He wanted to be the worst in history. No other explanation fits.
The guy she lived with had, like, 40 guns and she had no idea he was nuts. Something wrong with this picture. What kind of a person owns so many guns?
Wonder if he tried but failed to break the windows?
This sounds more like dry run planning events to me.
It sounds like he picked a girlfriend who was very docile and passive. There were accounts from workers at their local Starbucks about how rude he was to her.
Then there were the interviews on NPR with Nevadans who thought it was just normal to have so many guns… What a sick country.
An average Republican in Nevada?
I’m only sort of kidding. The United States has just under one firearm per resident, which is by far the world record.
But, in recent years, the overall trend has been that the number of guns owned is increasing while the proportion of gun owners is falling. So, fewer people owning larger arsenals, er, I mean collections.
“She had no idea he was nuts.”
That’s what she said. We do not know what she thought.
Yeah, or possibly he planned to actually hit those other targets but something wasn’t right. Rich video poker player is pretty much by definition paying attention to math and risk, and it could be that he intended another target but the circumstances in the moment didn’t allow for maximum effect-- room not positioned right, bad angles for the cameras in the hallways, etc.
Really fascinating exercise in the workings of the mind, if it weren’t all so tragic.
Maybe too soon:
The problem here is signal to noise ratio. In a normal country someone buying dozens of guns, with rapid-fire accoessories, thousands of rounds of ammunition and making hotel reservations overlooking major crowd events would be about as obvious as someone going to flight school and ditching the classes about landing. But when you have a culture where buying weapons to commit mass murders is just something people do without raising any eyebrows, the warning signs are going to be swamped.
“What kind of person owns so many guns?”
Remember Sen. Phil Gramm’s typical words: I got more guns than I need but not as many as I want.
One remarkable thing to me is how effectively this murderer has shut down the entire conservative movement.
We know if there was anything, anything conservatives could latch on to, they’d be filling the airwaves and Russian news feeds with it.
Oh, he’s that color, looked gay, walked funny, was poor, was the wrong religion…
But being a rich, old, white male with a fetish for guns and a secret lust to kill inferiors, leaves the conservative movement speechless.
He was one of theirs, and they’re helpless to spin the fact that he was also a murderer following their most cherished value – fear power.
She may not have known he had 40 guns, he might have kept a bunch in storage. Or maybe she did but it didn’t seem like a big deal - you know, “this room has some guns I’ve collected over the years, the next room is my office, and then the bathroom…” I just heard the gun shop owner in Utah where Poddack bought several weapons say he knows people who have hundreds of guns. It’s not uncommon.
Can you imagine if he had succeeded in using the Chicago venue to wreak his mayhem? The Right would be on that 24/7
And that’s where some of the proposed legislation – like banning assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, bump-stocks, and so on – might make a kind of difference that is not really being discussed. Beyond reducing the damage if the nutjob does carry out the attack, lack of easy access to such heavy firepower might also make the whole fantasy less appealing to the would-be mass murderer in the first place. If this guy just had a conventional rifle, and the best he could have done was pick a few people off, would he have bothered? I honestly don’t know. But I suspect that in some cases the desire to be the “worst yet” is a key part of the motive.
You must not have heard the latest repug conspiracy theory that a coworker of mine is spreading:
Somebody at Anonymous sent a warning last week about staying away from Los Vegas. Somebody at the concert took a video showing strobe lights on the ground plus gun shots from multiple locations - the strobe light being a signal for the antifa and blm gunmen to start shooting.
Educated, highly-paid, outwardly normal person who spends a lot of time on facebook.
And within that concentration of firearms in a shrinking % of households, there is further concentration in a small % of the gun-owning households.
Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.
The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace, estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since 1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.
Read the full article – some great information there.
As an aside, I’d rank the The Guardian as one of the top 10 papers for coverage of US hard news. That is to their credit, but also to the shame of papers in the US that don’t match the coverage we get from a foreign paper.
The trouble is that we humans are very bad at recognizing how much our inherent biases influence our beliefs. We have to imagine we are purely rational, even when we are objectively not being rational. If most people realized how much cognitive dissonance they live with in their day-to-day lives, there would be a lot more nervous breakdowns and the like.
Uh huh. A video taken at night shows where gun shots were fired from. Got it. The perps must have been using tracer rounds. You’d think the news reports would have mentioned that.
[Yes, I’m sure the claim is that you can see muzzle flashes in the video. Because LV has no other light sources and no reflective surfaces.]