Slampumpthejam t1_jegd2tm wrote
Nah doesn't line up. What makes a lot more sense is be was a right wing nutjob.
>>Did the FBI Downplay the Far-Right Politics of Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock?
>Paddock appeared fixated on three pillars of right-wing extremism: anti-government conspiracy theories, threats to Second Amendment rights, and overly burdensome taxes. For instance, one witness told Las Vegas police that Paddock was “kind of fanatical” about his anti-government conspiracies and that he believed someone had to “wake up the American public” and get them to arm themselves in response to looming threats. Family members and associates of Paddock painted a picture of a man who loathed restrictions on gun ownership and believed that the Second Amendment was under siege, according to our review of their statements to investigators after the shooting and other documents compiled by the authorities.
https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/stephen-paddock-las-vegas-shooting-far-right/
>But tantalizingly, people who encountered Paddock before his shooting say that he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs, which are characteristic of the far right.
>In a handwritten statement, one woman says she sat near Paddock in a diner just a few days before the shooting, while out with her son. She said she heard him and a companion discussing the 25th anniversary of the Ruby Ridge standoff and the Waco siege. (Each of these incidents became touchstones for a rising anti-government militia movement in the 1990s.)
>She says she heard him and his companion saying that courtroom flags with golden fringes are not real flags. The belief that gold-fringed flags are those of a foreign jurisdiction, or “admiralty flags”, is characteristic of so-called “sovereign citizens”, who believe, among other things, that the current US government, and its laws, are illegitimate.
>“At the time,” her statement says, “I thought, ‘Strange guys’ and wanted to leave.”
>Another man, himself currently in jail, says he met Paddock three weeks before the shooting for an abortive firearms transaction, in the carpark of a Bass Pro Shop. The man was selling schematic diagrams for an auto sear, a device that would convert semi-automatic weapons to full automatic fire. Paddock asked him to make the device for him, and the man refused.
>At this point Paddock launched into a rant about “anti-government stuff … Fema camps”. Paddock said that the evacuation of people by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) after Hurricane Katrina was a a “dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and ... confiscating guns”. “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” the man says Paddock told him. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
Numerous_Vegetable_3 t1_jegjj9p wrote
> “Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” the man says Paddock told him. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
Trying to "inspire americans to arm themselves" by giving the gov a perfect reason to pass gun legislation is the dumbest plan I could think of. Maybe he was truly that dumb, but I don't think anybody would come to that conclusion.
What he did gave the opposite energy to the country, it inspired people to want to ban guns and even an idiot would be able to think about that before doing it.
"Toward the end of the 1980s, Paddock worked for three years as an internal auditor for a company that later merged to form Lockheed Martin."
Someone that worked for one of the largest defense contractors in America would be able to put together a much better "plan" to get americans inspired to own guns. That personal tie itself is strange and makes me wonder.
RoyChavelle t1_jegn0a5 wrote
This dude killed 60 people and you’re trying to give him credit for logic? C’mon dawg.
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