I don’t have an answer to the question I pose in the title of this post. But I certainly think it’s an interesting question.

Lots of other people have dissected the Weinstein flap and I refer you to what they’ve written: for example, Ace has been on the case quite heavily, and you can find plenty more in today’s memeorandum.

The very very short version is that Weinstein has been a big Hollywood producer and executive as well as Democratic donor for many many years, and he’s apparently been coming on to women in various crass ways for just as many years. It is alleged to have been an open secret known to those in the business and in the Party. But a public fuss wasn’t made (and he settled some potential suits out of court by paying money) until yesterday, when this story appeared describing the whole sordid mess.

It’s important to note that that link I just gave goes to the NY Times, which broke the story. That seems to me to be one of the most curious things about all of this. Why did the Times choose to turn on a man who—if the Times’ allegations are to be believed—was protected until now?

I don’t know the answer, and the articles I read that purport to tell us say nothing of value. Weinstein himself has apologized and admitted some of the allegations but plans to sue the Times because “they didn’t give me enough time to respond.”

I must admit this story fills me with a feeling of exhaustion. I guess I always assumed that Hollywood was rife with the kind of behavior of which Weinstein is accused, and that everyone—I mean everyone—who goes to Hollywood to make movies is aware of it. That doesn’t make it right, of course. It’s wrong. Weinstein was a powerful man whose power intimidated people, which is an element of the claim of sexual harrassment. But—at least from what I’ve read so far—there seem to have been few repercussions for women saying “no,” and the threat was implicit in Weinstein’s powerful position rather than explicitly part of his seduction (which is a kind word for it) routine. And he doesn’t seem—unlike Roman Polanski—to have included underage girls in his sweep.

If his behavior really was common knowledge, the hypocrisy of the Democrats who took money from him is evident. That hypocrisy included the MSM, until this Times expose. But again, is hypocrisy of that magnitude news? I don’t think so; after all, look to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of about twenty years ago, and the John Edwards coverup of about ten years ago.

No, to me the news here (and the mystery) is really that the Times is leading the charge.

Harvey Weinstein supposedly blames the vast right-wing conspiracy (if the report is true; it’s not based on an interview with Weinstein himself, but rather “a source”):

Speaking to DailyMail.com a source painted a different picture, one of a man who felt that he was the victim of a sinister-sounding plot.

The source said: ‘Harvey feels is being set up by a team of people who are out to get him.

‘There are are conservative organisations who know he is long-time foe of the NRA, of Donald Trump, and a longtime supporter of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democrats.

‘He believes they are financing a team of lawyers who are digging up these stories.

‘There’s a political agenda behind this. Harvey feels it’s a conspiracy and that’s the most interesting part of this, where it originated from, not the erroneous reporting that’s going on.

‘He won’t be the last, other people like him will be targeted too.’

Yes, the Times has long been the instrument and puppet of the right. Right.

Weinstein says that much of the article is a lie:

Harder [one of Weinstein’s attorneys] said that he was preparing a lawsuit against the New York Times for writing a story that is ‘saturated with false and defamatory statements about Harvey Weinstein’.

He said: ‘It relies on mostly hearsay accounts and a faulty report, apparently stolen from an employee personnel file, which has been debunked by 9 different eyewitnesses.

‘We sent the Times the facts and evidence, but they ignored it and rushed to publish. We are preparing the lawsuit now. All proceeds will be donated to women’s organizations’.

How much of the Times’ story is true, and how much false? I don’t know; I think it’s always good to be careful in these matters because people do lie. But this certainly seems like a great deal of it is true, and I don’t even think Weinstein is disputing that but rather certain specifics in it.

And then there are statements such as this one from another of Weinstein’s attorneys who ordinarily finds herself on the other side of sexual harrassment cases:

As a women’s rights advocate, I have been blunt with Harvey and he has listened to me. I have told him that times have changed, it is 2017, and he needs to evolve to a higher standard.

‘I have found Harvey to be refreshingly candid and receptive to my message. He has acknowledged mistakes he has made. He is reading books and going to therapy. He is an old dinosaur learning new ways’.

New ways???? Excuse me? That’s almost humorous. Is Weinstein a sort of sexual Rip van Winkle, asleep for 20 years and just—as they say these days—woke?

Recently someone recommended that I watch a video in which Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson have a discussion involving—well, the sort of stuff this intense duo likes to discuss. I’m quite familiar with Paglia, but was previously unfamiliar with the intriguing Peterson (author and psych professor at the University of Toronto, and guy who might well qualify as a late entry into this select group of men).

Paglia’s veritable tsunami of words seems to inundate Peterson at first—and who can blame him? But he manages to keep up and provides thoughtful comebacks. I only watched about an hour of it, but plan to revisit Peterson in another post soon.

Yesterday I advanced a theory about the grandiose and psychopathic motives of mass murderer Stephen Paddock. As evidence for my contention that he didn’t much care what open-air crowd he fired into and from which high-rise hotel, I cited the fact that it was reported that Paddock had tried to book a similar room at a different hotel for a different outdoor concert, and failed to get the room he wanted.

Now we’ve been informed that he apparently made a similar effort back in August, in Chicago:

Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock booked rooms in a Chicago hotel facing the Lollapalooza music festival in August, a law enforcement official told USA TODAY on Thursday.

Paddock, 64, booked one room at the Blackstone Hotel starting Aug. 1, two days before the festival opened. He booked a second room Aug. 3. The Blackstone confirmed in a statement that rooms were booked in Paddock’s name during Lollapalooza but that he did not stay there on those dates.

Both rooms had a checkout date of Aug. 6, corresponding with the final day of the music festival that drew tens of thousands of concertgoers to Grant Park alongside Lake Michigan. It was unclear if Paddock was in Chicago during the festival, according to the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

If true, this is further evidence that my theory might be true. I’m not saying it is true, however, and at any moment I would totally abandon it in favor of another if evidence emerges that contradicts what I’m saying and points to an entirely different scenario.

When I wrote that I believed Paddock’s underlying motive was a psychopathic desire to kill as many people as possible and make a name for himself, I likened him to the Columbine killers, who originally had planned a more apocalyptic conflagration but whose execution of that grander and more fiery (literally, involving propane bombs in the cafeteria that failed to detonate but could easily have killed 600 people) plan left something to be desired. Now we hear that Paddock may have intended something similar, because he apparently shot aviation fuel tanks nearby:

The bullets left two holes in one of two circular white tanks. One of the bullets penetrated the tank, but did not cause a fire or explosion near the Route 91 Harvest country music festival, another knowledgeable source said late Wednesday.

The tanks are roughly 1,100 feet from the concert site, where Paddock killed 58 people and wounded almost 500. Several airplane hangars belonging to prominent corporations are also near the tanks.

To change the subject slightly, I notice that quite a few people are saying that they don’t buy Paddock’s girlfriend’s claim of ignorance of both his motives and his methods. My response is that those people underestimate the ability of psychopaths or con artists or other intelligent criminals to cover their tracks and fool those around them, both in personal terms and in practical terms. For example, Paddock could have easily kept his firearms somewhere outside the home in storage, or locked them in cases in some attic or basement if they were on the premises, and his girlfriend wouldn’t necessarily have pried or cared or suspected a thing if he never expressed any unusual hostility towards anyone. She was living with an alpha-male high roller, and I doubt she noticed much to make her suspicious—because Paddock (an intelligent and crafty man) planned it that way.

I’ve noticed time and again—most notably in the case of Madoff—that it’s commonplace to believe that family members or significant others must of course have known about that person’s criminal activity or intent. However, I think that’s hubris and ignorance. “Hubris” because I think those people are really saying “I would have known; I wouldn’t have been so stupid,” and that this is coupled with a lack of any true understanding of the highly-developed and tremonedouly deceptive play-acting skills possessed by the psychopath and/or con man.

Which brings us to another issue: did Paddock act alone? The simple answer is that we don’t know. And I certainly don’t know. Maybe he really was an ISIS operative. Maybe he was in league with some other destructive groups. Or maybe he just had help (for example, technical help in procuring and modifying his weapons) from someone who was ignorant of Paddock’s actual plans.

We don’t know.

But if I had to guess, I would say if Paddock got any help at all it was of the latter variety—technical help from someone who may not have been aware of his ultimate aims. At this point I see Paddock not only as a psychopath, but as a proud and narcissistic one who walked alone.

[NOTE: For more on psychopaths see this and this.]

More stories emerge:

“”

I am in awe of people who have the calm, the courage, and the skills to act this way in crises. I have often wondered how I would behave, and I doubt I would be anything other than frozen in fear or running away as fast as I could. One never knows, of course, and one never wants to find out.

