIS inspired.
He looked into the possibility of shooting up the Life is Beautiful festival in Vegas earlier, which includes hip-hop acts, as well as the hipster oriented Lollapalooza in Chicago. So it appears he was looking for any old crowd to shoot up, not specifically white proles.
I’m a little skeptical about these “he looked into X” stories. I’d want to see the evidence for drawing that conclusion. These smell like fake news to me.
It is possible he looked into other events, but the demographics didn’t match his intent.
Agree. Country music is a particular demographic.
Why do you say his brother is a nutter?
And you know this based on what source?
Yeah, to me it seemed a likely clearcut case of radicalized leftist. This is the only bit of info that throws that theory into question.
Probably why it was tossed out there
Islam has moved into the lone wolf scenario for terrorism because it’s cheap and unstoppable. However, I don’t think of it as terrorism. What’s happening in Europe isn’t political it’s low level pressure designed to force the mass conversion of Christians in Europe.
Don’t like having your daughters attacked on the subway, then convert and adopt our cultural norms and it all stops, It not only stops, but now you get to take part by harassing the Christians yourself. The Muslims have been force converting populations for 500 years, and this is how they do it.
Actually, conversion doesn’t protect your daughter. It merely legitimizes the behavior and let’s you join the club.
It does if she starts to wear the gunnysack
Well, other than being beaten and forced to have sex by her “owner”/husband. But, then, that’s just good discipline and foreplay for Islam.