Mass Killings
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Why have there seemingly been more suicide killers in recent decades?
Perhaps the Jihadis think they’ll go to heaven for killing infidels and the ex-Christians don’t fear going to hell anymore.
(Here’s a 2012 Taki’s column I wrote on the subject.)
Fluoride in the water, sir.
Less restrictive social norms allows the crazies to stay out of a straightjacket. The family may be lying “none that we know of” of course, of he really fooled everyone.
I don’t know if the claims of Antifa lit are legit, but that group of people has definitely been embolden to commit violence.
Also evidenced in the increasingly shrieking, harpy response of too many people to trivial offense.
General lack of impulse control.
Nature or Nurture?
--Thomas Whitman (brain tumor)
--Emmet Till (sociopathic father)
"Crazy" is a useless term. Ditto "mentally ill."
We're in this gap between Bedlamesque/Snake Pit treatment of these behavioral extremes and the coming era of genetic identification and population distribution of alleles associated with this sort of behavior.
It would be nice to have a law that says that a requirement for all murderers, murder-suicides, or suicide-by cop individuals is robust and extensive sampling of their DNA. Then we might be able to start assembling better understanding from study of that.
I had one other thought on it...but won't tack it on here.
Media (social and traditional) may be driving people to exhibitionism. There’s no doubt that it is massively negatively influencing kids.
1/ Back in the day it was easier to get someone committed. And because the ‘snake pits’ were so terrible people who thought they might be crazy did everything they could to avoid doing things that might get them committed.
2/ The only real drug for most people was alcohol. Now there’s a pharmacopia, whose effects are too many to number (or know).
3/ Every state had capital punishment, and not only for 1st degree murder.
4/ There was an aversion to killing women. There was also an aversion to killing unarmed people-it was considered ‘cowardly’ (see Bob Ford).
1. He never did anything that would get him committed. He never had so much as a traffic ticket. Everyone who knew him said that he seemed within the normal range.
2. No allegations of drug use that we know of. He seemed to be too high functioning over too long a period to be a serious drug user.
3. Usually mass killers like Paddock intend to (and do) kill themselves at the end of their spree so they are not concerned about capital punishment.
4. This is begging the question - WHY is there less aversion now?
I think the decline in (non-Islamic) religion has a lot to do with it - believing that you are going to spend eternity in Hell for your sins is a strong deterrent.
Population density has only gone up, and the tools have improved. It’s easy for nutjobs to commit mass killings that cause a lot of damage.
Also have mass killings really increased?
Yes.
>>/ Back in the day it was easier to get someone committed.
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot’s license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer’s point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
Airline and corporate operators have other ways to weed out crazies, but even they get a few. Even the astronaut corps has had a couple, but not killers.
Here is the Latin original as provided by S Pius V:
Da quaesumus Domine populo tuo diabolica vitare contagia, et te solum Deum pura mente sectari.
The following translation kept the idea of diabolical Evil as a contagion or infection which we catch and pass on. There are hundreds of sermons in it: "Lord we beseech thee grant thy people grace to avoid the infections of the Devil and with pure heart and mind to follow thee the only God."
It's not just post-Christian, it's basically having no real connections to the transcendent at all. Nothing beyond self. In this guy's case, he's bumping on into being elderly without family, faith, community or nation to live for. And apparently instead of just banging the girlfriend or offing oneself, this scumbag was sociopathic enough to decide to just kill a bunch of people.
And, let's be honest, this isn't just the decline in our society, there's an HBD angle. His dad was a useless POS too. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.
Why have there been so many in recent years?
Have there been? I know it certainly seems that way, but who’s actually counting?
Current theories:
1. He was a secret member of ISIS.
2. He was being crushed by gambling debts.
3. He had a brain tumor.
4. He was a copy cat killer inspired by ...
5. He hated Donald Trump.
6. He hated country music.
7. He succumbed to weltschmerz.
Any good stats on what kind of increase we are looking at? Is some of the increase actually just more hype in the 24 hour media?
On August 1st, 1966, Charles Whitman climbed the 28 story tower at the University of Texas and shot at people below for an hour and a half, killing 11 and wounding 31.
That event was reported on the evening news and written about in the papers. Evening news lasted 30 minutes or an hour. There were 3 networks and a few local stations, all of which went off the air every night. Newspapers arrived in the morning and required reading.
There was no 24-hour news cycle. No 24-hour TV constantly rehashing and promoting tragic events. People put news stories in perspective and went on with their lives.
Since then, a constant, flashing, overwhelming, distracting, colorful, loud blare of stories has enveloped us. It eventually spread via internet into myriad other channels, including social media.
The simple fact is, mass killings are a trend. Not only by definition, but in how they came to ideation in the minds of so many people.
When you only heard Walter Cronkite tell you for a few minutes at 6 o’clock that some guy shot people from a tower, you tended to compartmentalize it. Now, when you get a constant show of how massacres are performed, you get the idea in your head.
It’s a trend, a virus, a meme. Mass killings are in style.
They definitely have to open this Vegas shooter's brain. Anything less will be construed as a coverup.
You take the child abduction business. All of the prison-like grade-school atmosphere is due to parents' freaky fears of something that may happen a few times a year, in a country with 330 million people. There is no perspective! When a story about some kid being missing goes on for weeks, the news junkies or just the families that tend to leave the TV on all the time, all day long, have this burned in their brains. It would have never made Walter Cronkite, as there'd have been no time for it.
*Assuming this wasn't some deep state, gun-running operation run under the FBI's nose and they've spent the last 48 hours concocting their cover story.
The culture has gotten excessive and extreme in everything.
It’s not just violence but sex and culture. I mean… the ‘pussy hat’ march. Hysteria about everything. Haven Monhan!! Russia Hacking!! Trump Literally Nazi!! madonna calling to blow up the white house. Kathy Griffin and Trump’s head. Magazine cover with crosshairs on Trump.
Rap music. BLM and its lies and craziness. And GOP as the party that never says NO to more warmongering and more wars.
It’s like drugs. To get the same high, the dosage has to be increased.
Some people kill for personal reasons. Anger at someone or revenge.
But some kill for attention. When media have become saturated with a bunch of attacks, to get special attention it has to be bigger and splashier. And sheesh, this one was freaking incredible. Mind-blowing… but also mind-numbing.
Look at our movies and videogames. I’m not saying movies and games make people go out and kill people, but they have normalized violent spectacles as a form of cultural expression.
A nutjob turns his lunacy into a spectacle, a circus.
It’s telling that the biggest mass killing in US history is not about ideology but crazy ego.
And how fitting it happened in Las Vegas.
In LOST IN AMERICA, Albert Brooks tries to tie Las Vegas with X-mas. Garry Marshall says for hunting you go to Wisconsin.
Well, looks like someone tied hunting with Las Vegas.
I know, people will say: "It has been ever thus. Shakespeare exploited violence too, you know."
In a word............bullshit. Zombie-flicks, shoot-em-ups, and torture-porn like Hostel and Saw aren't Shakespeare. They don't even pretend to anything more than merely outdoing what went before them in gory spectacle.
From a Las Vegas Sun article on the incident:
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/oct/02/gunman-who-killed-50-at-las-vegas-concert-was-reti/
“No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about any of that stuff,” Eric Paddock said as he alternately wept and shouted. “He was a guy who had money. He went on cruises and gambled.”
Maybe that has something to do with it – a guy who never cared about much of anything, other than plunking coins in video poker slots. No kids, no church, no attachment to any real kind of community. It would be interesting if it turned out that he was on anti-depressants (I-don’t-give-a-f**k pills), as were a lot of recent mass-murdering maniacs, and if he had made a close study of other such crimes.
I heard that Trump was going to go to Las Vegas in the wake of this. That is a really bad idea. He would be making the same mistake that Obama did after Sandy Hook. It isn’t good for potential maniacs to know that they can conjure up a Presidential visit to crown their criminal achievement, as long as it’s big enough.
I first think that it's a question of data - has this kind of crime increased? Or has it not decreased as much as it should have? - but I think you have a point with lack of attachment. This guy had no kids, and probably not much of a girlfriend. Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech, and so many more - all loners with nothing to live for. Say what you will about the old days, but back then most people had some form of community to turn to. The decline of religion, of civic organizations, of organic communities - all of which have been targeted by the Left - has set a whole lot of people adrift, especially men. And mass shooting, given that the shooters know they are unlikely to survive, is a form that has as much in common with suicide as with other violent crimes, and suicides have been climbing.
Any Sailer readers with experience shooting .308 rounds full auto?
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn’t fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
He had his weapons on tripods, and he was firing into a mass of humanity. Accuracy was not needed, and he didn't even have to hold the guns.
Look, I'm as suspicious as you are about this event. Possible leftist leanings, etc. and whatever. It is odd. But a razor is a sharp weapon too -- when it belongs to someone named Occam.
Oh yeah, fake all the gun purchases in Mesquite, all the surveillance video in the casino showing him bringing in bag after bag of gear- easy peasy. Not hard to do at all. He even supposedly took video of himself doing the shooting, like the guy who killed the two reporters in Virginia. Posthumous fame appears to have been part of his goal. I'm shocked he didn't break to upload the videos to social media or livestream it on Facebook.
too much about this doesnt add up
planning and execution consistent with trained special ops or jihadist but the culprit is wealthy elderly white guy who would have been winded just hauling all that gear up to his room
I get the impression that Enemedia-Pravda's "reports" that the mass-murdered had tripod-mounted weapons are incorrect, as it's more likely that some of his weapons were bipod mounted. A tripod is a fairly heavy, ungainly assembly that's difficult to collapse or to disassemble into components small enough to conceal those components in a suitcase, or even in a duffel bag, while folded bipods are easy to conceal and carry in a suitcase, or even inside a collapsed large golfer's umbrella. Also, tripods are for heavy machine guns which are crew-served, belt-fed weapons, and it would be difficult to stand or stabilize a tripod atop typical hotel room furniture tables, but it would be easy to hold a bipod steady on a window sill. From the videos I've watched of the hideous slaughter, I did not detect prolonged bursts from a belt-fed weapon and heard only bursts long enough to be consistent with shoulder weapons fed most likely by drum magazines.
I haven't heard what calibres the shooter used, though I suspect the bulk of it was not battle rifle cartridges, such as the .308 - 7.62x51 and more likely to have been from AR and AK type platforms - 5.56x45 and 7.62x39 respectively, these generate about half the energy of a .308. We have yet to have a total of the number of rounds fired - it's going to be in the tens of 10os if not over 1,000. I heard some of the video and he was dumping whole magazines in one go, this is not the signature of a highly trained shooter. But then he was dumping them, at least until the crowd scattered, into a tightly packed throng of thousands of people.
So no big skill set here. It's not technically difficult to hit many folks pouring fire into a crowd of thousands from the 32nd floor. This gives a range of only around 100 metres. Also, in this scenario - the angle of fire down onto paving, would have resulted in amplified casualties because of ricochet injuries. Rounds and jagged bullet jackets would be coming off the paving and staying relatively flat - close to the ground - ricochets tend to stick fairly close to the surface they come off, they can cause very nasty injuries.
It was about 2 hours from the start of the shooting until the SWAT team burst into his room. How long the shooting actually went on for, I haven't heard. If he used precision fire I would have expected more dead, given there are no reports of rifle fire having been returned from the ground.
If NickG is right and no one knows for sure at this point, then this is a pointless discussion.
anomie
Autopsy revealed that Whitman had a brain tumor that may have contributed to his irrational/destructive behavior. I believe that the general consensus of knowledgeable experts did have an effect on his judgment and impulse control.
They definitely have to open this Vegas shooter’s brain. Anything less will be construed as a coverup.
Automatic weapons.
I have to agree with commenter Buzz Mohawk’s and JeremiahJohnbalaya’s take that nonstop global mass media exposure appeals powerfully to individuals who fantasize themselves as righteous judge-jury-&-executioner – especially to fantasists who are suicidal and fantasize about going out in the proverbial blaze of what they misapprehend to be glory. In fact, just last week in an e-mail exchange with friends I’ve known since our 1960′s high school days, I proffered that same take.
Long before the internet and nonstop global mass media came along my late Dad used to say of such crazies that “they’ll do anything to get their name in the paper.”
The internet and gun shows are the major culprits.
Back in the day, if you wished to amass a small, assault-grade arsenal, it required dealing with a variety of unsavory characters. For a gangbanger or drug runner, probably not an impediment. For an ex-military psychopath, maybe a minor impediment. But for a white-collar loner, it was a major impediment — completely outside of their homicidal-I-will-be-dead-anyway comfort zone.
The internet has removed this initial barrier. Disgruntled Joe Schmoe can do most of his homework and plotting behind the safety of his keyboard. Craigslist messages and Saturday afternoon gun shows have replaced dealing with Rico at a truck stop.
Moreover, it used to be even easier to obtain guns - you could buy them mail-order (even from Sears) as Lee Harvey Oswald did.
In short, your entire thesis is wrong.
And until 1968 you could buy any Title 1 firearm mail order.
I had several relatives who had dozens or hundreds of guns. Only one got into any trouble. Busted for shooting pigeons illegally. They confiscated the piece and fined him fifty bucks. It was a prewar Colt Ace 22 that would bring many thousands now.
See: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/23/35177769_79a70efcb0.jpg
It used to be very common to see Boy Scout children carrying 22 rifles in public (and getting on buses and such) throughout small town America a few decades ago. Guns are not any "deadlier" or more destructive now than it was back then. Gun laws are far more stringent than was ever imagined in the feverish days of 1934 ("Gangsters!" "Thomson submachine guns!").
What changed are people. The media almost celebrates mass shooters. A lot of people are alienated and don't have good communal ties and support all the while feeling entitled. And as others have pointed out, mentally disturbed people can no longer be committed with ease. And, yes, the Christian notion of valuing the lives of other people has degraded greatly.
Nonetheless, for all that, given just how many people own guns and how many guns there are in this country, "gun violence" is remarkably low outside suicides, black youths, and Hispanic gangsters.
Guns have saved the lives of A LOT of productive, law-abiding whites and Asians in this country from the depredations of criminals. Legally sound defensive use of guns far exceeds gun crimes (5-to-1) in the U.S. as researcher Gary Kleck demonstrated long ago.
However, it has some slight validity. It appear that the shooter was using something called a "bump stock" which is a legal way to make your semi-auto fire like an auto. Nowadays (and ESPECIALLY after yesterday) every fool and his brother now knows about bump stocks. Back in the day it was possible that your local gun shop didn't even carry bump stocks (if they had existed back in the day) and someone like Paddock might not have known even to ask for one. Then again, they could have advertised bump stocks in the back of Field & Stream and it would have been about the same as today.
There were also cultural differences - nowadays people buy bump stocks (and AR-15s in general) so they can live out their commando fantasies because they will never serve in a real military. Back in the day, most guys actually HAD been in the infantry and the last thing they wanted to do was relive that. If they bought a rifle it was to hunt deer and the lasting thing they wanted was some gizmo that would waste a lot of ammo while decreasing accuracy.
But he was shooting down at a crowd of about 10,000 people standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a parking lot. Seems like it would be hard not to hit somebody.
If you want to go off on conspiracy theories, I find it much more questionable that a lone shooter would bring a dozen guns, rent two hotel rooms, and knock out two windows to shoot from. That doesn’t add up.
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
I think we’ll soon find out that the Las Vegas terrorist/murderer Stephen Paddock was similar to James Hodgkinson (who could have killed dozens of Republican congressmen at a softball practice back in June.) His brother Eric Paddock was unconvincing at the press conference today saying his brother Stephen just “snapped.” Both murderous psychopaths suffered from severe anti-Trump derangement syndrome.
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
Okay, and maybe he just brought curtain rods into the hotel.
He had his weapons on tripods, and he was firing into a mass of humanity. Accuracy was not needed, and he didn’t even have to hold the guns.
Look, I’m as suspicious as you are about this event. Possible leftist leanings, etc. and whatever. It is odd. But a razor is a sharp weapon too — when it belongs to someone named Occam.
It's not just violence but sex and culture. I mean... the 'pussy hat' march. Hysteria about everything. Haven Monhan!! Russia Hacking!! Trump Literally Nazi!! madonna calling to blow up the white house. Kathy Griffin and Trump's head. Magazine cover with crosshairs on Trump.
Rap music. BLM and its lies and craziness. And GOP as the party that never says NO to more warmongering and more wars.
It's like drugs. To get the same high, the dosage has to be increased.
Some people kill for personal reasons. Anger at someone or revenge.
But some kill for attention. When media have become saturated with a bunch of attacks, to get special attention it has to be bigger and splashier. And sheesh, this one was freaking incredible. Mind-blowing... but also mind-numbing.
Look at our movies and videogames. I'm not saying movies and games make people go out and kill people, but they have normalized violent spectacles as a form of cultural expression.
A nutjob turns his lunacy into a spectacle, a circus.
It's telling that the biggest mass killing in US history is not about ideology but crazy ego.
And how fitting it happened in Las Vegas.
In LOST IN AMERICA, Albert Brooks tries to tie Las Vegas with X-mas. Garry Marshall says for hunting you go to Wisconsin.
Well, looks like someone tied hunting with Las Vegas.
https://youtu.be/pf2q0HemaFs?t=2m48s
I agree. Take, for example, a movie like John Wick, in which the hero (!) shoots what seems like 50-100 people in the head at point-blank range. Or shows like Walking Dead, broadcast in binge-marathon form on Sunday afternoons (thankyou AMC!) in which people by the truck-load are matter-of-factly beaten, hacked, stabbed, and shot. Does this have no effect on society? Sure, most people don’t react to it by becoming psychopaths But perhaps most psychopaths do react to it in some way.
I know, people will say: “It has been ever thus. Shakespeare exploited violence too, you know.”
In a word…………bullshit. Zombie-flicks, shoot-em-ups, and torture-porn like Hostel and Saw aren’t Shakespeare. They don’t even pretend to anything more than merely outdoing what went before them in gory spectacle.
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
Private Pilot Single Engine Land is something anyone with the money and time can get if they can pass the physical. I know some really questionable ones.
Airline and corporate operators have other ways to weed out crazies, but even they get a few. Even the astronaut corps has had a couple, but not killers.
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
I’ve had the same thoughts. Hand-held automatic weapons are generally ineffective beyond 25 meters–especially .308. And why bring ten guns? My working hypothesis is that this was a team of shooters, possibly even firing from a different room, who then killed this guy, making it look like suicide and then their getaway. Police find lone male gunman and don’t cordon off the area to see if anyone is trying to get away. Or perhaps the shooters just hang around in the crowd like John Mohammad did. Setting up a victim/perpetrator while the real assassin makes a getaway was a central part of the plot of Stephen Hunter’s Point of Impact. It’s not impossible that that’s what happened here, although the motive wouldn’t be clear–unless it was Antifa targeting likely Trump supporters at a country music festival.
We must notify the FBI immediately of this line of investigation.
This is the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. A commentator on "Lion of the Blogosphere" raised this possibility too. Especially as ISIS keeps insisting they did it.
Other than the serious obstacle of the suspected killer not being a nut, the "lone nut" hypothesis runs into the problems of the massive arsenal and the two hotel rooms.
Its funny seeing the other commentators engaging in all sorts of speculation of what made the suspect snap when there is really a strong prima facie case that he was the first victim/ patsy of whoever did it.
Maybe it's not clear how wide that is. A human head (9 inches wide) is seven degrees wide at 72 inches (4.5*481/30) range --- two yards. Could you hit a stationary human head with a .308 rifle at two yards? At least, say, 50% of the time? I'm not up to much, riflery-wise, but I think I could handle that.
I guess we should account for drop. A ballistics table I googled up says that a .308 drops 42 inches in 450 yards. So, the drop will make his first shots (before he starts to correct for it) drop short of the target he aims at by something like 42 *(440/180) = 102 inches. That's three yards. Nothing, given how big his target is. Wind could mess him up, too, but unless a tornado was going by, it's going to mess him up by feet, not tens of yards.
Maybe I've screwed up these calculations by a order of magnitude somewhere?
Was that a typo? Do you just not understand firearms? Are you copy and pasting something you read?
He had his weapons on tripods, and he was firing into a mass of humanity. Accuracy was not needed, and he didn't even have to hold the guns.
Look, I'm as suspicious as you are about this event. Possible leftist leanings, etc. and whatever. It is odd. But a razor is a sharp weapon too -- when it belongs to someone named Occam.
Private pilot, gun owner, self-employed real-estate entrepreneur, gambler, country-music fan (according to one report I read, he used to go to music festivals of the kind he shot up): characteristics like that seldom add up to a lefty. Of course, it’s possible he was, but I doubt it.
My husband is from Colorado. I can think several people I met through him who fit the profile of everything you said and they are die hard lefties. Colorado should have been an easy win for Trump. But I saw all sorts of signs when we visited the summer before last that were essentially: a pox on both of them. #NeverTrump messed with Trump's primary chances. Hillary won CO, in the end.
Colorado is that the real weird combo of white pot heads and don't touch my guns types that ironically seem like they're "natural" conservatives but appear to mostly express commie like tendencies when they vote. Those are spread all over West and sometimes they hit Florida, too.
If the shooter fits that Western social profile, I can easily see him doing a mass shooting at a country music concert to "get back" at the southern/capitalist culture, or really Trump, that carried the day.
Old man (wearing prescription lenses?)…
firing full auto…
big NATO rounds .308/7.62…
(hands only no tripod)…
on target…
from the 32nd floor…
DOWN to ground level…
at distance…
!!!
This is a very difficult task. Three-shot bursts are the military norm because full auto is 90% off target even at short distance. Usually off target over the target.
Think about the recording of the shots (he’s holding the trigger down and going through 50 round magazines) and think how many full auto rounds would simply sail over the concert area.
He would’ve had to train from a perch several hundred feet above ground to simulate his 32nd floor battlefield conditions. On a cliff out in the desert.
I CALL BULLSHIT.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/oct/02/gunman-who-killed-50-at-las-vegas-concert-was-reti/
"No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about any of that stuff," Eric Paddock said as he alternately wept and shouted. "He was a guy who had money. He went on cruises and gambled."
Maybe that has something to do with it - a guy who never cared about much of anything, other than plunking coins in video poker slots. No kids, no church, no attachment to any real kind of community. It would be interesting if it turned out that he was on anti-depressants (I-don't-give-a-f**k pills), as were a lot of recent mass-murdering maniacs, and if he had made a close study of other such crimes.
I heard that Trump was going to go to Las Vegas in the wake of this. That is a really bad idea. He would be making the same mistake that Obama did after Sandy Hook. It isn't good for potential maniacs to know that they can conjure up a Presidential visit to crown their criminal achievement, as long as it's big enough.
Maybe that has something to do with it – a guy who never cared about much of anything, other than plunking coins in video poker slots. No kids, no church, no attachment to any real kind of community.
I first think that it’s a question of data – has this kind of crime increased? Or has it not decreased as much as it should have? – but I think you have a point with lack of attachment. This guy had no kids, and probably not much of a girlfriend. Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech, and so many more – all loners with nothing to live for. Say what you will about the old days, but back then most people had some form of community to turn to. The decline of religion, of civic organizations, of organic communities – all of which have been targeted by the Left – has set a whole lot of people adrift, especially men. And mass shooting, given that the shooters know they are unlikely to survive, is a form that has as much in common with suicide as with other violent crimes, and suicides have been climbing.
Many many people just want to be heard. Most people think they have something important to contribute. People frequently feel like no one listens to them. Some of us are content commenting at ISteve, or having a blog of our own. Some of us want a bigger moment.
If you want to go off on conspiracy theories, I find it much more questionable that a lone shooter would bring a dozen guns, rent two hotel rooms, and knock out two windows to shoot from. That doesn't add up.
Why doesn’t that “add up”? It seems perfectly easy enough to do. The guy practically lived in casino hotels. He rented out a whole floor of one once. He wasn’t a no-account loser and idiot, but someone who was relatively successful in life; the sort of person who can plan out the logistics of such an attack, and anticipate contingencies.
NPR had a security guy from another casino; he said his group had measures in place that would have caught this guy earlier. Maybe a brag. He suggested Mandalay's security was lax, which this shooter was probably aware of.
I'm wondering about counter-battery fire from the ground. I would think the local police could have spooled up some suppressing sniper fire.
Yesterday, I was at the beach staring out at the horizon and, apropos of nothing, thinking about the Steely Dan song “Do It Again,” about a compulsive gambler like Stephen Paddock.
Something like this always brings a deluge of opinion from ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and celebrities.
firing full auto...
big NATO rounds .308/7.62...
(hands only no tripod)...
on target...
from the 32nd floor...
DOWN to ground level...
at distance...
!!!
This is a very difficult task. Three-shot bursts are the military norm because full auto is 90% off target even at short distance. Usually off target over the target.
Think about the recording of the shots (he's holding the trigger down and going through 50 round magazines) and think how many full auto rounds would simply sail over the concert area.
He would've had to train from a perch several hundred feet above ground to simulate his 32nd floor battlefield conditions. On a cliff out in the desert.
I CALL BULLSHIT.
It takes a lot of skill to shoot in the general direction of a huge crowd.
Frankly, I'm suprised it took this long for an attack of this nature to emerge.
It may be that many of the wounds were from ricochets, since by firing down, the shooter minimized the possibility of shooting over everyone's heads. Soldiers are taught to aim for individual targets, even if one is confronting a mass assault. Machine guns are different, but they are usually only effective when mounted on bipods or tripods and serviced by a team of soldiers to keep ammunition going into them.
Any adult with no criminal record can walk into a gun store and buy almost all the stuff that guy had. And gun-shows are neither scary nor dangerous.
Moreover, it used to be even easier to obtain guns – you could buy them mail-order (even from Sears) as Lee Harvey Oswald did.
In short, your entire thesis is wrong.
Gun shows have been around since forever. Plus in most states, before the instant check, you just filled out the 4473 and the ATF never knew unless the gun was traced post-crime or the dealer went out of business and sent his logs into the ATF.
And until 1968 you could buy any Title 1 firearm mail order.
I had several relatives who had dozens or hundreds of guns. Only one got into any trouble. Busted for shooting pigeons illegally. They confiscated the piece and fined him fifty bucks. It was a prewar Colt Ace 22 that would bring many thousands now.
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
Or maybe he didn’t fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
Oh yeah, fake all the gun purchases in Mesquite, all the surveillance video in the casino showing him bringing in bag after bag of gear- easy peasy. Not hard to do at all. He even supposedly took video of himself doing the shooting, like the guy who killed the two reporters in Virginia. Posthumous fame appears to have been part of his goal. I’m shocked he didn’t break to upload the videos to social media or livestream it on Facebook.
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
this^
too much about this doesnt add up
planning and execution consistent with trained special ops or jihadist but the culprit is wealthy elderly white guy who would have been winded just hauling all that gear up to his room
Don’t be an idiot. You could mail order fully automatic weapons (“machine guns”) from a catalog at Sears before the National Firearms Act was passed in 1934. Auto-Ordnance used to advertise the fully automatic Thomson submachine gun as just the thing for defending home and ranch in the early 20th Century America.
See:
It used to be very common to see Boy Scout children carrying 22 rifles in public (and getting on buses and such) throughout small town America a few decades ago. Guns are not any “deadlier” or more destructive now than it was back then. Gun laws are far more stringent than was ever imagined in the feverish days of 1934 (“Gangsters!” “Thomson submachine guns!”).
What changed are people. The media almost celebrates mass shooters. A lot of people are alienated and don’t have good communal ties and support all the while feeling entitled. And as others have pointed out, mentally disturbed people can no longer be committed with ease. And, yes, the Christian notion of valuing the lives of other people has degraded greatly.
Nonetheless, for all that, given just how many people own guns and how many guns there are in this country, “gun violence” is remarkably low outside suicides, black youths, and Hispanic gangsters.
Guns have saved the lives of A LOT of productive, law-abiding whites and Asians in this country from the depredations of criminals. Legally sound defensive use of guns far exceeds gun crimes (5-to-1) in the U.S. as researcher Gary Kleck demonstrated long ago.
The left likes to point out that firearms ownership is considerably lower in Europe (true), but not as much as we think, considering the vast number of illegal firearms that cannot be accurately measured. If it is impossible to shut down the drug trade, a gun ban is impossible, and might easily trigger civil war.
On the other hand, we are on the way to cramming 15 billion people on the planet; jobs are given to machines and the low bidder; and elite society is cheering the extinction of white Europeans, so one can't help but have a little less concern for the other guy.
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
Yes, my dear Anonymous, I have such experience, and have the same experience in firing on full auto a range of other ammunition calibers from a variety of weapons. (Some of my old shipmates are licensed full-auto firearms dealers/owners, and they’d invited me to shoot with them at machine gun shoots out in the sticks.)
Not if you have a rest – such as a window sill or bipod (or boulder, tree branch, fence rail, &c.) – for the forepart of the weapon: holding the weapon’s forepart down firmly on the rest stabilizes the barrel/muzzle to maximize shot grouping, and a bipod serves that same purpose of stabilizing the barrel/muzzle. Either one, the other, or both of those methods is probably how the Vegas mass-murderer maximized his bullet strikes among a densely packed throng of human beings. All of this indicates that the vicious sonofabitch had planned his mass-killing well in advance.
I get the impression that Enemedia-Pravda’s “reports” that the mass-murdered had tripod-mounted weapons are incorrect, as it’s more likely that some of his weapons were bipod mounted. A tripod is a fairly heavy, ungainly assembly that’s difficult to collapse or to disassemble into components small enough to conceal those components in a suitcase, or even in a duffel bag, while folded bipods are easy to conceal and carry in a suitcase, or even inside a collapsed large golfer’s umbrella. Also, tripods are for heavy machine guns which are crew-served, belt-fed weapons, and it would be difficult to stand or stabilize a tripod atop typical hotel room furniture tables, but it would be easy to hold a bipod steady on a window sill. From the videos I’ve watched of the hideous slaughter, I did not detect prolonged bursts from a belt-fed weapon and heard only bursts long enough to be consistent with shoulder weapons fed most likely by drum magazines.
The most recent reports I have seen is that the gunman had semi-autos with "bump fire" stocks as I suspected yesterday. He appears to have had (at least one) AR-15 with a bipod and a 100 round magazine. Watch the video that goes with the link below and you will clearly see some of his setups. In addition to the one with the bipod the other has a handle at the front of the barrel that can be used to help keep the barrel down when firing auto.
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/03/las-vegas-shooting-gunman-used-bump-stock-device-to-speed-fire/
But he was shooting down at a crowd of about 10,000 people
Worst situation for full auto shooting. Plus there was lateral distance involved and the target area would appear relatively narrow top to bottom. Look at the map.
Plus I’m not buying any tripod in this guy’s storyline. None of these crazed shooters use tripods! Btw none of them use full auto from distance in an elevated sniper’s nest!
I do accept that a pro hit team did use tripods while the crazy man was dead on the floor. They also knocked out the windows in two places because they needed some draft to keep the smoke moving…
Also it was later at night in Vegas. Are we supposed to believe he was sober? Disciplined? I thought he “snapped”!
He was 64 and he sure did remember to wear his prescription lenses for the big show. I think it was a ~400 meter shoot.
This guy shot at a crowd of ten to twenty thousand people and killed about 60, many of whom were probably killed before the crowd as a whole perceived what was going on. There is nothing strange or remarkable about the details of the crime.
