Unfortunately Stephen Paddock is not that different from other American shooters. I just finished a first draft of a book, Shots Fired in Terminal 2 about the Ft Lauderdale airport shooting that I had the bad luck to be in. I studied twenty mass shootings in America and I looked for common factors in the shooters. This is what I found. They were male. Ninety nine percent white. Young adult to middle age. Middle class. And they had access to high powered weapons. And they were all insane to some degree. And their stated reasons for murdering people was not really important.
It is the pissed off white male syndrome. That is what I called it though I never put it in the book. From Sandy Hook to Columbine the psychopath was there waiting. The paranoid schizophrenic, the PTSD vet hearing voices telling him to kill, the manic depressive, the truly insane killer of children and the killer of people watching movies all are cousins of the severely mentally ill. By the time I was finished I realized there were two things that could be done to limit these shootings. One was to get rid of access to semiautomatic weapons and the other is to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
If we did these two things and nothing else we would see a result. People who shoot people enmasse are insane. They just are. There is no rational. There is no motive. I saw it in every shooting that I studied. The men who committed these acts were simply nuts and it is not about the second amendment or handgun laws. What happens is the insane individual decides to kill people and they know that the best gun to do this is a semiautomatic. That is where it stops.
Stephen Paddock just joined the white men's club of mass killers who have no motivation. Insane people don't need one.
Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair
It is the pissed off white male syndrome. That is what I called it though I never put it in the book. From Sandy Hook to Columbine the psychopath was there waiting. The paranoid schizophrenic, the PTSD vet hearing voices telling him to kill, the manic depressive, the truly insane killer of children and the killer of people watching movies all are cousins of the severely mentally ill. By the time I was finished I realized there were two things that could be done to limit these shootings. One was to get rid of access to semiautomatic weapons and the other is to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.
If we did these two things and nothing else we would see a result. People who shoot people enmasse are insane. They just are. There is no rational. There is no motive. I saw it in every shooting that I studied. The men who committed these acts were simply nuts and it is not about the second amendment or handgun laws. What happens is the insane individual decides to kill people and they know that the best gun to do this is a semiautomatic. That is where it stops.
Stephen Paddock just joined the white men's club of mass killers who have no motivation. Insane people don't need one.
Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair
