The Blame Game
So, some nut case in Las Vegas collects an arsenal in his hotel room then uses said arsenal to kill and wound hundreds of people.
And, we-the-sheeple demand to know why.
Well, there are the usual suspects… the NRA, the 2nd Amendment, the GOP, Donald Trump, etc.
I beg to offer another very different point of view.
For years, the progressive movement in the USA has repeated the mantra that nobody is personally responsible for the outcome of their life. It is all the fault of THEM.
From all accounts, the Las Vegas nut was distraught over his massive gambling losses. (Can one assume that the NRA, the 2nd Amendment, etc. forced this nut to gamble and lose a fortune? Of course not.) But, according to the progressive mantra, the gambler himself could not have been responsible. Nope, it was all due to THEM.
So, our nut case does the only logical thing… he kills and wounds as many of THEM as he possibly can.
In a sick way, doesn’t this actually make some sense? THEY cause these awful things to happen to you so you strike back against THEM as best you know how.
That should teach THEM!
Think about it.
Troy L Robinson
First, I find no fault with anyone being curious as to the actual motive for this meticulously planned and well-executed atrocity. It is so far beyond rational that even the perennially irrational are dumbstruck, pondering what it might be.
Your hypothesis is interesting, Troy; but I don’t yet buy all the premises. Nothing I have read about him suggests he might have viewed himself as a victim, with a thirst for revenge.
Although I am by no means convinced that he was acting as a ‘lone wolf,’ I will temporarily grant that premise, for the sake of discussion. Who he might have been colluding with, or acting as a patsy for, might make for interesting ancillary discussion later.
I have yet to see evidence of massive gambling losses and or debts. Yes, it has been reported that he had wagered a lot lately; but not the net losses or winnings of this recent activity, nor whether it was beyond normal for him. He was a high roller, who liked to make large bets at video poker, and often bragged of huge winnings to his brother. One such pot was reportedly $250,000! At such high stakes, a retired millionaire could rack up several million dollars in recorded wager churn in a single afternoon, without losing a dollar.
He certainly wasn’t tapped out yet. He still owned a lot of expensive real estate, and he wired $100,000 to his girlfriend in the Philippines just a week ago. Besides, it seems like he could have lived quite well for a year or two, just on the proceeds from selling his massive arsenal. I could be wrong, of course; but I doubt that financial stress had much to do with his well-planned suicide.
For, whatever the sick motive for the chosen method, he had to know he would die in the process. That established, his recent gambling activity, instead of being causative, might have been simply a riskless bit of amusement, burning through funds he would soon no longer need. The unusually large cash transfer to his girlfriend, also makes more sense when viewed this way.
Thus, the prime question becomes why he decided to commit suicide? Secondarily, why this horrific method? Perhaps he recently got a death sentence from a cancer screening, and simply wanted to be remembered. Or, ISIS isn’t lying, and he was a recent convert to Islam. They are now saying he was video recording himself during this. I suspect that our answers are also on that recording. It probably says goodbye and why. Let’s see if the state will ultimately allow their sheeple to view it. If not, it might be because he is yelling Allah hu Akbar while shooting… ◄Dave►
I agree with you completely Dave. I don’t think it was money. I think his recent activity was exactly as you say. Having fun with unneeded funds.
I have recently heard it postulated that his girlfriend who resides in Australia with Indonesian heritage was somehow engaged in ANTIFA type groups through her husband. You mentioned ISIS. Either would work, but what about both. The tactics of ANTIFA are not unlike the tactics used to incite unrest in the middle east that lead up to “the Arab spring”. I have long believed the same forces are inciting unrest in the US. Either group would rejoice the further restriction of well armed Americans. I now I’m slipping into tin foil hat territory but I’m not buying that this one rich guy with everything going for him just went off his nut and executed a long and well planned massacre on his own.
Somehow none of this hangs together and I really can not put my finger on why.
If any situation lends itself to conspiracy this would be it. So far nothing other than rumor suggests this guy was a whack job. Yet what he did was far beyond nuts.
So I must admit … I am one who is very interested in why.
Agreed, Chris and CT. It is certainly tempting to go with conspiracy speculation on this. His girlfriend just returned to LAX and was met by the FBI, so we should know more soon, if they share what they learn. A very interesting article from Australia (her citizenship country) has more data from relatives. â—„Daveâ–º
I agree with you Dave and to me it has at least one hallmark of ISIS – keep your nose clean until “the act”. We saw that with the Tsarnaev brothers; not enough subversive activity to raise flags, which is how they, and now the Vegas nut seemed to appear out of nowhere.
