The Motivation of the Las Vegas Shooter

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

Being in a Mass Shooting

When I was going through the Ft Lauderdale airport with my wife and children we heard the gunshots that began Esteban Santiago's rampage that left five people dead and eight wounded. You never forget that moment when your adrenalin kicks in and you go to some primal fight or flight response that gets you running. You just cant believe it is happening but once you have gone through it you never view public venues the same. I never go into a crowd without thinking that a shooter could appear from anywhere.

And watching the video from Las Vegas you see the same disbelief then terror all over again. I watched the country singer Aldine run off stage and people are already criticizing him but the thing is once that cold fear hits you there is not much you can do. Your primal response is to try and survive and the only way you can do that really is to flee. Could he have said something like there is a shooter of course. But here is the thing you don't really think you just react and the overwhelming reaction is to run and get away from those bullets.

And there will be  the same responses by the gun lobby and everyone else. But listen to that video of automatic weapon fire. It goes on and on. I just finished Ken Burns Vietnam and that kind of sustained fire was common. But that was a war.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair