Shooting at Las Vegas casino

We still don't know anything more about Stephen Paddock, do we?

I tend to agree that if 27 first-graders getting gunned down didn't change anything, this won't, either. But there's an almost eerie hush surrounding this that I'm not used to. He didn't have a mental health or criminal history. He wasn't in the shooting orbit of a good guy with a gun. He mowed down people who presumably largely sympathize with gun ownership rights. All the usual cards are out of play.

 

It's my theory, which could be totally off base, is that he had mega gambling debts he couldn't possibly replay and decided to take vengeance on Las Vegas as a whole.

 

I think that's probably on the right path. What is astonishing is that at age 64, not a single known sign at this point of mental illness or a criminal history. Schizophrenia usually first manifests, at the latest, during the teen-age years or early 20s. This wasn't an act of momentary rage. It was meticulously planned. I'm dumbstruck.

 

And that's opening the door for the conspiracy whackadoos to get a headstart on their versions of what "really happened."

For example, there's an airplane that Paddock allegedly owned at one time. It's now registered to a company in Virginia - which has the same name as another company that is a DOD contractor. That's given rise to the theory that Paddock is a Barry Seal-like CIA operative who went off the deep end and/or it was a deep state attack designed to get the 2A repealed.

 

Prescribed Valium in June.

Las Vegas Strip shooter prescribed anti-anxiety drug in June

 

He'd have to have gotten in really deep with the casinos. He owned, what, four? houses and two airplanes. Even if that was "he and the bank owned them", he had pretty substantial assets which we've heard about, and who knows what others.

I really hope that they do piece together what happened to cause him to do this.

Five hundred and fifty people shot in ten to twelve minutes? That's hard to process.

 

If Sandy fucking Hook didn't get us significant improvement on the gun problem, nothing ever will. Except maybe boomers dying out. Worst fucking generation.

 

His job history looks pedestrian. Anybody piece together how he made enough to be a high roller?

Stephen Paddock graduated from California State University, Northridge, a large public institution in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, in 1977. Carmen Ramos Chandler, the university’s director of media relations, said that he had completed a degree in business administration.

His work history was not completely clear. Mr. Paddock worked for the federal government for roughly 10 years, from 1975 to 1985, a spokeswoman for the Office of Personnel Management confirmed.

Investigators unearthed multiple job applications, with Mr. Paddock’s fingerprints on file, as part of records reflecting his employment as a letter carrier for the Postal Service in the mid 1970s; as an Internal Revenue Service agent from 1978 to 1984; and as an auditor focused on defense contracts, a job he held until 1985. He also worked in the 1980s for one of the companies that later combined to form Lockheed Martin, the aerospace contractor.

 

Yeah, this is a non starter. Nothing is changing in my lifetime, and I doubt in my young adult children's lifetime. People will keep being blown away and everybody will just say 2nd Amendment -
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Probably.

Except after Sandy Hook, they still had the, "Good guy with a gun could have prevented this" talking point to hang their hat upon.

The NRA wanted to arm teachers and train local retirees to guard schools, and that put out that fire.

 

No, the Second Amendment is going to go to the courts here at some point soon.

 

Real estate and landlording, it sounds like.