But don't let that interfere with your false-flag fantasies.
A pro would have herded the crowd into a kill box and then poured it on.
Figuring out height + defilade + ambush against a crowd ain't exactly Seal Team 6 shit.
See: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/23/35177769_79a70efcb0.jpg
It used to be very common to see Boy Scout children carrying 22 rifles in public (and getting on buses and such) throughout small town America a few decades ago. Guns are not any "deadlier" or more destructive now than it was back then. Gun laws are far more stringent than was ever imagined in the feverish days of 1934 ("Gangsters!" "Thomson submachine guns!").
What changed are people. The media almost celebrates mass shooters. A lot of people are alienated and don't have good communal ties and support all the while feeling entitled. And as others have pointed out, mentally disturbed people can no longer be committed with ease. And, yes, the Christian notion of valuing the lives of other people has degraded greatly.
Nonetheless, for all that, given just how many people own guns and how many guns there are in this country, "gun violence" is remarkably low outside suicides, black youths, and Hispanic gangsters.
Guns have saved the lives of A LOT of productive, law-abiding whites and Asians in this country from the depredations of criminals. Legally sound defensive use of guns far exceeds gun crimes (5-to-1) in the U.S. as researcher Gary Kleck demonstrated long ago.
The public is now far more sympathetic to carrying handguns for protection, than it was 50 years ago. It’s an accident of history that handguns weren’t made Title II under the National Firearms Act, as they were in the corresponding Canadian legislation.
The left likes to point out that firearms ownership is considerably lower in Europe (true), but not as much as we think, considering the vast number of illegal firearms that cannot be accurately measured. If it is impossible to shut down the drug trade, a gun ban is impossible, and might easily trigger civil war.
Fiocchi in Italy still makes a lot of the oddball cartridges for these. Even more esoteric ones were made until recent times. You could even get pinfire cartridges until the seventies. The last pinfire guns were made circa 1885.
Social atomization.
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he’s a member of society. The lunatic’s friends/relatives/acquaintances might’ve also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they’re unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of “friends” on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don’t know these days, people think that’s “creepy” and “weird.” Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they’re often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
You couldn’t make a show like that these days. People just couldn’t relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I’ve actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: “You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they’re always glad you came.”
Robert Putnam wrote a book called “Bowling Alone,” which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B’nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women’s Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans’ organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop – and then go home. Here’s an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, “social media” doesn’t count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there’s no one to even see the warning signs.
These fraternal organizations had another societal benefit in that they were vertically integrated. Lawyers and doctors shoulder-to-shoulder with blue collar types in the same organizations, socializing and working together for charitable purposes.
This promotion of atomization in the US goes much further back than the 1960s, though. Read _Slaughter of Cities_.
This goes back to your recent posts on record breaking and limitations being all in the mind. At this point, it’s a one-way memetic ratchet. This will get worse, as the current generation of children are raised with active shooter drills in their schools.
When alien archaeologists are writing the history of our species, I suspect the name “Charles Whitman” will play an outsized role.
Before Whitman, it just doesn’t seem to have occurred to mentally deranged people to go out and slaughter a huge number of random strangers in a brief period of time, seeking either fame or revenge. Actually, for a long time AFTER Whitman, it was still kind of out there — we went through a long detour where serial killers were the monster du jour, possibly because serial killers are much sexier. They are darkly, obliquely flattering about our potential as human beings — essentially a Satanic incarnation of the Protestant work ethic. Serial killers lend themselves quite naturally to art and entertainment.
Spree killers are an entirely different animal. For starters, they don’t lend themselves well to art and entertainment, except when they have explicit political objectives — which they rarely do. Even then, they’re pretty dull. Timothy McVeigh and Mohammad Atta might be the most boring mass murderers in history.
I can’t really pinpoint the moment mass murderers took over from serial killers as the focus of our fears. I think it was probably Columbine, but who knows? Regardless, it seems the spree killer meme quite quickly eclipsed the serial killer meme in the heads of psychopaths everywhere. Unlike serial killing, which is subject to a number of outside limitations, spree killers are only limited by the ingenuity of the perpetrator.
And that’s why I think Whitman will be so important in hindsight. He opened this Pandora’s box; if it eventually leads to the end of the human race, our alien archaeologists will be able to trace it all the way back to him.
From googling to refresh my memory - A spree killer is someone who kills two or more victims in a short time in multiple locations. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a spree killing as "killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders".
Each have different ranges of personality types, and they are different to each other.
Howard Unruh in 1949, for instance. BTW, there was some general public angst/fear following WWII about brutalized veterans returning home and the Unruh incident fed into it.
The Leftists are probably happy that he was a lone crazed white guy. They won't be so happy when they announce the names of the perps the next time a crime like this is committed (emphasis on the plural - the biggest difference between white mass murder and Islamic mass murder is that Muslims never seem to have too much trouble finding other Muslims with a murderous hate for white Westerners).
Not buying the tripod for the old man. Doesn’t fit the M.O. And he wasn’t a vet.
Two tripods? One for each window? Or he dragged the tripod rig between the windows?
People are not grok-ing that the shooter was 300+ feet off the ground. The concert was not directly adjacent to the building.
It will come out in the next few days just how complex a shoot this was. There was a lot going on in that hotel room during the shoot. Can’t wait for the CIA’s reenactment animation.
Perhaps he preloaded the weapons and the pauses in the recording are actually him moving to the next tripod rig across the room! Maybe he had six stations set up?
The old man either secretly trained for the job to a pro level… or he didn’t do it.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-03/first-pictures-emerge-vegas-shooters-weapons
But he was shooting down at a crowd of about 10,000 people
Worst situation for full auto shooting. Plus there was lateral distance involved and the target area would appear relatively narrow top to bottom. Look at the map.
Plus I'm not buying any tripod in this guy's storyline. None of these crazed shooters use tripods! Btw none of them use full auto from distance in an elevated sniper's nest!
I do accept that a pro hit team did use tripods while the crazy man was dead on the floor. They also knocked out the windows in two places because they needed some draft to keep the smoke moving...
Also it was later at night in Vegas. Are we supposed to believe he was sober? Disciplined? I thought he "snapped"!
He was 64 and he sure did remember to wear his prescription lenses for the big show. I think it was a ~400 meter shoot.
Worst situation for full auto shooting? Who says? Yeah, that’s why the germans didn’t bother shooting down at the landing-craft on Omaha Beach. Because it would have been pointless.
This guy shot at a crowd of ten to twenty thousand people and killed about 60, many of whom were probably killed before the crowd as a whole perceived what was going on. There is nothing strange or remarkable about the details of the crime.
But don’t let that interfere with your false-flag fantasies.
I can't think of a single criminal shooting in modern times where you at least had to respect the shooting involved, except maybe JFK depending on what you think the real circumstances were. John Wood maybe a little bit: if he'd not had his wife buy the piece at K-Mart and had disposed of it properly Harrelson would have walked.
Apparently it’s coming down to a choice between ‘fake moon landing’ people and ‘possible brain tumor’ people, in this forum anyway. I’m going with the Whitman-Austin theory until it’s proven otherwise.
Maybe this chick can use the theory too:
Two years before Columbine was Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree, which coincided with the advent of competition in the 24-hour cable news business. Charles Starkweather had to wait more than 10 years for Terence Malick to bring an arty, Heideggerian interpretation of his crimes to the screen. Cunanan was covered live.
Unbelievable to hear Don Lemon on CNN ask an interviewee if Paddock and the Steve Scalise shooter represented a ‘new thing’.
I guess Lemon just meant ‘old white guy’. It’s possible that, within the CNN cloisters, he was never exposed to the conspiracy theory that the Scalise shooter was anti-Trump. So it was an innocent mistake, perhaps; but you could hear the collective cringe in the CNN studio when the favourite son clumpsied all over the narrative.
You make several good points. OTOH, it’s sort of difficult to make sweeping social extrapolations from a lone gunman proven to have a physiological brain injury.
http://46.105.118.169/~presstit/52.html
I know my life
Would look all right
If I could see it on the silver screen
The narrative was more important than the additional suicides.
The narrative needed is more important than the additional shootings.
They definitely have to open this Vegas shooter's brain. Anything less will be construed as a coverup.
I was going to mention Charles Whitman and his brain tumor, but you beat me to it. I’ll be watching for Paddock’s autopsy results. Sixty-four seems like a strange age to suddenly turn evil.
The media is using profiling (racial and demographic) to argue that a 64 year old white guy wouldn’t have connections to ISIS. Politico called ISIS’ claim that the suspect was a soldier of ISIS “surprising.” And all of this before the case was even 16 hours old.
Time quoted an extremism expert:
A statement like that is apparently fine when directing suspicion (for the Vegas attack) away from Islam or even ISIS, but I wonder how those same words would go over if used to direct suspicion (for Islamic terrorism) away from 64 year old white guys, generally speaking? Of course, Berger’s observation is correct. Stephen Paddock likely doesn’t have connections to ISIS because profiling generally works.
http://time.com/4965449/isis-las-vegas-shooter-stephen-paddock/
The left likes to point out that firearms ownership is considerably lower in Europe (true), but not as much as we think, considering the vast number of illegal firearms that cannot be accurately measured. If it is impossible to shut down the drug trade, a gun ban is impossible, and might easily trigger civil war.
In France and Italy there are still a lot of old pistols dating from the start of the metallic cartridge era to WW1 or later that were never turned in.
Fiocchi in Italy still makes a lot of the oddball cartridges for these. Even more esoteric ones were made until recent times. You could even get pinfire cartridges until the seventies. The last pinfire guns were made circa 1885.
Ammunition isn't something that you can DIY, with smokeless powder being much harder than black powder. Firearms are much simpler, and an average machinist in the West can produce superior results compared to most in the Khyber Pass.
The FBI defines serial, spree killers and mass murderers differently. A serial killer will kill without apprehension and identification, have a cooling off period, and kill again until either apprehension or he grows tired of it. A mass murderer will kill a number of people in the one place. They tend to expect to not get away with it. (The Jihadis may want to get away with it though.)
From googling to refresh my memory – A spree killer is someone who kills two or more victims in a short time in multiple locations. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a spree killing as “killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders”.
Each have different ranges of personality types, and they are different to each other.
From googling to refresh my memory - A spree killer is someone who kills two or more victims in a short time in multiple locations. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a spree killing as "killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders".
Each have different ranges of personality types, and they are different to each other.
Serial killing seems to be in decline. My impression from reading Bill James’ book summarizing all the hundreds of true crime books he has read is that serial killing was around at a low level for a long time, but became a Thing, like so much else, late in the 1960s.
Serial killing seemed to correlate with street crime.
You would have to be concerned that no trace DNA would be found on the victim. Where is your phone during this time? Do you carry it and chance that the pinging from it is being recorded as you carry out the crime? Do you leave it somewhere and have it ring without you interacting at all with it?
I think with all of that you're taking a risk. A lot of police are of fairly middling intelligence and lazy, so all of this evidence has to actually get examined by someone who cares... however, it seems like there is more risk than there was, say, in the 1980s.
With mass murdering OTOH, as long as you can kill enough people, that's mission accomplished for most. These days with better technology for killing and researching, it's only going to get easier I think. It doesn't matter if you get caught, indeed for 90% of them that's the plan.
It was also peak/near peak a lot of other crime too, though.
We had a black male tranny serial killer late last year. Before that it was a serial rapist-killer.
Whatever happened that guy in L.A. with all the photographs? Did they ever confirm their suspicions?
The '60s and '70s were a golden age for the passionate, methodical murderer. It would have been possible then for an intelligent person to outsmart the cops and cover his tracks enough so as never to be convicted. This represents what we could perhaps call the third stage of possible homicides.
The first stage is the Wild West. In a frontier scenario, men kill each other over cattle and land, and do not fear the consequences because there aren't any. In fact, they don't even really think of this as crime; it's just the way you do business in a lawless territory. This situation prevails until a new sheriff rides into town to bring law and order. The sheriff is cast as the hero and the presence of law and order is deemed progress over barbarism, but there is always a strong undercurrent of lament for the lost freedoms of the open range.
The second stage is the gangster murders of the Great Depression and Prohibition. It is characterized by the presence of powerful crime syndicates which have attained rough parity in terms of arms and legitimacy with the representatives of the official government. The gangs actually control territory and run industries; there is interaction between the mafia bosses and official politicians, and there is even talk of the crime families going legitimate (which entails that they will be accepted into society without much reprisal for their past criminality). In this stage law and order exists but it is a fragile thing, divided unequally among several factions.
In the third stage, the Columbo stage, hegemony is achieved. There is one power and one law for all, but each person still thinks of himself as a Kantian end-in-himself, a free citizen of a republic. Although the law is taken as something transcending individuality, it is still paradoxically thought of as the private possession of each, meaningless outside of the context of a free man and his needs and aspirations. Therefore, when certain persons feel that their situation has become unfair and untenable, it occurs to them to plot murder as a means to restore local justice. The guiding maxim of the age is, "I have a right to be happy." If you interfere with my happiness, then you are "in the wrong." Serial killers are pathological manifestations of the same idea.
By the fourth stage, the stage of anarcho-tyranny which is where we're at today, the whole notion of Kantian citizenship has been largely given up with a shrug. There is an imperial police power, omnipresent but often ham-fisted, and a huge population of rather docile citizens who are legally prevented from being dangerous. The whole idea of citizenship in this era seems to be, "As a citizen, I am contractually obligated to never, ever do anything dangerous, either in attack or in defense." This hapless citizenry exists side by side with an equally large and growing underclass of non-citizens who have long since dropped any vestiges of higher cultural existence. There is plenty of thuggish violence among them, including many murders, but nobody really cares. Meanwhile, a handful of very malcontented individuals exploit the asymmetry between a feckless population on the one hand, and a preponderance of technical means on the other hand, to commit a steady stream of highly sensational mass murders. Again, this is just a pathological manifestation of the victimology complexes and identity politic which pervade the society at this stage.
The fifth stage, which has not yet transpired but will occur in the lifetimes of many now living, will involve massive amounts of unapologetic mob violence. No political cause, no idea, nothing of higher symbolic value is brought to the fore in these clashes; it is simply the scabrous clawing at one another of overpopulated rats in a fetid cage. These battles will consume our hundreds of millions of useless eaters, putting an end to any concerns over unchecked population growth, but they will leave the country scorched and almost devoid of high culture except in a few isolated pockets. Eventually life will stabilize at a lower level of complexity where notions reminiscent of feudal honor and the need to guard against vagabondage will once again define the forms of permissible violence.
The 2nd amendment should be repealed and ownership of guns massively curtailed.
This guy shot at a crowd of ten to twenty thousand people and killed about 60, many of whom were probably killed before the crowd as a whole perceived what was going on. There is nothing strange or remarkable about the details of the crime.
But don't let that interfere with your false-flag fantasies.
A pro would simply load up tracers and ‘walk them in’. If you are not shooting for any specific individuals, it’s like, as the expression goes, shooting fish in a barrel. Nothing to be proud of in any way.
I can’t think of a single criminal shooting in modern times where you at least had to respect the shooting involved, except maybe JFK depending on what you think the real circumstances were. John Wood maybe a little bit: if he’d not had his wife buy the piece at K-Mart and had disposed of it properly Harrelson would have walked.
Would look all right
If I could see it on the silver screen
haiku?
limerick without the “there once was…” ?
free from stream of consciousness?
beat?
here’s mine:
if anyone believes the story they’re peddlin’
that this tired old man did all this killin’
they’re so naive and dim witted it’s appallin’
Next time, do your own googling.
Has this type of crime increased? Certainly the magnitude of the carnage has, but is this type of person really more common nowadays?
There’s a few pretty big assumptions with your initial post, Steve, namely that 1. this type of crime has always been accurately reported according to most historical records and 2. the successful mass-murderers are the only mass-murderers.
I’m not sure I buy either of those assumptions. I think that in modern times, it’s much easier to accurately report every time an event like this happens and that there are plenty of other would-be mass-murderers, but they failed. A more interesting question is why do they always use guns? Explosive devices could be just as (if not more) effective at achieving their sick goals, but they almost never use them.
We have just as many mentally ill psychopaths in Europe as in the USA, but here they do not have easy access to automatic weapons.
One of the only great things about America, it seems to me, is the Constitution, and specifically the right to bear arms--against a corrupt, evil government, which we certainly have. And I personally know nothing of guns, don't have one, never have, etc. But I'm very aware of the constant stream of anti-gun propaganda, including in my opinion most of these (probably) non-events. CIA is all.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4943330/Marseille-knifeman-named-29-year-old-Tunisian.html
Some of them have automatic weapons too. Like at Bataclan.
It seems pretty possible and well thought out to kill ~60 people in this manner, out of what, 30k? It’s basically aiming for the broad side of a barn.
60/30k is only 1 in 500 people. 50 is a lot of people for a mass murder in 2017 but it’s low compared with the potential. I would think a 64 year old with a clue would be able to pull something like this off.
There are some unexplained things. For example:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/embed/video/1547089.html
It’s a pretty rare thing to have random people say to you that everyone’s going to die tonight. So when it is said, and then it happens, it seems more than coincidence.
It goes further back.
Howard Unruh in 1949, for instance. BTW, there was some general public angst/fear following WWII about brutalized veterans returning home and the Unruh incident fed into it.
What do you guys think of ISIS claiming involvement?
Serial killers with reasonable IQ actively avoid getting caught. Have a think about it. Would you want to risk killing someone in this day and age? There is a good chance that some CCTV saw you or your vehicle if you were to carry it out. Maybe facial recognition technology will even link you to your face.
You would have to be concerned that no trace DNA would be found on the victim. Where is your phone during this time? Do you carry it and chance that the pinging from it is being recorded as you carry out the crime? Do you leave it somewhere and have it ring without you interacting at all with it?
I think with all of that you’re taking a risk. A lot of police are of fairly middling intelligence and lazy, so all of this evidence has to actually get examined by someone who cares… however, it seems like there is more risk than there was, say, in the 1980s.
With mass murdering OTOH, as long as you can kill enough people, that’s mission accomplished for most. These days with better technology for killing and researching, it’s only going to get easier I think. It doesn’t matter if you get caught, indeed for 90% of them that’s the plan.
Why not just get rid of the whole Bill of Rights? Or just ignore the parts you don’t like, as so many do nowadays.
There’s this thing called a search engine…
There's a few pretty big assumptions with your initial post, Steve, namely that 1. this type of crime has always been accurately reported according to most historical records and 2. the successful mass-murderers are the only mass-murderers.
I'm not sure I buy either of those assumptions. I think that in modern times, it's much easier to accurately report every time an event like this happens and that there are plenty of other would-be mass-murderers, but they failed. A more interesting question is why do they always use guns? Explosive devices could be just as (if not more) effective at achieving their sick goals, but they almost never use them.
Kaboom is a Muslim and IRA thing.
I can't think of a single criminal shooting in modern times where you at least had to respect the shooting involved, except maybe JFK depending on what you think the real circumstances were. John Wood maybe a little bit: if he'd not had his wife buy the piece at K-Mart and had disposed of it properly Harrelson would have walked.
Using tracers would have attracted police and even CC people taking pot shots back at the source. Not what you’d want.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
Agreed. This is something that’s built on itself. Basically, any suicidal loser who hasn’t quite come to the attention of the authorities enough to pop the background check, or else can get someone to straw purchase guns for them, knows very well now that they don’t have to go out with a whimper, and can at least get themselves a few minutes to hours of a twisted sort of Valhalla on their way out. The media and politicians have invested these incidents, and their perpetrators, with such power to create fear that it’s let anyone with a minimum of a few hundred bucks and enough viciousness know that they can take over the national news cycle for a few days, at least.
Also, as a few other commenters have noted, our culture today elevates victimhood and a sense of righteous grievance over things like shame, dignity, or honor as responses to conflict or setbacks, in a way that emphasizes blaming vast, impersonal forces for personal insecurities and failures. (White males, of course, have few approved or sanctioned outlets to either cast themselves as victims or find acceptable objects of blame.) If all that’s left to you is to feel that your life sucks because all “those sons of bitches” screwed you, might as well go get even.
Personally, aside from trying to limit these creeps’ posthumous public exposure through the media (something Steve has suggested in the past), I think something that ought to be considered is trying to find ways to shame them and to shame and (legally) terrorize their families after the fact. Publish their secret hentai porn stashes, have women who knew them talk about how creepy they were, put their families through the roughest sorts of law enforcement investigatory tactics available. Anything to make people who obviously don’t fear any afterlife think twice.
Is it possible that the increased surveillance, DNA evidence, and CSI forensics of the modern era are more likely to stop a potential serial killer after their first victim?
Anti depressive medications and other drugs seem like the most likely candidate to me. Serotinin has a known link to violence regulation in humans and other animals, SSRIs screw with your serotonin system in ways that aren’t well understood.
You would have to be concerned that no trace DNA would be found on the victim. Where is your phone during this time? Do you carry it and chance that the pinging from it is being recorded as you carry out the crime? Do you leave it somewhere and have it ring without you interacting at all with it?
I think with all of that you're taking a risk. A lot of police are of fairly middling intelligence and lazy, so all of this evidence has to actually get examined by someone who cares... however, it seems like there is more risk than there was, say, in the 1980s.
With mass murdering OTOH, as long as you can kill enough people, that's mission accomplished for most. These days with better technology for killing and researching, it's only going to get easier I think. It doesn't matter if you get caught, indeed for 90% of them that's the plan.
Machiavelli pointed out it’s hard to deter a would-be killer who doesn’t care if he lives or dies.
“Hamlet” has at least a couple of scenes on the deterrent effect on homicide and suicide of a belief in, or a worry about, an afterlife: the scene where Hamlet is dissuaded from killing a repentant King Claudius praying for forgiveness and “To be or not to be.”
Plus, Hamlet didn't want Claudius to go to heaven (after Purgatory).
Hopefully.
In the eerily prophetic sci-fi novel “Stand on Zanzibar” by John Brunner there is a phenomenon of people known as “muckers” because they run amok and engage in mass killings. Our world, like the dystopia of the novel, has become super complex, overwhelming in scale, ultra fast paced, radically atomized and despiritualized. No one is meant to do well in such an environment since we evolved in little tribal groups for tens of millennia, and most people don’t but they have some coping mechanisms. Then you have those who just go apeshit and muck.
Americans are insanely drugged up – one in six are on some sort of psychiatric drug. The rate for whites is 20.8%. Eric Harris, James Holmes, Dylan Roof.
Paddock seems to come by his psychopathy honestly since his dad was on the FBI’s most-wanted list for bank robbery. It’ll be interesting to see what actually set this guy off.
Oh gawd, the old ‘video games make people violent’ chestnut. I thought that was retired in the 90s.
The shooter’s father was a criminal with psychopathic and suicidal tendencies. Maybe his son inherited his disposition to a degree and was able to channel his energies into making himself a business success. Someone of his age and profile would usually have a wife, kids and grandkids to keep them busy and connected with life.
Paddock did not, he spent most of his time gambling. Maybe he simply got bored and figured instead of enduring old age, he may as well go out in a blaze of glory and show his old man how an organised, disciplined professional would commit a spectacular crime.
Will Durant was correct when he said the most influential figure of the 20th century was not Hitler but Darwin as the extinction of religious belief was the most salient feature of modern times.
Looks like it was a big tactical error for the concert light crew to turn on the lights when the star left the stage. This is the norm in most concerts, “Elvis has left the building.” They probably just did it instinctively. Too bad they hadn’t put a little thought into their actions, or that the first police on the scene didn’t shoot out all the concert and flood lights. I think that a lot of people would have been spared if this had been done.
Fiocchi in Italy still makes a lot of the oddball cartridges for these. Even more esoteric ones were made until recent times. You could even get pinfire cartridges until the seventies. The last pinfire guns were made circa 1885.
Operation Gladio might also account for a number of unregistered firearms.
Ammunition isn’t something that you can DIY, with smokeless powder being much harder than black powder. Firearms are much simpler, and an average machinist in the West can produce superior results compared to most in the Khyber Pass.
https://youtu.be/KfzQ4uKvE7c
Advertising works.
We have wall to wall advertising for the next sociopathic attention whore.
Liberterian web site lewrockwell.com likes to blame prescription drugs
The Mass Shooting Problem – Like Organised Terrorism – Is a DRUG PROBLEM
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/10/no_author/the-mass-shooting-problem-like-organised-terrorism-is-a-drug-problem/
I like to blame austerity measures caused by the forever war.
.
.
.
... austerity?! WTO!
Yes, worrying about the afterlife seems to be quite effective at stopping Islamic terrorists.
That is a statistical fact. The 1980s were peak serial killer.
It was also peak/near peak a lot of other crime too, though.
It was also peak/near peak a lot of other crime too, though.
A bunch of serial killers in South Central LA got lost in the noise of crack murders.
Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it? Amos 3:6
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
Yup, a fair amount in the British Commandos.
I haven’t heard what calibres the shooter used, though I suspect the bulk of it was not battle rifle cartridges, such as the .308 – 7.62×51 and more likely to have been from AR and AK type platforms – 5.56×45 and 7.62×39 respectively, these generate about half the energy of a .308. We have yet to have a total of the number of rounds fired – it’s going to be in the tens of 10os if not over 1,000. I heard some of the video and he was dumping whole magazines in one go, this is not the signature of a highly trained shooter. But then he was dumping them, at least until the crowd scattered, into a tightly packed throng of thousands of people.
So no big skill set here. It’s not technically difficult to hit many folks pouring fire into a crowd of thousands from the 32nd floor. This gives a range of only around 100 metres. Also, in this scenario – the angle of fire down onto paving, would have resulted in amplified casualties because of ricochet injuries. Rounds and jagged bullet jackets would be coming off the paving and staying relatively flat – close to the ground – ricochets tend to stick fairly close to the surface they come off, they can cause very nasty injuries.
It was about 2 hours from the start of the shooting until the SWAT team burst into his room. How long the shooting actually went on for, I haven’t heard. If he used precision fire I would have expected more dead, given there are no reports of rifle fire having been returned from the ground.
Upper stock separates from lower stock, 7 - 8 pounds unloaded ... what, three suitcases to get everything in? Career gambler with a knack for real estate rolls into the hotel and sets up shop. Nothing to draw much attention so far. And apparently retrofitting or even acquiring full auto is fairly easy.
San Bernardino: two midwit Pakistanis earn enough disposable income to jet over to Islamabad to get sermonized and arm up like a Marine Corps fire team.
I'd like to know what triggered these individuals and how they acquired such explosive undercurrents but apparently it doesn't take much. And in the old days if you went berserker mode all you had was a sword or muzzleloader. Technology enables the super-berserker. Our tech is so good and idiot-proof, any schlep can be a berserker. Retired accountants can be berserkers. I'd love for there to be an elaborate conspiracy, but Occam's Razor seems to have whittled it down.
I think Steve is on to something here. Watching that interview with his brother, these are not people who spend a lot of time thinking about ontological issues.
Still within the effective range from 32-stories up with a bipod and just firing into a crowd.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UdHjV_KZT8
Mass Killings
Can happen spectacularly all at once, or less spectacularly — incrementally over time.
Can happen spectacularly all at once, or less spectacularly -- incrementally over time.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLLmHlRW0AIB6np.jpg
Well, before that for a few generations if you wanted to kill a lot of people you could just find a pillbox somewhere in the world – there was way more of that sort of thing going on than there is now.
Can happen spectacularly all at once, or less spectacularly -- incrementally over time.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLLmHlRW0AIB6np.jpg
Hatefacts! You trying to get this website shut down or something?
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
Governments know that political changes start in public spaces. That’s why it’s cheaper to drink at home than to visit the local bar.
The angriest I’ve ever seen a bunch of old guys get was when they kicked off about the repatriation of the bodies of dead soldiers from Iraq. Two of them had wives/partners who were dealing with initial attempts to rehabilitate young men who’d lost limbs due to IEDs and the shameful shambles of their insertion, traumatised, into “regular ” NHS wards, with no additional training for staff. Those two began to rant and others joined in about the sick parade of flag-covered coffins applauded through the streets of a picturesque English town, while seriously injured young servicemen were ignored by the media. That has stuck in my mind for a decade. It occurred on a Sunday night and none of the ranters was drunk.
Governments LIKE atomisation.
Ammunition isn't something that you can DIY, with smokeless powder being much harder than black powder. Firearms are much simpler, and an average machinist in the West can produce superior results compared to most in the Khyber Pass.
You can in a pinch try reloading modern cartridges with black versus smokeless powder but the inherent risks (how many grains of faster-burning black powder equal how many grains of smokeless equal how many psi, exactly?) would put me off doing so casually. America at least has a well-developed legal reloader subculture and cottage industry.
Although there were considerably necked down black powder cartridges, trying it in the more modern rifle cartridges with severe neck angles would perhaps be a bad idea.
Remember BP is really, really corrosive, so only shoot it in junkers or in stainless guns.
As far as making your own ammo, many people cast their own bullets, and if you were desperate and had a lathe you could turn cartridge cases. Making your own primers would probably be suicidal, but even black powder manufacture is not really practical at home. It takes a lot of time and is very messy and leads to explosions.
But under REAL survival conditions, you probably won't have time even to reload with existing components. Stow a can or two of your favorite powder and a few thousand primers away, but your best investment is probably .22 Long Rifle, your rifle caliber and your pistol caliber in that order.
Different religion, in which the afterlife promises rewards for dying in a holy war.
There a a poplular bumper sticker that says something like “nice women don’t make history.” When you take the purpose out of the ordinary stuff of life what is left but that your life must be spectacular. If it isn’t on tv does it even happen? That sort of thing.
Add to that a decline in community. People have fewer friends and relations. Relationships are more temporary and superficial.
Then there is the fact that we all inhabit this mediandream world where you are constantly told to be outraged at the world.
Why is all violence done by white men?
This is why demographic change is so important
People of Color are more religious, do not like guns, believe in a strong community, are more accepting, use less drugs, don’t like country music, like children, etc….
...except when they're knockout-punching, ganging up on helpless victims, committing armed robbery, muggings, burning cigarettes on the heads of the mentally retarded, loudly playing gangsta rap....
Now why'ns don't you go back to dat mensroom at da public park and make an afternoon of it?
- Leonard Pitts
The real question is, which Unz commenter was it? Keep eyes peeled to see who no longer shows up on these hallowed pages. (That is to say, if it really happened.)
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
Hilarious, two–so far–readers with just such experience! Uuuuuuuuuuuuuunz!
No you don’t: you don’t have the t.v. non-culture of America, nor anywhere near the level of prescription drugs pushed by doctors from the earliest ages, nor the systemic lack of care (e.g. no dole, housing benefit, health care) that the good old U.S.A. has.
One of the only great things about America, it seems to me, is the Constitution, and specifically the right to bear arms–against a corrupt, evil government, which we certainly have. And I personally know nothing of guns, don’t have one, never have, etc. But I’m very aware of the constant stream of anti-gun propaganda, including in my opinion most of these (probably) non-events. CIA is all.
Looking down on a mass of standing people in a concert or stadium, it always struck me how it would be so easy for an attacker to shoot and kill many people with little aiming required.
Frankly, I’m suprised it took this long for an attack of this nature to emerge.
Agreed, as I’ve just stated to another commenter from Europe. Anti-gun propaganda is everywhere all the time. As Dylan said, it makes you stop and-a wonder why?
I was thinking the same thing … One more Boomer Bernie Bro in his 60s.
Yes, it's a very disturbing pattern.
I don’t think it would be impossible for one person to do, just unecessary and therefore unlikely. Why would a single shooter need so many guns, or a second hotel room, or a second window to shoot from? A lot of people are (as usual) jumping to conspiracy theories – If that is where you want to go, I think these facts are harder to square with the narrative then the fact that a guy could hit a lot of people (maybe 300+), while shooting repeatedly into a dense crowd.
Rifles jam, barrels overheat, and it may have been faster than reloading. The second room presumably gave him an increased field of fire, since one of his rooms was on the corner. It also could have created doubts about the number of shooters involved. Who knows? He obviously spent a lot of time planning this out. They're going to be looking at his internet browsing history, his purchase history (especially of ammunition), and when he reserved the room. I think they'll find that he'd been planning this for a very long time - a year or more. It may not take a lot of practice to hit hundreds of people in a huge crowd from an elevated position 300 yards away, but I would bet that he *did* practice, and quite a lot. He didn't just wake up one morning and decide to pack up his guns and go shoot up a country music concert.
This is why demographic change is so important
People of Color are more religious, do not like guns, believe in a strong community, are more accepting, use less drugs, don't like country music, like children, etc....
‘People of Color are more religious, do not like guns, believe in a strong community, are more accepting, use less drugs, don’t like country music, like children, etc….’
…except when they’re knockout-punching, ganging up on helpless victims, committing armed robbery, muggings, burning cigarettes on the heads of the mentally retarded, loudly playing gangsta rap….
They have acid, knives, bombs and trucks though. Just yesterday a random Tunisian stabbed and killed two white french women. “No connection with ISIS” say the authorities, whew we got lucky.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4943330/Marseille-knifeman-named-29-year-old-Tunisian.html
Some of them have automatic weapons too. Like at Bataclan.
See: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/23/35177769_79a70efcb0.jpg
It used to be very common to see Boy Scout children carrying 22 rifles in public (and getting on buses and such) throughout small town America a few decades ago. Guns are not any "deadlier" or more destructive now than it was back then. Gun laws are far more stringent than was ever imagined in the feverish days of 1934 ("Gangsters!" "Thomson submachine guns!").
What changed are people. The media almost celebrates mass shooters. A lot of people are alienated and don't have good communal ties and support all the while feeling entitled. And as others have pointed out, mentally disturbed people can no longer be committed with ease. And, yes, the Christian notion of valuing the lives of other people has degraded greatly.
Nonetheless, for all that, given just how many people own guns and how many guns there are in this country, "gun violence" is remarkably low outside suicides, black youths, and Hispanic gangsters.
Guns have saved the lives of A LOT of productive, law-abiding whites and Asians in this country from the depredations of criminals. Legally sound defensive use of guns far exceeds gun crimes (5-to-1) in the U.S. as researcher Gary Kleck demonstrated long ago.
We are getting mixed messages here. The local paper and support groups cry and moan over every illegal alien up for deportation; we award a cajillion dollars to people who sprinkle baby powder on their privates. In some ways these shootings are encouraged by a higher value on individuals: the jewelry store is a more tempting target than the rock quarry. Back when we were willing to lose 5000 men building the Panama canal, shooting 50 people didn’t have the cachet that it does today.
On the other hand, we are on the way to cramming 15 billion people on the planet; jobs are given to machines and the low bidder; and elite society is cheering the extinction of white Europeans, so one can’t help but have a little less concern for the other guy.
Seems unlikely because of the particulars. There is the fact that there have been a lot of random terrorism in recent days (Marseilles, Edmonton, etc) and this could be part of the same wave of like totally unrelated incidents that certainly aren’t organized. But still, I doubt it.
But isn’t it racist to use DNA to profile unknown killers and rapists?
“I was thinking the same thing … One more Boomer Bernie Bro in his 60s.”
Yes, it’s a very disturbing pattern.
We’ve had several serial killers in my area over the last couple years. All black males. I don’t think they get the national coverage they once did because it used to be all serial killers were white, can’t step on that valuable narrative.
We had a black male tranny serial killer late last year. Before that it was a serial rapist-killer.
Whatever happened that guy in L.A. with all the photographs? Did they ever confirm their suspicions?
Two tripods? One for each window? Or he dragged the tripod rig between the windows?
People are not grok-ing that the shooter was 300+ feet off the ground. The concert was not directly adjacent to the building.
It will come out in the next few days just how complex a shoot this was. There was a lot going on in that hotel room during the shoot. Can't wait for the CIA's reenactment animation.
Perhaps he preloaded the weapons and the pauses in the recording are actually him moving to the next tripod rig across the room! Maybe he had six stations set up?
The old man either secretly trained for the job to a pro level... or he didn't do it.
More likely that he has a small, few-pound bipod on each weapon. That stabilization would have improved accuracy a lot.
Two tripods? One for each window? Or he dragged the tripod rig between the windows?
People are not grok-ing that the shooter was 300+ feet off the ground. The concert was not directly adjacent to the building.
It will come out in the next few days just how complex a shoot this was. There was a lot going on in that hotel room during the shoot. Can't wait for the CIA's reenactment animation.
Perhaps he preloaded the weapons and the pauses in the recording are actually him moving to the next tripod rig across the room! Maybe he had six stations set up?
The old man either secretly trained for the job to a pro level... or he didn't do it.
More likely that he has a small, few-pound bipod on each weapon. That stabilization would have improved accuracy a lot.
Guaranteed to have a Wikipedia page now.
Yeah, but he had some things break his way. I would think hotel staff and security would soon realize someone was using one of their rooms for this activity and break down the door; even the patrons in surrounding rooms. I heard it was two hours for SWAT to move in.
NPR had a security guy from another casino; he said his group had measures in place that would have caught this guy earlier. Maybe a brag. He suggested Mandalay’s security was lax, which this shooter was probably aware of.
I’m wondering about counter-battery fire from the ground. I would think the local police could have spooled up some suppressing sniper fire.
Having fired at a flock of ducks with a shotgun and coming up empty, I don’t think you get many hits just shooting in the general direction of a group of people, even if they are tightly packed. Lot of rounds will just go high or wide. And four hundred yards really is a long ways–very few ranges have even a two hundred yard range, let alone a four hundred yard one. And an angle makes it slightly more difficult because gravity acts on the bullet at an angle.
It may be that many of the wounds were from ricochets, since by firing down, the shooter minimized the possibility of shooting over everyone’s heads. Soldiers are taught to aim for individual targets, even if one is confronting a mass assault. Machine guns are different, but they are usually only effective when mounted on bipods or tripods and serviced by a team of soldiers to keep ammunition going into them.
I first think that it's a question of data - has this kind of crime increased? Or has it not decreased as much as it should have? - but I think you have a point with lack of attachment. This guy had no kids, and probably not much of a girlfriend. Sandy Hook, Aurora, Virginia Tech, and so many more - all loners with nothing to live for. Say what you will about the old days, but back then most people had some form of community to turn to. The decline of religion, of civic organizations, of organic communities - all of which have been targeted by the Left - has set a whole lot of people adrift, especially men. And mass shooting, given that the shooters know they are unlikely to survive, is a form that has as much in common with suicide as with other violent crimes, and suicides have been climbing.
The lack of a sense of community is, I think, the reason you got more of these kind of incidents than you do in Europe, although they do happen. Europe has another problem with a group of people whose sense of community induces them to attack non-Muslims.
1. We don’t have as many as it seems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
1927. Close to 50 dead. Most of them School Children.
We now have 4x as many people.
2. Better technology for killing people. The Boston Marathon bombers were shocking because it appears that they just saw the bomb manufacturing instructions on the internet and then built two and both of them detonated without any testing. Most people crazy enough to do something like this aren’t functional enough to succeed. A single person can do more with a typical weapon.
3. Mass Shootings by White Males.
2017 – Vegas.
2012 – James Homes. Movie Theatre, Aurora, CO.
1991 – George Hennard. Luby’s Cafeteria Shootings
1986 – Patrick Sherrill. Edmund, OK Post Office. Killed 14, Wounded 6. Inspired phrase, ‘go postal’.
1983 – James Huberty. Age 41. McDonalds.
1966 – Charles Whitman. Killed 16, Wounded 31.
1949 – Howard Barton Unruh. Killed 13, Injured 3. Used Luger. Found Criminally Insane.
Hey …. mostly picked from a list of rampage killers. I skipped the plane bombings and other stuff. But it totals out to a couple per decade and under 10 per year for the entire US. I don’t consider anything criminal to be a rampage. I’m skipping a couple of schools also.
Meanwhile — we have the immigrant stuff. That happens because …. it happens. They shouldn’t be here. These days, the immigrants and 2nd generation are angry and rampage a lot.
But mostly — the Bath School strikes me as the most evil and it was 90 years ago.
There was a Wall Street bombing in 1920 – 30 dead. And the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing. I have a sense that bombings would be more popular if guns were harder to find. In China, there have been a number of knife rampages in schools. And the popular acid attacks in 3rd world places.
This stuff is more rare than it seems. Especially if you toss the immigrants into a quasi terrorist category.
Kinky Friedman takes us on a stroll down memory lane.
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
Good comment! And even in a group, large numbers of people are staring at those damned screens on their phones!
But he was shooting down at a crowd of about 10,000 people
Worst situation for full auto shooting. Plus there was lateral distance involved and the target area would appear relatively narrow top to bottom. Look at the map.
Plus I'm not buying any tripod in this guy's storyline. None of these crazed shooters use tripods! Btw none of them use full auto from distance in an elevated sniper's nest!
I do accept that a pro hit team did use tripods while the crazy man was dead on the floor. They also knocked out the windows in two places because they needed some draft to keep the smoke moving...
Also it was later at night in Vegas. Are we supposed to believe he was sober? Disciplined? I thought he "snapped"!
He was 64 and he sure did remember to wear his prescription lenses for the big show. I think it was a ~400 meter shoot.
Do you accept that dozens of officers from multiple responding law enforcement agencies were in on the conspiracy and will remain quiet for eternity?
Trump, who’s a bad president but quite good at speed reading people, plus probably has access to better info than any of us, said it best: an evil act. Why is that so difficult for high IQers to see? Sheesh!
If you think of Nevada, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, … as all part of the American Empire, the Mandalay Bay massscre was probably not the worst thing to happen in the American Empire that day.
Raqqa in ruins: Brutal fight against IS leaves city destroyed
http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/inside-raqqa-islamic-state-raqqa-slowly-falling-1603909747
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
This is at least partially due to suburbanization during the 60s-90s crime wave and the resultant criminalization of drinking and driving in the 80s. Now having a few drinks with your buddies and hopping into your car risks your livelihood.
These fraternal organizations had another societal benefit in that they were vertically integrated. Lawyers and doctors shoulder-to-shoulder with blue collar types in the same organizations, socializing and working together for charitable purposes.
I get the impression that Enemedia-Pravda's "reports" that the mass-murdered had tripod-mounted weapons are incorrect, as it's more likely that some of his weapons were bipod mounted. A tripod is a fairly heavy, ungainly assembly that's difficult to collapse or to disassemble into components small enough to conceal those components in a suitcase, or even in a duffel bag, while folded bipods are easy to conceal and carry in a suitcase, or even inside a collapsed large golfer's umbrella. Also, tripods are for heavy machine guns which are crew-served, belt-fed weapons, and it would be difficult to stand or stabilize a tripod atop typical hotel room furniture tables, but it would be easy to hold a bipod steady on a window sill. From the videos I've watched of the hideous slaughter, I did not detect prolonged bursts from a belt-fed weapon and heard only bursts long enough to be consistent with shoulder weapons fed most likely by drum magazines.
I own a top of the line bipod that fits into a back pocket. This size is standard in the industry.
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
The “LOL” was meant to be an “AGREE.”
Bingo. Character formation, that dark hole for IQers.
Plus, Hamlet didn’t want Claudius to go to heaven (after Purgatory).
The perceived increase is lone-wolf, private operator types types… actually, the biggest mass killings have always been done by governments: Babi Yar, Katyn Forest, Nanking, My Lai, Cambodia, etc.
Lock him up and throw away the key.
What do you do with someone who kills 20 people?
Put him in a hospital and see if he gets better.
What do you do with someone who kills 2 million people?
Put him in a hotel suite and initiate peace talks.
Surprised no one has applied the sailer test yet. When I heard about the event, I figured it was either a white or Asian shooter, based on Steve sailer’s analysis of the shots to casualties ratios of different ethnicities.
Given that Steve’s analysis shows whites (and Asians) are the most deadly spree shooters, we should restrict them from having access to weaponry that would facilitate this. But no restrictions on blacks and Hispanics, who are statistically much less deadly in these situations ( according to Steve )
But he was shooting down at a crowd of about 10,000 people
Worst situation for full auto shooting. Plus there was lateral distance involved and the target area would appear relatively narrow top to bottom. Look at the map.
Plus I'm not buying any tripod in this guy's storyline. None of these crazed shooters use tripods! Btw none of them use full auto from distance in an elevated sniper's nest!
I do accept that a pro hit team did use tripods while the crazy man was dead on the floor. They also knocked out the windows in two places because they needed some draft to keep the smoke moving...
Also it was later at night in Vegas. Are we supposed to believe he was sober? Disciplined? I thought he "snapped"!
He was 64 and he sure did remember to wear his prescription lenses for the big show. I think it was a ~400 meter shoot.
Lmbo the fever swamp has spoken.
A pro would have herded the crowd into a kill box and then poured it on.
Figuring out height + defilade + ambush against a crowd ain’t exactly Seal Team 6 shit.
Not true. The Swiss have “easy access to automatic weapons” but don’t have these types of problems. Conversely, France has ultra-strict gun control but that didn’t stop the jihadis from smuggling in AK-47s and murdering 130 people with them.
Too emotional to read all the comments, but the photo on Drudge of the bodies of two young women, laying side by side, drove a dagger through my heart. My daughters often attend concerts together. So sad for the families of the victims. I believe in prayer so I will pray for healing for their families.
Returning fire with WHAT? Pistols and patrol rifles? Shooting at least 300 feet vertical to begin with? Unless someone has a scoped bolt action with the right angle to set it up and can pound out the ballistics of the shot you’re pretty safe.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
In 30k people in the US, someone will be armed. Who knows with what. It only takes one bullet to seriously mess up your day, even a fluked shot with iron sights.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
I had to strain and read comments to find it but it is there... right where you'd think in the rightmost smashed window. Of course it is not easy to see. The camera operator has the virtue of being there with full resolution of natural vision and still doesn't know where to point the camera directly.
https://youtu.be/iuv4cLjQqNE
Now tell me you'd not know where the tracers are coming from.
https://youtu.be/dq4xnRGZMOI
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/oct/02/gunman-who-killed-50-at-las-vegas-concert-was-reti/
"No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about any of that stuff," Eric Paddock said as he alternately wept and shouted. "He was a guy who had money. He went on cruises and gambled."
Maybe that has something to do with it - a guy who never cared about much of anything, other than plunking coins in video poker slots. No kids, no church, no attachment to any real kind of community. It would be interesting if it turned out that he was on anti-depressants (I-don't-give-a-f**k pills), as were a lot of recent mass-murdering maniacs, and if he had made a close study of other such crimes.
I heard that Trump was going to go to Las Vegas in the wake of this. That is a really bad idea. He would be making the same mistake that Obama did after Sandy Hook. It isn't good for potential maniacs to know that they can conjure up a Presidential visit to crown their criminal achievement, as long as it's big enough.
In short, an aging Boomer trying to keep up with the Millennials.
I can see it now: a movie about some small, economically-depressed town that stages a fake mass shooting just so the President will show up, and the town can hit him up for federal funds.