Not all of the courageous and selfless people are off-duty cops, of course, although police officers and ex-military are trained to respond this way. But there are others who respond similarly without having that sort of background.

Here’s one (and by the way, this man was ultimately saved by one of the officers in that first video, Tom McGrath):

“I don’t know what made me turn back around; maybe it was the screams, I don’t know…I really can’t explain why or what made me turn around. I just felt, ‘You know what? If I can help one person or multiple people, at least that someone’s life that was spared’…I’m not a hero; I’m far from a hero. I think I just did what anybody would do.”

This is very typical of people who act heroically under fire. They often say they don’t know why they did it, and often modestly (and seemingly sincerely) minimize the heroic nature of their actions and describe them as ordinary and commonplace. I’ve noticed that time and again.

Also notice how, when the interviewer praises Smith, at first he looks down. It’s as though he doesn’t want the praise and certainly doesn’t bask in it. A true hero.

Please stay with that video to the end. He has a message on race.

So far, I’m with this guy on the question of a bump stock ban:

…as much as it pains me to say it and with full knowledge of the potential implications for a slippery slope, I think we need to consider a ban on both bump stocks and these automatic fire conversion kits…

These conversion kits and bump stocks only exist for one reason, and that’s to allow a semiautomatic rifle to fire as a fully automatic model. You can pull out your amateur lawyer thesaurus (or professional copy for you actual lawyers) and try to talk your way around this subject, but there is no other purpose for these products to exist. If you accept that the law forbids the possession of fully automatic weapons in all but the most limited cases, then these products should also be illegal unless the purchaser already qualifies for ownership of a fully automatic weapons. For everyone else they should be banned.

This seems reasonable to me. However, I also don’t think it much matters in terms of preventing the amount of carnage in most crimes. It’s not as though bump stocks are often used in mass murders or other murders; in fact, as far as I know, this is the first time, and there are undoubtedly other ways to get around bans if a person is determined. And mass murderers tend to be rather determined.

What’s more, I have read in multiple sources that although bump stocks tend to increase speed of firing they also reduce accuracy. That means that, under more “normal” circumstances (i.e. not shooting into a densely-packed crowd) the sacrifice in accuracy might make for fewer casualties rather than more. But in the Las Vegas massacre, or other crowd situations, it is more likely than not that bump stocks enhance the murderers’ kill-per-minute rate.

Paddock certainly seemed to think so, anyway. He had quite a few in his arsenal.

In somewhat related news—what’s up with Bret Stephens? Anyone advocating an end to the Second Amendment must either be on the side of government tyranny, or of criminals, or be totally unaware of the historically-documented perils of gun confiscation. I recommend that people in that latter group familiarize themselves with the work of Stephen Hallbrook (short version here, medium version here, long versions here and here).

[ADDENDU: The NRA issued a statement supporting additional regulation on bump stocks in return for some other changes.]

…of the US Army:

It is extremely concerning that someone who so often expressed such hostile views towards the United States’ system of government was able to obtain a commission. Rapone’s revolutionary ideas were harbored long before he was commissioned as an Army Second Lieutenant. Were West Point administrators or faculty aware of his views and behavior?

While I strongly believe academic institutions must respect the exchange of ideas and allow students to voice their opinions, members of the military who harbor anti-American views and express their desire to harm our country and its leaders are unfit to serve and defend our nation—and certainly should not enjoy the privilege of attending or graduating from an institution such as West Point, a taxpayer-funded military academy.

This is clearly not just a matter of law but also of common sense, and I can only assume Rapone’s unchecked behavior is an extreme embarrassment for the United States Army and the United States Military Academy. Please provide me with all relevant information regarding West Point’s efforts to ensure cadets who actively support the destruction of our government do not waste more taxpayer funds or prevent a more worthy candidate from attending an institution like the United States Military Academy. The Army’s premier officer commissioning source must ensure an individual like Spenser Rapone is never given the opportunity to lead or serve beside American soldiers.

I wonder if he—or we—will ever get any answers.

The Army is reported to have opened an investigation.

I haven’t reported on the rumors about Tillerson dissing Trump because, quite frankly, at this point I automatically tune such news out as gossip coupled with propaganda until it’s authenticated.