Hi, St. J9. I hope you have been well. Agreed on ISIS; but there are other possibilities I don’t hear anyone mentioning. What if he had no personal motive at all? I presume you are aware of the various sleeper assassin movies starting with The Manchurian Candidate back in ’62. The sleeper leads a normal life, unaware of his condition, until a phrase is spoken to him that activates him to follow orders. I did a lot of research into a government mind control program called ‘MK Ultra’ after Tim McVeigh claimed to be a patsy, and to try to make sense of the remarkable number of meek Post Office employees ‘going postal.’
Setting aside all the conspiracy theories regarding why the U.S. Government might decide to unleash a mind-numbed robot on its own citizens, I am convinced that these mind control experiments did take place, and that to some extent they work. All manner of inexplicable mayhem over the years, by supposedly harmless souls, might best be explained by this hypothesis. The thing is, it wouldn’t have to be the American government doing it anymore. Iran? North Korea? Russia? China? The Jihadists (ISIS or not) certainly have the resources and motive to pull it off. As does George Soros and his ilk, active among all manner of collectivist movements, whether on the Left or the Right. ◄Dave►
I’m very interested in motive as well. This happened in what just be the most surveilled place on the planet, with tens of thousands of witnesses. Officials are acting like they don’t know anything, but if anything, I’d expect them to be struggling with information overload.
You know I love to weave a good conspiracy theory, so here goes. We need most of these oddities in the story to add up to something that makes sense. They’re trying to make us believe he was just a boring guy, but to me it looks more like all of his friends, family, and backstory don’t quite add up to a whole human being. This looks like someone either leading a rather complete other life, or a cover identity.
He was a pilot with multiple planes. He liked to frequent gambling institutions, and he was in possession of a rather interesting arsenal. Sounds like someone like a gun runner, smuggler, and money launderer.
He also had written down ballistic calculations, drilled holes in the hotel walls, set up live (no record) cameras, put multiple weapons on tripods, and carefully selected his room days in advance. This would also seem to point to assassin.
He climbed the ladder of government jobs, from USPS, to IRS, to defense contractors. That seems like it could easily be anything from cover jobs, to something that leads to three letter agencies, to deep state.
Islamic State keeps repeating that he was one of theirs.
Now it starts to sound like he was selling weapons to terrorists, either himself, or undercover, or as part of some twisted, Fast and Furious, CIA-type operation.
I’ve yet to hear from a coroner that he did indeed shoot himself, or time of death. It still seems possible to me that it was not him, but his buyers, who did the shooting. I’ve listened to the scanner traffic, and there were some pretty specific descriptions of other shootings nearby, now denied. There are also reasons to believe this wasn’t intended to happen when it did or be a suicide.
If this is a government coverup, there are things they can easily lie about to throw us off. There are other things that would be really hard to cover up on short notice, surrounded by cameras and witnesses. It’s sad, but the world makes more sense when I distrust what our officials tell us.
All valid and interesting conjecture, Steel. The way they keep changing the story and timeline really stinks. I want to hear more about/from this security guard. 200 rounds and he only got a flesh wound in the leg? Wait… 200 rounds fired through a closed door, at an unarmed security guard harmlessly walking down the hall, before any other shots were yet fired? Why?
Depending on capacity, 200 rounds represent somewhere between 5 and 10 clips. How long, and how many of his preloaded weapons did that take? Whatever could have caused him to think doing so was worth the time and ammunition, when it would reveal his location and arsenal before he even got started with his mission? Then, what could possibly have been left of the door to require the SWAT team to use explosives to breach it? If the hole wasn’t quite big enough to walk through, at least they could have reached inside to unlock it.
Very early in the investigation, I read somewhere that the guard himself was utterly saturated with powder residue, as if he were the shooter. The article speculated that he was at least an accomplice, that he killed Paddock after the shooting, shot up the door and gave himself a flesh wound as cover. The only thing that queers that speculation at this point, is this maintenance worker they just revealed and allowed to be interviewed. I still don’t know what to make of that development; but again, why isn’t the security guard himself being interviewed by the press?
Sagacity… sad or not. We may never get the answers we seek; but if we do, they won’t likely come from government functionaries. ◄Dave►
Troy, the weapons sale, (high volume of weapons and ammo in a hotel room) money laundering (real estate deals, and heavy gambling) gun and drug running (multiple aircraft) angle was the first thing that came to mind. Deal with the wrong people gone bad? Working for folks that decided he was no longer of use? There’s more to it than some guy with seemingly everything going for him going off his nut. He had the forethought to get his girlfriend way out of harms way. Did he maybe know he was at high risk from someone or was dealing with dangerous elements? We’ll probably never know.
Chris, did you mean to address this comment to Steel? Although Troy started this discussion, he never returned…
Meanwhile, the mysterious security guard has literally disappeared, and nobody is talking about it??? â—„Daveâ–º
Yes, Steel. My bad.