“Why would a single shooter need so many guns, or a second hotel room, or a second window to shoot from?”
Rifles jam, barrels overheat, and it may have been faster than reloading. The second room presumably gave him an increased field of fire, since one of his rooms was on the corner. It also could have created doubts about the number of shooters involved. Who knows? He obviously spent a lot of time planning this out. They’re going to be looking at his internet browsing history, his purchase history (especially of ammunition), and when he reserved the room. I think they’ll find that he’d been planning this for a very long time – a year or more. It may not take a lot of practice to hit hundreds of people in a huge crowd from an elevated position 300 yards away, but I would bet that he *did* practice, and quite a lot. He didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to pack up his guns and go shoot up a country music concert.
The media if off talking about how we’ve had 273 mass shootings this year, defined as an incident in which 4 or more people were injured. I’m guessing the overwhelming majority of these are urban in nature, but no mention of that or who is doing the shooting since that would mean speaking poorly of our perpetual victim class – and that a serious effort to penalize illegal gun possession would mean a lot more black bodies in jail.
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
Keep your invisible friend; you sound just like a liberal gun-grabber. I’m glad to “pay the price” of having gun ownership and no priests.
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
Because people who believe in a “judgmental God” never commit mass slaughters. Except when it’s justified, like sinners and heretics. Oh, and if God gives us their land.
Generally speaking they don't. If we're going to this Las Vegas style, the least likely person to attempt to kill you would be a God fearing Christian. Most likely are atheists, particularly when they get complete control of nation state (Communism)
That Christians have killed and atheists have not isn't the point. We're talking best odds.
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
This, along with the aforementioned decline in religiosity, is probably a major driver of the spike in deaths from opioids, meth, and alcohol, too. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, and idle minds his playground- and a lot of modern Americans don’t have much purpose or meaning in their lives. For all the amusing electronic trinkets and long life-spans we enjoy, there’s much more existential despair in this country than anyone likes to admit.
“Jihadis think they’ll go to heaven for killing infidels and the ex-Christians don’t fear going to hell anymore”
That is a good line
One reason serial killers will probably keep receding from the public conscious: probability. Technology – cameras, DNA testing, cell phone tracking, improved communication between law enforcement agencies – have made it far less likely go get away with a long series of murders. If your chances of getting away were 50% in the 1970s and 20% now then the chances of committing six murders before getting caught were (0.5)^5 then and (0.2)^5 now – 3.125% then vs 0.32% now. The odds against it increase exponentially. Mass murderers, on the other hand, seem to keep getting better and better at it. The saddest fact is that this event is going to generate a lot of copycats. This guy probably wasn’t a terrorist, but he’s going to inspire tens if not hundreds of them.
The Leftists are probably happy that he was a lone crazed white guy. They won’t be so happy when they announce the names of the perps the next time a crime like this is committed (emphasis on the plural – the biggest difference between white mass murder and Islamic mass murder is that Muslims never seem to have too much trouble finding other Muslims with a murderous hate for white Westerners).
It’s a lyric from “James Dean” by the Eagles.
Next time, do your own googling.
Yes, and then they would have been able to avoid hotel security cameras and make their getaway wearing INVISIBILITY cloaks. Such cunning!
We must notify the FBI immediately of this line of investigation.
C'mon Jeff Sessions and the FBI are under Congressional subpoena and it's been a month past deadline.
We need facts which we'll never know now. Too many "security" contracts and pet projects will be the order of the day.
#SWAMPmaga
It would be a bit embarrassing if the weapons were sourced from Op Fast and Furious.
Any experts here care to comment on Hillary’s idiotic tweet–”Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get”?
I’m not experienced with guns, and even I saw the stupidity there.
In other words, Hillary is clueless as usual. The woman is just not that bright.
I think the guy was a failed gambling addict. Professional gamblers do not play slot machines and video poker; they play games like poker against weaker players, they seek out situations where the odds are in their favor.
So probably he had gambling debts and maybe also owed money to the IRS. Perhaps he had gambled to try to win enough money to pay the IRS.
Perhaps he was also a guns addict. He must have accumulated all these weapons over a period of time, so they were not just for self defense, though he may have had a developing paranoid illness. Some people do develop addictions to weapons and cease to use them sensibly.
I agree with others that the lack of religion, family, social ties, would have left him without a moral center. Cable TV and 24 hour news probably does make going out in a blaze of infamy attractive to such people. Why should Muslims get all the TV ratings?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?
[The Beatles: When I'm Sixty Four]
What do you do with someone who kills 2 people?
Lock him up and throw away the key.
What do you do with someone who kills 20 people?
Put him in a hospital and see if he gets better.
What do you do with someone who kills 2 million people?
Put him in a hotel suite and initiate peace talks.
Sorry, I do not have time to read all the comments, but I read a few. Somebody might have already covered it, but I think it is much harder to get away with murder now. A person who has a bout of insanity 100 years ago could quietly kill a few people, return to behaving normal and live the rest of their lives with no problems. I read a story of a guy in the U.S. who casually killed and ate a bunch of kids in his neighborhood just because he wanted to taste human flesh. Such easy relief is not available to people today plus the appeal of becoming a spectacle as others have mentioned makes the spree killer more common.
I suspect he brought extra guns in case his main gun jammed.
Multiple shooter/Paddock was just a dead body theories are bullshit flat out.
The cops had his location within about 15 minutes and they had a 4 man team outside the door within about 20. A hotel security guard engaged the door before that even, and was shot in the leg. Shooting continued for over an hour, with police camped outside the door. Nobody else came out of the suite, unless they left within the first few minutes but then in that case who was still shooting?
The only “conspiracy theory” has to do with his motivations being covered up. It’s totally believable that one high agency White man could pull this off himself, given he was willing to lose his own life. The only thing that’s not believable about the story is that he did all this for no reason other than wanting to kill.
Paddock was an anti-Trump, anti-White boomer nut, exactly like the scalise shooter except much more competent. He consumed anti-White media for 50 years and guess what he took it seriously. His profile, financially successful but no family life, a nonWhite girlfriend, no hobbies other than gambling, the fact that he has allegedly been found in videos at anti-Trump rallies wearing a pussy hat, plus the targeting of White America — country music … It points to Trump derangement. The loud and consistent narrative from the media that there is no political motivation is all the confirmation we need that there is definitely a political motivation.
One problem with the idea that it was a team of shooters is that Vegas is Surveillance Central. If this was a team of shooters, it will become a matter of public record soon, because Vegas security people will know, and then the feds will know soon after.
This. Firing from a braced position is completely different from firing “freehand.”
Shooting braced from an elevated position at a densely-packed crowd of unaware victims is absolutely textbook turkey shoot. Shooting full-auto or bump-fire makes it trickier, but everything else about the shoot works to make it easier to score hits. Actually even auto/bump fire makes it easier, because the shooter only has so much time to score hits before the element of surprise wears off and the crowd starts to seek cover or disperse, so that compensates for the decreased accuracy, which isn’t all that meaningful when firing into a crowd.
Guns are pretty straightforward, their operations well-known and -understood. Explosives, not. Most of people have little knowledge of chemistry and engineering.
Las Vegas 2017 shooter: 60 or so dead, provisionally.
Oslo 2011 shooter: 77 dead (8 by explosive, 69 by shooting).
I was wondering about return fire myself, at least until people started saying the shoot was from 400 yards out (still not read any official word on the actual range of the shooting). At an event like this, it seems likely to have been a gun-free zone where people were walked through metal detectors to get in. 400 yards is quite a ways to return fire with a handgun. The problem would be less about figuring out where the shooter was (though this is always an issue in a large crowd of panicked people, or when under fire), and more about having a weapon to hand that can effectively return fire at that range.
IIRC, I’ve read plenty of guys talk about hitting man-sized targets out to 300m with M4s or clones and no magnification (red dots, ACOGs (can’t remember if ACOGs have magnification, though), iron sights too). Combat included. 400m wouldn’t be out of the question, I’ve heard guys talk about longer distances, and not as if they’re great marksmen, either. I supposed the serious elevation involved is a complicating factor, but at first blush it doesn’t sound like that big of one (return fire helps, even if you’re not hitting the target).
Tracers would make it easier, though.
Generally speaking, mass shootings with long guns are the cause of death of 100 or fewer people per year, in the USA. It’s not even a rounding error, really. It’s down there with bee stings and lightning strikes.
This one is a true head scratcher. He doesn’t appear to be a convert to Islam. He had no political obsessions that have come out yet. He wasn’t broke, wasn’t an incel, and made it 64 years without any criminal behavior. There was no note or manifesto that have come out yet.
I predict this will end up being like Charles Whitman: a tumor pushing on his brain, causing irrational behavior.
One thing is for sure though: in spite of Paddock seemingly having no political affiliation whatsoever, these 59 bodies will be added to the tally of “domestic” terrorism so that various liars can claim, via other accounting tricks such as starting the clock in 2002 and classifying some incidents as workplace violence and so on, that it has a similar higher body count than Islamic terrorism.
I'm not experienced with guns, and even I saw the stupidity there.
Actually, she does have a point, although she probably doesn’t know why. Silencers make it harder to locate the location the shooter is at. That’s one reason why hunters want them (another being to preserve their hearing). None-the-less, I am all for liberalizing the laws that suppress suppressors. I am generally opposed to any gun restrictions.
Apples and oranges. Ranges basically don’t cater to the distances rifle calibers are capable of accurately engaging. For one thing, real estate is expensive. I don’t know enough about .308 ballistics to say if 700m is in the sweet spot, but I know that 700m is absolutely within the reliably accurate range of .308 from a bolt-action rifle. This guy wasn’t using a bolt-action rifle, but my point is that shooting ranges don’t really service the ranges that rifles are capable of. It’s very hard to find ranges that go out to 700m, and that’s (more or less) where long-distance rifle work starts. If you want to practice long-range shooting, you do it on private land, or way out in the boonies.
Well, it depends on where you live; it’s much easier to find long-distance shooting ranges out west. They’re practically non-existent east of the Mississippi.
It isn’t a fact if it’s “alleged”. It’s just alleged. And with no real evidence as far as I can tell. I saw a video where it was claimed that the shooter was at an anti-Trump rally, but the video didn’t support the claim. It was so blurry you can’t even make out faces. Maybe there’s another video that’s clearer. Or maybe the whole claim is BS. It’s possible he was an anti (never)-trumper, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it so far, and I don’t think anyone else has either.
Follow up post about reactions/politicizing the tragedy.
My only criticism of Hillary’s tweets is that she picked such a piddly issue that nobody cares about – “silencers” lol what a joke. It’s a normal, healthy, human reaction to try to use any event that happens to advance your team’s interests. What’s abnormal is cucking out and saying “now is not the time”. This is why they have done so much winning.
Ditto the CBS (((lawyer))). It’s a normal human reaction to be indifferent or even happy about the deaths of the Other — the enemy tribe. The weird thing is cuck universalism. When 47 gay nonWhites were shot at a gay bar, by the very same diverse Muslim that they demanded we admit to our country I certainly didn’t have any sympathy for them.
People don’t seem to have caught on yet that Obama’s speech was bullshit. There is a black and a White America. There is a red and a blue America. There is no longer a “United States of America”.
The Leftists are probably happy that he was a lone crazed white guy. They won't be so happy when they announce the names of the perps the next time a crime like this is committed (emphasis on the plural - the biggest difference between white mass murder and Islamic mass murder is that Muslims never seem to have too much trouble finding other Muslims with a murderous hate for white Westerners).
Also the 70s-80s type of serial killer depended on a lot of cultural habits in those days that have disappeared, such as hitchhiking and the general tendency to accept rides from strangers, plus a much higher level of trust generally. And perhaps the biggest effect – cameras are everywhere now.
But don’t take my word for it; run searches of AR15.com for talk of range, check out what people think of as short, medium, and long range. Ballpark for a 5.56 AR15: short range is up to 100 or 200 meters, medium range is between 100 or 200 and 300 or 400m maybe, and long range starts after that (IIRC, there are guys who, speaking from combat experience, reliably engage man-sized targets with M4s or clones out to 700 or 800m). Ballpark; it’s a subjective topic to begin with, and I’m going by my deteriorating memory of stuff I read a few years ago. So YMMV (I’m sure there are plenty of people with more experience and knowledge than I, who would object to my numbers).
.308 ranges are substantially longer.
Trying to do some research on the shooters bank robber father, I came across an old article that actually specifies that after escaping prisons (how common is this, btw?) he robbed a San Francisco bank in 1969. Now that strikes me as an interesting time and place to rob a bank, but I can’t find any contemporary references.
Trying to make sense of something that’s apparently senseless makes one just go around in circles. The ISIS claim is the only one that has any coherent trail. Misfit, although rich, has conversion experience and renounces this evil world, setting out to do away with all the evil people in it. Has some similarities to the gay club mass-shooting last year. This was not a case of someone simply snapping and going on a rampage but was planned and carried out over a period of time with attention to all the steps needed such as acquiring the automatic firing capability to getting the right hotel room, sneaking it all in, using tripods, etc. It’s like a planned terrorist attack by a one-way jihadi.
Why have there been so many mass killings in recent years?
In a word – massive overprescription of SSRI-type (Prozac-type) antidepressants – plus several other psychoactive drugs of similar chemical structure (ie derived from antihistamines).
The proximate cause is probably sometimes a type of akathisia – internal turmoil. This has been well known as a side effect of this group of drugs for some 60 years – but the usage of these akathisia-prone drugs has increased more than 100-fold in recent decades (still rising). Other possibilities are dissociated states and dysphoria (feeling very bad)
https://davidhealy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/1991-Creaney-Healy-Prozac-Suicide.pdf
https://rxisk.org/rxisk-asks-are-prescription-drugs-to-blame-for-school-shootings
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/07/25/antidepressants-linked-murders-murderous-thoughts
The way to think of it is that in many of these cases – the prescription drug was necessary but not sufficient – or, if they hadn’t been taking the drug, they wouldn’t have done the shooting/ killing.
The same applies to the spate of recent violent suicides out-of-the-blue, especially hanging, esepcially hanging from a kneeling position:
https://davidhealy.org/left-hanging-suicide-in-bridgend
I’ve been wondering about the girlfriend. From the photos of her I’ve seen, she looks mixed black and white. But the news stories say she’s Asian.
Her maiden name is reported as being 'Natividad', which obviously points away from any Muslim background.
It's certainly interesting that Paddock wired $100K to an account in the Philippines, but our favorite razor suggests he was simply giving his girlfriend some money to live on when he knew he'd be dead soon.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
Returning fire with WHAT? Pistols and patrol rifles? Shooting at least 300 feet vertical to begin with? Unless someone has a scoped bolt action with the right angle to set it up and can pound out the ballistics of the shot you’re pretty safe.
In 30k people in the US, someone will be armed. Who knows with what. It only takes one bullet to seriously mess up your day, even a fluked shot with iron sights.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
I had to strain and read comments to find it but it is there… right where you’d think in the rightmost smashed window. Of course it is not easy to see. The camera operator has the virtue of being there with full resolution of natural vision and still doesn’t know where to point the camera directly.
Now tell me you’d not know where the tracers are coming from.
Some of the newer over-the-counter antihistamines like Zyrtec can cause anger. I’ve never really heard this discussed, except on some online forums.
We must notify the FBI immediately of this line of investigation.
And you’ll get the straight truth from our current FBI? It’s all political now.
C’mon Jeff Sessions and the FBI are under Congressional subpoena and it’s been a month past deadline.
We need facts which we’ll never know now. Too many “security” contracts and pet projects will be the order of the day.
#SWAMPmaga
Oslo 2011 shooter: 77 dead (8 by explosive, 69 by shooting).I was wondering about return fire myself, at least until people started saying the shoot was from 400 yards out (still not read any official word on the actual range of the shooting). At an event like this, it seems likely to have been a gun-free zone where people were walked through metal detectors to get in. 400 yards is quite a ways to return fire with a handgun. The problem would be less about figuring out where the shooter was (though this is always an issue in a large crowd of panicked people, or when under fire), and more about having a weapon to hand that can effectively return fire at that range.IIRC, I've read plenty of guys talk about hitting man-sized targets out to 300m with M4s or clones and no magnification (red dots, ACOGs (can't remember if ACOGs have magnification, though), iron sights too). Combat included. 400m wouldn't be out of the question, I've heard guys talk about longer distances, and not as if they're great marksmen, either. I supposed the serious elevation involved is a complicating factor, but at first blush it doesn't sound like that big of one (return fire helps, even if you're not hitting the target).Tracers would make it easier, though.Generally speaking, mass shootings with long guns are the cause of death of 100 or fewer people per year, in the USA. It's not even a rounding error, really. It's down there with bee stings and lightning strikes.
It’s not a team of shooters unless there is audio recordings of them shooting simultaneously.
Here’s an interesting piece:
The M4 Carbine at 750 Yards and Beyond: Three Simple Things to Know
Knowledge of these topics used to be much less widespread, but with the internet, any red-blooded 15 year old can read about them.
(Again, .308 has substantially longer range than 5.56. Does a lot more damage, too.)
Yeah, I hadn’t even thought about the actual video/audio of the shooting itself. Duh.
On the legislative front, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see bump-fire devices go down for the count over this, assuming the shooter did in fact use one.
Similarly, Paul Ryan announced that the legislative action to make suppressors easier to obtain (I guess by removing them from Title I NFA) is now on hold because, um, well, whatever. . .
In related news, the San Francisco Chronicle has a typical passive-voice "raises new questions" article: "In the wake of Sunday's mass slaughter. . . many Nevadans are searching their souls." It went on with the usual visits to gun shops, but didn't identify one person who was "searching his soul" about tightening gun laws in the state. Typical editorializing as news.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/Las-Vegas-massacre-reverberates-in-gun-loving-12250848.php?cmpid=gsa-sfgate-result
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
The Las Vegas carnage is strikingly similar to the case of Charles (Chuck) Whitman and the Texas Bell Tower killings. I’m guessing, if an autopsy of this man’s brain is possible, there will be evidence of relatively recent organic changes, e.g., tumor or stroke, that might have caused his behavior.
Paddock obviously will be autopsied, but I've seen nothing about when (and if) the results will be publicized.
In 30k people in the US, someone will be armed. Who knows with what. It only takes one bullet to seriously mess up your day, even a fluked shot with iron sights.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
I had to strain and read comments to find it but it is there... right where you'd think in the rightmost smashed window. Of course it is not easy to see. The camera operator has the virtue of being there with full resolution of natural vision and still doesn't know where to point the camera directly.
https://youtu.be/iuv4cLjQqNE
Now tell me you'd not know where the tracers are coming from.
https://youtu.be/dq4xnRGZMOI
You can’t return sniper fire with a pistol.
You can buy tracer rounds. With the amount of thought and preparation that went into this, if Paddock thought tracers would have added value he would have used them.
None of this seems to apply in the case of Paddock.
1. He never did anything that would get him committed. He never had so much as a traffic ticket. Everyone who knew him said that he seemed within the normal range.
2. No allegations of drug use that we know of. He seemed to be too high functioning over too long a period to be a serious drug user.
3. Usually mass killers like Paddock intend to (and do) kill themselves at the end of their spree so they are not concerned about capital punishment.
4. This is begging the question – WHY is there less aversion now?
I think the decline in (non-Islamic) religion has a lot to do with it – believing that you are going to spend eternity in Hell for your sins is a strong deterrent.
What’s the deal with the Filipino(?) girlfriend anyway? (Is she Filipino? Las Vegas is a Filipino town.)
A small percentage of Filipinos are Muslims.
This seems highly unlikely, but maybe it’s worth checking out.
Unless she's one of those "wring all the money out and dump him" women, I don't really see her (given the information I have so far) being more than a secondary cause or accomplice in the shooting.In any case, I still find it hard to believe the narrative on this event. If only there was some CCTV footage of the hallway outside the room...
http://a57.foxnews.com/images.foxnews.com/content/fox-news/us/2017/10/03/marilou-danley-what-know-about-las-vegas-shooting-assailants-companion/_jcr_content/article-text/article-par-7/related_image/image.img.jpg/612/344/1507041469085.jpg?ve=1&tl=1
I would say almost zero chance of her being a radical muslim. This is not how devout Muslim women dress nor a job that they take.
But who knows what she got into as an adult?
I found it bizarre that yet again an obvious potential accessory to a horrific crime was given an almost immediate 'all clear' public exoneration before essentially anything was known about the circumstances of the crime. What's up with this?
I predict this will end up being like Charles Whitman: a tumor pushing on his brain, causing irrational behavior.
One thing is for sure though: in spite of Paddock seemingly having no political affiliation whatsoever, these 59 bodies will be added to the tally of "domestic" terrorism so that various liars can claim, via other accounting tricks such as starting the clock in 2002 and classifying some incidents as workplace violence and so on, that it has a similar higher body count than Islamic terrorism.
too early to know…he was not on social media…degenerate gamblers often go broke…could have become depressed and started taking antidepressants which does cause some to go insane…maybe a recently diagnosed illness caused him to take antidepressants because he had just 6 months to live or it cold be a brain tumor triggered it.
Could be.
firing full auto...
big NATO rounds .308/7.62...
(hands only no tripod)...
on target...
from the 32nd floor...
DOWN to ground level...
at distance...
!!!
This is a very difficult task. Three-shot bursts are the military norm because full auto is 90% off target even at short distance. Usually off target over the target.
Think about the recording of the shots (he's holding the trigger down and going through 50 round magazines) and think how many full auto rounds would simply sail over the concert area.
He would've had to train from a perch several hundred feet above ground to simulate his 32nd floor battlefield conditions. On a cliff out in the desert.
I CALL BULLSHIT.
I read a comment on another blog last night written by someone who clearly had some expertise about audio devices suggesting the shooter(s) must have been much closer than the hotel room because the gunfire would not have been audible from that distance on all those videos over the sound of the concert.
Can anyone clarify this?
One thing I’d note, having watched several videos of the event yesterday: the crowd seem to react remarkably well, given the circumstances. I initially thought that many of the deaths and injuries would be the result of the stampede to escape. From what I saw probably not many of the deaths were and most of the injuries from the rush to evacuate were probably minor.
One of the things that has not been highlighted in the press reports is that the police did not break into the room until maybe a half an hour or more after the shooting had stopped (because the shooter had killed himself at that point). The police did essentially nothing that saved lives.
good point…she may have radicalized him , or given him ideas. Isis claimed Paddock was responding to its leader’s call for intensified attacks against Western countries..If she was Muslim he may have been influenced by her.
Putting aside that there is zero credible evidence to connect Paddock with Antifa at this point, there is nothing in Antifa ideology or past actions that calls for mass killing. I am no Antifa fan but it is stupid when the left tries to blame mass killing on “the right” and it is equally stupid the other way around. Invariably these early claims are factually wrong and even if it turns out that the killer identified with some ideology it is filtered thru a very sick mind into a highly twisted and distorted funhouse mirror version of that ideology that does not create a true picture of the ideology itself.
Also have mass killings really increased?
Also have mass killings really increased?
Yes.
Hillary is either starting to get senile, or was never very bright to begin with, or both. One of her tweets yesterday was pure Orwell, something like “we must put aside politics and take on the NRA and enact gun control.” Hillaryous.
Leftists get everything they know about guns from TV and film. This is really bad, because TV and film portrayals of firearms are egregiously incorrect, in many ways. E.g., a gun goes off inside a car with the windows closed; in real life, everyone inside is now deaf for a while, probably with long-term hearing loss. They’re certainly in quite a bit of pain, at least right afterward. In movie life, the two hitmen discuss how awful it is that Marvin just got accidentally shot in the face, with no thought given to the noise. Guns are stupendously loud. Firing them outdoors without ear protection results in immediate tinnitus, and probable long-term hearing loss. Sound suppressors are simply a safety issue, and a way to prevent noise pollution. But in the minds of leftist TV/film learners, they’re solely the domain of assassins.
I just spent an intense weekend of training on the range (www.tdsatulsa.com) a couple of weekends ago. On one of the drills I forgot to put my "ears" back on after the instructor finished talking. We were only shooting 9mm semi-automatic pistols and it was in open outdoors. It was loud!
The last time I had a spooky premonition was in Aug 2001. I was sitting in a coffee shop wondering to myself how construction workers would dismantle the World Trade Center towers when the time came to replace them.
Technically it is machine gun fire. If you knew where the bullets were coming from, you had a concrete barrier between you and the shooter that you could duck behind, you could get off maybe 5 seconds of shots at the source if from a tracer before he may have noticed and returned fire. The chance is non-zero you’d score a hit, even with a pistol. A lot higher if some cop or redneck had an AR in the trunk of a car.
You can buy tracer rounds. With the amount of thought and preparation that went into this, if Paddock thought tracers would have added value he would have used them.
Most likely though, guns were banned from this event. Most concerts I’ve been to don’t allow weapons even if you have a carry permit (I think Nevada’s laws are silent on point but I know they ban carrying if you drink past 0.10 BAC).
It’s unlikely, but there is a Muslim insurgency in the south of the Philippines that causes problems now and then.
I predict this will end up being like Charles Whitman: a tumor pushing on his brain, causing irrational behavior.
One thing is for sure though: in spite of Paddock seemingly having no political affiliation whatsoever, these 59 bodies will be added to the tally of "domestic" terrorism so that various liars can claim, via other accounting tricks such as starting the clock in 2002 and classifying some incidents as workplace violence and so on, that it has a similar higher body count than Islamic terrorism.
His girlfriend had a son named Ali. This suggests that she is moslem. It is possible than Paddock converted to islam or was sympathetic to Islam.
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
Is Paddock’s girlfriend from the Moro region of the Philippines?
“My working hypothesis is that this was a team of shooters, possibly even firing from a different room, who then killed this guy, making it look like suicide and then their getaway. Police find lone male gunman and don’t cordon off the area to see if anyone is trying to get away. ”
This is the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. A commentator on “Lion of the Blogosphere” raised this possibility too. Especially as ISIS keeps insisting they did it.
Other than the serious obstacle of the suspected killer not being a nut, the “lone nut” hypothesis runs into the problems of the massive arsenal and the two hotel rooms.
Its funny seeing the other commentators engaging in all sorts of speculation of what made the suspect snap when there is really a strong prima facie case that he was the first victim/ patsy of whoever did it.
She looks like a Filipina to me, and it is rather likely that she is one of those typical middle-class ones (likely a Tagalog with some foreign blood) who managed to snag a rich American by chance.
I don’t really get it, either. She doesn’t look like the type who’d end up in some balik-Islam ([return to] Islam) movement. I find it suspicious that she winds up in Tokyo after the shooting – so that lends credence to this being planned out by the perpetrator.
Unless she’s one of those “wring all the money out and dump him” women, I don’t really see her (given the information I have so far) being more than a secondary cause or accomplice in the shooting.
In any case, I still find it hard to believe the narrative on this event. If only there was some CCTV footage of the hallway outside the room…
It sounds like the kind of mistaken memory a traumatized person might have, but you never know....
I saw a news report showing scene filmed from the crowd. I could heard machine gun fire. The venue is at least a quarter of a mile away and 32 floors lower. Can you hear gunfire that far away? They found tripods in the room. That suggests machine guns which you cannot get at any gun store.
Can anyone clarify this?
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
Correct. Plus, evil is kinda catching. But who minds received wisdom about human nature nowadays?
Here is the Latin original as provided by S Pius V:
Da quaesumus Domine populo tuo diabolica vitare contagia, et te solum Deum pura mente sectari.
The following translation kept the idea of diabolical Evil as a contagion or infection which we catch and pass on. There are hundreds of sermons in it: “Lord we beseech thee grant thy people grace to avoid the infections of the Devil and with pure heart and mind to follow thee the only God.”
This is a point I’ve made before, Buzz, and very well said. Once TV news networks had to fill 24 hours with video of some sort, it became infotainment (big Dave Letterman word). Various stories, some that are big like this and some that would never have been on a 30 min. network broadcast back in the day, just because of priorities, are dragged out for weeks. I avoid all of it – all I read about it is from my websites of interest.
You take the child abduction business. All of the prison-like grade-school atmosphere is due to parents’ freaky fears of something that may happen a few times a year, in a country with 330 million people. There is no perspective! When a story about some kid being missing goes on for weeks, the news junkies or just the families that tend to leave the TV on all the time, all day long, have this burned in their brains. It would have never made Walter Cronkite, as there’d have been no time for it.
I get the impression that Enemedia-Pravda's "reports" that the mass-murdered had tripod-mounted weapons are incorrect, as it's more likely that some of his weapons were bipod mounted. A tripod is a fairly heavy, ungainly assembly that's difficult to collapse or to disassemble into components small enough to conceal those components in a suitcase, or even in a duffel bag, while folded bipods are easy to conceal and carry in a suitcase, or even inside a collapsed large golfer's umbrella. Also, tripods are for heavy machine guns which are crew-served, belt-fed weapons, and it would be difficult to stand or stabilize a tripod atop typical hotel room furniture tables, but it would be easy to hold a bipod steady on a window sill. From the videos I've watched of the hideous slaughter, I did not detect prolonged bursts from a belt-fed weapon and heard only bursts long enough to be consistent with shoulder weapons fed most likely by drum magazines.
The reporters got it wrong – he used a bipod instead of a tripod (see below) – most reporters could not tell a rifle from a shotgun because in their culture weapons are icky, so bipod, tripod, shmipod, whatever – it’s all the same to them. But this trivial detail does not really change anything. He had no need to achieve accuracy – he was aiming into a dense crowd and not trying to hit anyone in particular so as long as his shots hit somewhere in that vast field they were going to hit someone.
The most recent reports I have seen is that the gunman had semi-autos with “bump fire” stocks as I suspected yesterday. He appears to have had (at least one) AR-15 with a bipod and a 100 round magazine. Watch the video that goes with the link below and you will clearly see some of his setups. In addition to the one with the bipod the other has a handle at the front of the barrel that can be used to help keep the barrel down when firing auto.
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/03/las-vegas-shooting-gunman-used-bump-stock-device-to-speed-fire/
I don’t go in for second-guessing cops, at least not relative to many, but this sounds really bad. IF the nut was still hitting people the whole time, I mean (for all I know, the cops in the hotel knew the streets were clear, and the nut wasn’t hitting anyone anymore). Cops sitting in the hall while the nut just keeps gunning people down is fucked up. Fuck that, blow the hinges off, pour into the room in body armor, and fill the SOB with lead. You know there were cops there who’d do it (knowing some of them would probably die), and it was the brass/manual holding them back.
The Leftists are probably happy that he was a lone crazed white guy. They won't be so happy when they announce the names of the perps the next time a crime like this is committed (emphasis on the plural - the biggest difference between white mass murder and Islamic mass murder is that Muslims never seem to have too much trouble finding other Muslims with a murderous hate for white Westerners).
Great point. Apprehension probability is higher now and with probability chances are worse for 1 murder but a lot worse as a hobby career.
This is the simplest explanation that fits the evidence. A commentator on "Lion of the Blogosphere" raised this possibility too. Especially as ISIS keeps insisting they did it.
Other than the serious obstacle of the suspected killer not being a nut, the "lone nut" hypothesis runs into the problems of the massive arsenal and the two hotel rooms.
Its funny seeing the other commentators engaging in all sorts of speculation of what made the suspect snap when there is really a strong prima facie case that he was the first victim/ patsy of whoever did it.