That means I have about fifty major “news” articles a day to ignore, which makes my task a little easier.

I’m not even sure whether Tillerson’s denials issued today are true, either. What I do know is that every single day the press is loaded with reports that this person or that person in Trump’s employ thinks Trump is a vile person and wants to quit, and the vast majority of these reports seem to fizzle out.

So, if you’d like me to cover that sort of thing more heavily, I’m sorry but I’m probably not going to. I’m tired of it and consider it mostly meaningless noise, although I am pretty sure that my liberal friends credit it with being true. That said, I haven’t discussed any of it with any of them. I think they’re pretty tired of this stuff, too.

First let me address the general topic of the conspiracy theories that have been flying around ever since the Las Vegas killings.

I think that in a way the talk is understandable. After all, nature abhors a vacuum, and at the moment Paddock’s motives are virtually unknown. So perhaps one of these conspiracy theories will even turn out to be true. At this point we have so little evidence of Paddock’s motives that we cannot rule such theories out, although I strongly suspect they will remain in the fantasy realm.

But lack of evidence, or even the existence of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, does not stop conspiracy buffs who look for it—and think they’ve found it—nearly everywhere. With Paddock, there probably will always be big holes in our knowledge. In fact, I have come to conceptualize Stephen Paddock as the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 of mass murderers. That’s the flight whose demise was recently, three years after the plane went down, declared by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report to have been “almost inconceivable” in its mystery.

Although so far Paddock’s motivation has been almost equally mysterious, it is not inconceivable. In fact, lots of people are guessing at the motive or motives (as I did yesterday and will continue to do today).

For example, a great many people have wondered why Paddock might have chosen the country music festival for his carnage. Generally, people seem to believe there must have been some ideological reason. And his actions definitely seem to have been long-planned, and therefore premeditated. But I believe that although Paddock planned his attack quite meticulously, the details of exactly which venue he would end up attacking were decided somewhat late in the game. I believe that the festival was a target of both opportunity and planning—planning for its general outlines, opportunity for the specific event.

In other words, I believe that Paddock’s basic motive was to kill a lot of people and then kill himself (something I wrote about yesterday). It almost didn’t matter to him who those people would be, as long as there were a lot of them. I believe he had decided that a good way to maximize his kill number would be to use high-powered and speedy firearms, have lots of ammunition handy, and to fire from a difficult-to-detect and protected perch up high into a very dense crowd.

Paddock frequently stayed in Vegas hotels. He was well-known there and the casinos liked his business; among other things (according to his brother) he was a very lavish tipper. Therefore he would have known a lot about the Mandalay and its rooms and the view from different rooms both in that hotel and others. He would also have known when and where open-air concerts were scheduled, and the best vantage points from which to kill people at the venues.

I believe Paddock decided a while ago—most likely a few months ago, when he reportedly bought some extra weapons and added them to some he already had—to become a mass murderer. But I believe it was only recently that he decided that his victims would be the people attending this particular concert. He booked the room accordingly, which would have been no problem given his relationship with the hotel. The festival concert had to have been advertised in advance, and it represented the perfect opportunity for him.

This became my theory quite soon after first hearing some of the details, and I’ve seen nothing so far to change my mind. Of course, my mind could change if some evidence against this theory were to be revealed, but so far it has not. In fact, a few moments ago I read something that backed the theory up (if the report is true, of course), at least to my way of thinking:

Police are investigating the possibility that Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock may have originally targeted another music festival in the city.

Paddock had apparently attempted to book rooms at the Ogden, a luxury condo tower that overlooked the Life is Beautiful open-air festival, which ran across 15 Las Vegas blocks from September 22-24.

He requested specific suites at the Ogden and another unidentified hotel, but moved on when he discovered they were booked, an inside source told CBS.

That raises the grim possibility that he’d intended to turn either location into sniper nests, like the one he built in the Mandalay Bay hotel on Sunday, prior to his horrific killing spree.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I believe that any festival, or any gathering, that was to take place under the high windows of any hotel with good sightlines would have suited Paddock’s needs.

As for why Paddock wanted to become a mass murderer in the first place, I believe that (unless an autopsy locates some organic cause such as a brain tumor in an area that deals with aggression and/or judgment) he was a psychopath like his father before him, and ultimately became an even more violent one. His father was a psychopath of the con man variety; he’s usually been described as a bank robber but that was just one of his many modi operandi (I may write more about the father in another post). Not all psychopaths are violent by any means, and I think Paddock was a relatively law-abiding one—until he wasn’t. As commenter “FunkyPhD” wrote:

I suspect that the more we learn about Paddock, the more we’ll find out that he was just a sociopathic, black-hearted nihilist, who wanted his suicide to be spectacular. He served no ideology, was checked by no transcendental beliefs, and had no children or parents [NOTE added: except that Paddock had an elderly mother and some brothers and their kids] or friends or family to shame. He was tired of life, which was easy for him, and–like Oswald–bitter that the world failed to exalt him for his genius, and was therefore determined to punish his fellow human creatures for their indifference. He wasn’t in pain, or in despair, or even lashing out for some unforgivable injury or slight. As Dostoyevski so brilliantly showed, when there is no meaning or purpose or duty or responsibility, destruction of the human community is not only permissible, it is also the ultimate act of freedom.

I concur; or at least that’s my working theory at present.

Stephen Paddock would have been about 14 years old when Charles Whitman famously climbed that tower at the U. of Texas, and he would have been ten when Oswald blew the top of JFK’s head off in Dallas from his sniper’s nest above. These are very formative years and the incidents probably made a deep impression on Paddock (as they did on all of us at the time). He probably realized that a sniper position could keep him relatively safe and protected for a fairly long time and maximize his opportunity to kill. Although Paddock doesn’t seem to have possessed any special marksman skills, his choice of a large and densely packed target, coupled with his protected position, would be his way to achieve success in what I imagine was his desire to be the single shooter who killed the largest number number of people in a mass murder in the US.

As for the question of why Paddock had so very many firearms and so very much ammunition in the room, I believe it was because he thought he might last there a long, long time and hoped to kill a lot more people than he did. Apparently it was only 9-11 minutes before a police officer came to the door and Paddock killed himself, which I believe was much faster than he had originally predicted. He also may have had so many weapons because he felt he needed backup in case some of the weapons jammed or heated up or otherwise malfunctioned.

There are ordinarily three goals in murders such as this. The first is the one we all notice: the desire to kill large numbers of people. Sometimes the motive and targets are specific (revenge, money, politics). Sometimes—as I believe is the case with Paddock—they are not.

But there are ordinarily two additional motives. The first is to commit suicide, because in these cases the perpetrator almost certainly knows it’s unlikely he’ll escape alive and he is prepared to shoot himself before the authorities get to him. He does not want to be taken alive. And the other is to hurt one’s family—the other survivors who have to deal with the reaction of press and public, and try to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives.

[Part II will come soon, and will deal with the motives of Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower mass murderer.]

…of Las Vegas.

Resourceful, courageous, altruistic.

“Red Pill Black” tells her story of left-to-right political change. It’s a long video, but the gist of her story comes at the beginning:

I wrote “left-to-right political change,” but Candace Owens (that’s her real name) was never really on the left to begin with. She describes herself as having been a liberal but not really all that interested in politics, and after she had her political conversion (which might more aptly be described as a political awakening, I suppose, in terms of intensity of interest in the subject) she realized she had always been somewhat conservative in her basic orientation towards things (beginning at around 13:10):

You know, when I think back on it, I just—I don’t even know that I ever really was a liberal. I didn’t really care about politics. I was just a girl who was trying to pay back my student loans. I wasn’t really involved in politics. I didn’t really know what being a liberal meant, or being conservative meant. I think at the end of the day I was always a conservative; I’m pretty rational, I’m very fact-based in terms of I will always value economics of like, social issues and that sort of thing because I understand that that should take a back seat, obviously. I mean, you don’t want to become a third-world country…I think I was always a conservative, or more conservative, in that regard. I started really deeply considering politics and my positions on everything…

Unlike Owens, I didn’t have something dramatic happen to me personally that caused an almost instantaneous change. But much of her story resonates with mine nevertheless, particularly the change from relatively apolitical to the political, and the realization that one’s basic orientation was always at least somewhat conservative even in the past, despite having voted liberal.

In my case, after my political change I looked back on earlier incidents in my life where I had spoken up for things that were unpopular in terms of the people around me (many of these incidents happened while in college during the 60s or especially grad school during the 90s). At the time these things had occurred I had no conceptual framework in which to place them; it had just seemed that I was somewhat randomly thinking differently than my friends and acquaintances and professors. I didn’t even realize the issues involved were all that political (some, for example, were ethical issues connected with therapist/client interactions). But later on, I became aware that the thread that united my objections was having a more conservative general philosophy than that of the others.

Here’s an interview with William F. Buckley from 40 years ago, mostly about statistics and discrimination. Well worth watching, as is most of Sowell:

And why should we care? After all, there’s a very good argument to make for not giving shooters such as Paddock the attention they probably craved in life.

But there’s also a desire to make sense out of something so vile, something that still lacks any motive that we can see. Some mass killers who’ve previously led obscure lives leave manifestos because they want us to know them at the end. Paddock doesn’t seem to have done that, although I assume his computer might reveal more than we know now (which is next to nothing). So far there is no “sense” to be made. But more understanding of his life trajectory and motives could point to something that might help prevent or alert us to the next one.

Because there is very likely to be a “next one.” Unfortunately, the impulse to kill and the ability to kill is part of humankind, and that won’t change. The weaponry might, and among the many present-day choices are vehicles and/or explosives and/or firearms and/or knives and probably others I haven’t thought of. And some that haven’t been invented yet.

We don’t know much about Paddock at this point (most of the information I rely on in this post is at that link), so anything I’m about to write here is extremely speculative. But these are my hunches, guesses, theories, for what they’re worth.

Paddock was a guy who kept a very low profile. But there are two unusual things about his life, and they tie in with each other (or might tie in with each other). The first is that his father was a notorious criminal, a bank robber and prison escapee who lived away from the family under a different name for many years. The second is that Stephen Paddock was a gambler. If he had a home—and he apparently had several in various Sunshine states but didn’t stay too long in any of them—it was the gambling centers of Las Vegas and to a lesser extent Reno. So in a sense he was home when he committed his crime, although he was in a Vegas hotel.

Does psychopathy run in families? Maybe, say the researchers. Paddock’s shocked and talkative younger brother Eric says that his father was on the run by the time Eric was born and therefore not much of an influence on their lives, but since Stephen was eight years older than Eric we can conclude that their father probably was a much greater environmental influence during Stephen’s formative years until the age of eight. And of course their father would have been a genetic influence for all his children.

So there’s a criminal and possibly psychopathic father, and Stephen himself seemed drawn to the risky business of gambling. On the move, married once (briefly?), no children, holding various legit jobs until making a financial killing (to coin a phrase) in real estate, at least according to his brother. I wonder, though, whether Stephen might have actually made his money in a shadier enterprise and gave the real estate explanation as a cover story. Something about his constant moving and the very low profile indicates at least the possibility.

So he might have been a shady character right along, who kept a low profile and let no moss grow under his feet, and found his natural home in casinos, where he felt most comfortable.

What made him decide to become a killer? After all, he’s older than most mass murderers, and isn’t described as having been particularly rageful, or rageful at all. My guess is that politics was not the issue, but that’s just a guess (like most of what I’m writing here). I think he wanted to die for some reason, and decided to let his destructive impulses out prior to killing himself. And I think he did that because he was a psychopath who wanted to kill, to go out in what he considered a blaze of glory.

If I’m correct about that—and I have no idea whether I am—he would have most resembled Columbine shooters Harris and Kliebold, of the mass killers that come to mind. That may seem like an odd thing to say, since they were high school students and he was well into his sixties. But here’s what I’m basing the statement on [emphasis mine]:

…Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular…

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting “the most deaths in U.S. history.” Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn’t been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn’t just “fame” they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Well, I don’t know if Paddock was that ambitious, but I think his impulse was most likely similar.

The other comparison that comes to mind is to Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper of 1966. The similarities there involve the high-up sniper perch, and the seeming lack of obvious or conventional motivation (even Whitman—who kept voluminous journals—didn’t understand why he had these aggressive impulses and was trying to puzzle it out). On autopsy, Whitman was found to have had a brain tumor that may or may not have been the cause or at least a contributing factor in his aggression, and doctors have been arguing about that ever since. I wonder whether an autopsy of Paddock will reveal any brain changes that might possibly explain (or at least partially explain) his sudden turning.

I have little doubt we’ll learn more about the shooter as time goes on. But I doubt we’ll learn enough to understand all that much. Perhaps Trump’s characterization is the best explanation we’ll ever have: “an act of true evil.”