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They would spend time gambling, which he seems to have been good at. He had money, probably from real estate deals and property rentals, and did not need to work. He lived with a woman, Marilou Danley, who had been married at least twice before (one comment about her came from a “former stepdaughter") and who he had met in one of the casinos he frequented. Paddock had, we are told, “no known children”. And the picture it creates shows, in many ways, something worse even than political violence or grudge killing. There could yet be a true Paddock out there, full of motive, but the motiveless one feels right to me. As far as we know, not being religious or believing that he was acting on behalf of God, he could reasonably expect that his own shot into his body would be his last act before oblivion. And, of course, he expected to die at the end of it. You’d think there would have been at least one dry run. Perhaps he had practised some of this out in the desert somewhere, perhaps not. Then he sat there for three days behind his Do Not Disturb sign, until the moment came. He had to rig up the cameras that would warn him that his suite was about to be rushed. He had to fit those guns with the “bump stock” that would turn them from semi-automatics into proper machine guns. He had to buy all those guns, all that ammunition and bring them into the right room at the right hotel at the right time. He had thought a lot about what he was going to do, about how exactly he was going to stage his bit of theatre. We may not know what Paddock’s motive was but he was certainly motivated. It will be discovered by a retired FBI employee to have been impossible to fire that many shots in that period of time. Meanwhile conspiracy theorists will rush in to fill the vacuum with Manchurian Candidates, contradictory police reports, “sightings” of Paddock in strange places with official-looking people and “coincidences” which are not really coincidences. Some of us will be waiting for the news that “profilers” have worked out what Paddock’s terrible secret was. No, I’m talking about the motive.įrom what we know now this massacre is that worst of things: inexplicable. I believe exactly what you’d expect me to believe about that. I’m not talking here about the debate on gun control. We want to know why so that, if possible, we can stop it happening, but even more than that, so that we can make some kind of sense of it.
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If people like us are going to be killed at a concert, then we want to know why. It is based on something, but not on Paddock. No, I’ve done the president an injustice. And though on Tuesday President Trump stated that Paddock was “a very, very sick individual”, this seems not to have been based on any record of psychopathology. So far no one has discerned a work grudge of the kind that gave its name to “going postal”, nor a “take-the-world-with-me” suicidal desire following either financial disaster or a relationship breakdown, or even a terminal illness. His only legal run-in had been suing a hotel over a minor accident. He wasn’t a petty criminal with a prison record. He was not a disgruntled, bullied adolescent, not (despite the pathetic claims of Islamic State) an unusual recruit to jihadism operating under the name of Abu Abd al-Barr al-Amriki. Other than being male, Paddock fulfilled none of the criteria we might look for in a mass killer. On Sunday night, on his own, Stephen Paddock, a man whose regular Starbucks order was a venti mocha cappuccino, killed six more people than the four London bombers murdered on 7/7.