Not only did they keep him prisoner in that room (actually a room plus an adjoining suite) for days as he came and went to his car 10 times with suitcases but they also planted all those guns in his house and they create false records of him buying various guns. And they wore invisibility cloaks so that no one would see them on the security cameras that are all over the place in casinos.
Correction, *toss in a dozen flash-bangs* then pour into the room. Behind those big shields SWAT and bomb squads use.
With normal rifle rounds, all a suppressor does is lessen the noise from the detonation of the round. There’s still a loud crack as the bullet breaks the sound barrier. Subsonic rounds don’t break the sound barrier, but they’re substantially less powerful and effective than standard rounds. So while cankles may have had a point on one hand, it’s taken away on the other.
He was shooting from a small hole in a huge flat sided building that would have reflected the sound in that direction. On the tapes you never hear more than 1 gun going off at a time.
Yeah something about that timeline just doesn’t add up. Why weren’t sharpshooters turning his head into a Gallagher watermelon within 15 minutes? There’s something hinky here. Either VPD are insanely incompetent, or there were some *serious* complicating factors that we aren’t hearing about yet.
Can anyone clarify this?
No machine guns, no tripods. Bipod mounted AR-15 with 100 round magazines and bump stock – all readily available. Yes you can hear it that far because everyone did.
Most people reacted by trying to get down which is effective when the shooter is at ground level but from his elevated position being spread eagled on the ground probably make you a bigger target. The crowd should have gone for cover and/or battered down some of the fences so they could get out of the area.
One of the things that has not been highlighted in the press reports is that the police did not break into the room until maybe a half an hour or more after the shooting had stopped (because the shooter had killed himself at that point). The police did essentially nothing that saved lives.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4944234/Two-23-rifles-inside-Stephen-Paddock-s-room.htmlThe daily mail article has many pictures of the inside of the hotel room.
SWAT often seem to be kind of useless - essentially just hunkering down and engaging in "force-protection".
Yeah, Steve, I think your “media hype” hypothesis has a lot of legs. I just watched that Clint Eastwood film J. Edgar, and in it Hoover was angry with the media of the 1920s portraying gangsters and criminals positively; when the movie shifts to the 1930s we see James Cagney (who had previously made his name portraying gangsters) on screen portraying a “heroic” G-Man, with a satisfied Hoover smiling in the audience.
The screenplay tries to make a lot of Hoover’s actions solely about self-promotion and attempts to hide his own cowardice/homosexuality, but Eastwood is too good a director–and too rightwing—to buy that nonsense. Hoover definitely put a lot of pressure on Hollywood to stop glamorizing evil, and it worked to stop youngsters from starting down the slippery path of criminality. That, combined with a few high-profile “gets” in the 1930s of famous bad guys (Dillinger, Hauptmann), made the FBI heroes and the gangsters the nonadmirable bad dudes in the public eye.
The Megaphone is a powerful weapon, and what’s more, despite our knowledge that the Megaphone often doesn’t announce what should be announced (e.g. that black immigrant who shot up a white church last week), it still is sensationalizing things that should be tampered down on (e.g. BLM, Charottesville’s march, etc.).
"Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron);"
In other words, it was understood back then that movies (and this was before TV and the internet which are even more mass in nature) were mass media that would be viewed by EVERYONE and not just by sophisticates who can distinguish art from reality and so you had to tread carefully. It's sort of sad that people 80 years ago had a more sophisticated understanding of human nature than our elites do today.
Danley (formerly married to a different white guy) was a “high limit hostess” in casinos, which is how she met Paddock. This is her:
I would say almost zero chance of her being a radical muslim. This is not how devout Muslim women dress nor a job that they take.
Hoping she can step forward and shed some light on why he did this.
Unless she's one of those "wring all the money out and dump him" women, I don't really see her (given the information I have so far) being more than a secondary cause or accomplice in the shooting.In any case, I still find it hard to believe the narrative on this event. If only there was some CCTV footage of the hallway outside the room...
Has there been any confirmation of the story (stories?) from a bystander (bystanders?) about a woman in the crowd toward the start of the concert, supposedly yelling at people that they were all going to die?
It sounds like the kind of mistaken memory a traumatized person might have, but you never know….
The Mass Shooting Problem – Like Organised Terrorism – Is a DRUG PROBLEM
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/10/no_author/the-mass-shooting-problem-like-organised-terrorism-is-a-drug-problem/
I like to blame austerity measures caused by the forever war.
I’ll take Lew Rockwell over your “austerity” crap for any odds you wanna give me.
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.
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… austerity?! WTO!
Are the sounds on the videos the cracks or the bangs (or both) of the bullets?
A rifle round makes two noises.The first is the pressure wave that is released when the charge emerges from the muzzle - this is why blanks still make a noise The second is the sonic boom of the bullet breaking the sound barrier. "Silencers" only work on the 1st noise. And in an urban area there are all sorts of echoes too.
I'm not experienced with guns, and even I saw the stupidity there.
The full tweet was even stupider:
Putting aside that suppressors (there is no such thing as a silencer except in the movies) are useless on automatics because they tend to melt from the heat, the crowd did NOT flee because there was nowhere to flee to – they were locked inside a fenced-in cattle pen with nowhere to go. At first the crowd assumed the sound was firecrackers and they didn’t realize it was gunshots until they saw victims going down. Even in the best circumstances it would have taken many minutes to evacuate a crowd of that size. Even if the guy had phoned in a 10 minute warning in order to be sporting, it wouldn’t have helped.
In other words, Hillary is clueless as usual. The woman is just not that bright.
The screenplay tries to make a lot of Hoover's actions solely about self-promotion and attempts to hide his own cowardice/homosexuality, but Eastwood is too good a director--and too rightwing---to buy that nonsense. Hoover definitely put a lot of pressure on Hollywood to stop glamorizing evil, and it worked to stop youngsters from starting down the slippery path of criminality. That, combined with a few high-profile "gets" in the 1930s of famous bad guys (Dillinger, Hauptmann), made the FBI heroes and the gangsters the nonadmirable bad dudes in the public eye.
The Megaphone is a powerful weapon, and what's more, despite our knowledge that the Megaphone often doesn't announce what should be announced (e.g. that black immigrant who shot up a white church last week), it still is sensationalizing things that should be tampered down on (e.g. BLM, Charottesville's march, etc.).
The Hayes Code is nowadays looked upon as wrong and evil. One of its requirements was that the following depictions should be carefully limited:
“Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron);”
In other words, it was understood back then that movies (and this was before TV and the internet which are even more mass in nature) were mass media that would be viewed by EVERYONE and not just by sophisticates who can distinguish art from reality and so you had to tread carefully. It’s sort of sad that people 80 years ago had a more sophisticated understanding of human nature than our elites do today.
The police insanely incompetent? Say it ain’t so joe! Apparently the shooter did shoot a hotel security guard in the leg through the room door. At that point the police retreated (rule #1 of police work is that you always get to go home at night regardless of how many civilians don’t) to formulate a better plan that wouldn’t involve cops getting shot at. Basically that plan turned out to be to wait a half hour until the shooter killed himself and then bust in.
I think this is similar to the way that classic murder mystery shows like Columbo are starting to seem quaint. The murderers in Columbo are not deranged; they are usually somewhat sympathetic figures acting from recognizably human motives—greed, jealousy, familial oppression, the need to avoid professional embarrassment, et cetera. They carefully crafted their crimes with the full expectation of getting away with them, and the whole point of the show is that they likely would have gotten away with them if it hadn’t been for the hard working, rumpled detective with the crazy eye always asking about “just one more thing.”
The ’60s and ’70s were a golden age for the passionate, methodical murderer. It would have been possible then for an intelligent person to outsmart the cops and cover his tracks enough so as never to be convicted. This represents what we could perhaps call the third stage of possible homicides.
The first stage is the Wild West. In a frontier scenario, men kill each other over cattle and land, and do not fear the consequences because there aren’t any. In fact, they don’t even really think of this as crime; it’s just the way you do business in a lawless territory. This situation prevails until a new sheriff rides into town to bring law and order. The sheriff is cast as the hero and the presence of law and order is deemed progress over barbarism, but there is always a strong undercurrent of lament for the lost freedoms of the open range.
The second stage is the gangster murders of the Great Depression and Prohibition. It is characterized by the presence of powerful crime syndicates which have attained rough parity in terms of arms and legitimacy with the representatives of the official government. The gangs actually control territory and run industries; there is interaction between the mafia bosses and official politicians, and there is even talk of the crime families going legitimate (which entails that they will be accepted into society without much reprisal for their past criminality). In this stage law and order exists but it is a fragile thing, divided unequally among several factions.
In the third stage, the Columbo stage, hegemony is achieved. There is one power and one law for all, but each person still thinks of himself as a Kantian end-in-himself, a free citizen of a republic. Although the law is taken as something transcending individuality, it is still paradoxically thought of as the private possession of each, meaningless outside of the context of a free man and his needs and aspirations. Therefore, when certain persons feel that their situation has become unfair and untenable, it occurs to them to plot murder as a means to restore local justice. The guiding maxim of the age is, “I have a right to be happy.” If you interfere with my happiness, then you are “in the wrong.” Serial killers are pathological manifestations of the same idea.
By the fourth stage, the stage of anarcho-tyranny which is where we’re at today, the whole notion of Kantian citizenship has been largely given up with a shrug. There is an imperial police power, omnipresent but often ham-fisted, and a huge population of rather docile citizens who are legally prevented from being dangerous. The whole idea of citizenship in this era seems to be, “As a citizen, I am contractually obligated to never, ever do anything dangerous, either in attack or in defense.” This hapless citizenry exists side by side with an equally large and growing underclass of non-citizens who have long since dropped any vestiges of higher cultural existence. There is plenty of thuggish violence among them, including many murders, but nobody really cares. Meanwhile, a handful of very malcontented individuals exploit the asymmetry between a feckless population on the one hand, and a preponderance of technical means on the other hand, to commit a steady stream of highly sensational mass murders. Again, this is just a pathological manifestation of the victimology complexes and identity politic which pervade the society at this stage.
The fifth stage, which has not yet transpired but will occur in the lifetimes of many now living, will involve massive amounts of unapologetic mob violence. No political cause, no idea, nothing of higher symbolic value is brought to the fore in these clashes; it is simply the scabrous clawing at one another of overpopulated rats in a fetid cage. These battles will consume our hundreds of millions of useless eaters, putting an end to any concerns over unchecked population growth, but they will leave the country scorched and almost devoid of high culture except in a few isolated pockets. Eventually life will stabilize at a lower level of complexity where notions reminiscent of feudal honor and the need to guard against vagabondage will once again define the forms of permissible violence.
Put enough rounds through an AR and they tend to melt from the heat, too. Well, they become too hot to handle and lose accuracy first (you don’t want a plastic handguard on a weapon in that state), but I digress. Would either melt before 1k rounds though? Maybe that’s why the nut had so many weapons.
It sounds like the kind of mistaken memory a traumatized person might have, but you never know....
There may have been such a person but a stopped clock is right twice a day. I’m sure they will try to find that person (if she exists) but she will turn out to be just a random nutjob unrelated to the shooter.
Two tripods? One for each window? Or he dragged the tripod rig between the windows?
People are not grok-ing that the shooter was 300+ feet off the ground. The concert was not directly adjacent to the building.
It will come out in the next few days just how complex a shoot this was. There was a lot going on in that hotel room during the shoot. Can't wait for the CIA's reenactment animation.
Perhaps he preloaded the weapons and the pauses in the recording are actually him moving to the next tripod rig across the room! Maybe he had six stations set up?
The old man either secretly trained for the job to a pro level... or he didn't do it.
Here are some pics of his guns. Note the bipod on one of them.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-03/first-pictures-emerge-vegas-shooters-weapons
In 30k people in the US, someone will be armed. Who knows with what. It only takes one bullet to seriously mess up your day, even a fluked shot with iron sights.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
I had to strain and read comments to find it but it is there... right where you'd think in the rightmost smashed window. Of course it is not easy to see. The camera operator has the virtue of being there with full resolution of natural vision and still doesn't know where to point the camera directly.
https://youtu.be/iuv4cLjQqNE
Now tell me you'd not know where the tracers are coming from.
https://youtu.be/dq4xnRGZMOI
The point is the tracers are irrelevant. People in Las Vegas are not driving around with high powered scoped bolt action rifles, which is the only weapon you really need to fear in that circumstance at that range.
The original post commentee that a pro would use tracers. In this circumstance, I don't think so. I wouldn't, if I were operating with the same objectives. Murphy's Law would dictate that by firing tracers into a crowd of rednecks, including guys with military experience, someone would return fire and even if you had body armor on, someone would fluke the shot to the head. Likely to happen? Probably not with a pistol. Worth chancing? No, IMO.
Instead, he used flash suppressors. However a lot of that would just be to maintain night vision.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4600926/revealed-las-vegas-gun-maniacs-terrifying-arsenal-of-23-guns-from-military-assault-rifles-to-ak-47s-with-a-bump-stock-device-allowing-him-to-fire-800-rounds-every-minute/
Whups. Fixed:
I guess I should hold off on 2nd-guessing LVPD, then. Waiting outside isn’t that big a deal, if the shooting has stopped. They could’ve just been waiting for the bomb squad to show up.
I’m going to need to know more before I’m satisfied with the narrative. This kind of situation is precisely what police sharpshooters are for. I’d guess most of them live to drop a guy like this nut.
Saw this and thought of you, Steve:
Las Vegas shootings: Is the gunman a terrorist?
See the tweet about halfway down the page from someone called Julian Lengauer attaching a handy skin-colour guide to statistically likely behaviour, from Shooter to Gangster via Militant/Fanatic/Terrorist etc. Doubtless the tweeter in question intended it as the usual fatuous politically correct nonsense, but it occurred to me that it probably has a statistically sound basis.
I don’t like Twitter or I’d just find the tweet and link it, but I’m sure you can find it if you want to.
What do you call a crack or a bang? If bang is the bullet hitting its target this is usually not very loud unless it happens to be something resonant.
A rifle round makes two noises.The first is the pressure wave that is released when the charge emerges from the muzzle – this is why blanks still make a noise The second is the sonic boom of the bullet breaking the sound barrier. “Silencers” only work on the 1st noise. And in an urban area there are all sorts of echoes too.
(I'm not working up any kind of conspiracy theory with this. I'm just curious.)
You clearly know nothing about the legal gun world in the FUSA in the year 2017 or the past.
Have there been? I know it certainly seems that way, but who's actually counting?
I don’t know why he did it – and I think you don’t either.
Current theories:
1. He was a secret member of ISIS.
2. He was being crushed by gambling debts.
3. He had a brain tumor.
4. He was a copy cat killer inspired by …
5. He hated Donald Trump.
6. He hated country music.
7. He succumbed to weltschmerz.
Do you have a link for this?
I’m reminded of two recent Hollywood efforts: The Accountant and Breaking Bad.
Haven’t seen The Accountant, but the pitch was autistic accountant with a rifle taking no prisoners.
Then Breaking Bad with the middle-aged nondescript white guy turning all his unused brainpower into criminal masterminding, with the big finale executed thanks to a machine gun.
The main problem with The Accountant is Ben Afflick. We are all supposed to believe that Autism makes you terrific at math. But this accountant had a father who also trained him for years in martial arts. When he grew up he became a deadly assassin with an accountancy cover.
So plausibility is not a virtue of this film
It’s a fact that it was alleged
http://a57.foxnews.com/images.foxnews.com/content/fox-news/us/2017/10/03/marilou-danley-what-know-about-las-vegas-shooting-assailants-companion/_jcr_content/article-text/article-par-7/related_image/image.img.jpg/612/344/1507041469085.jpg?ve=1&tl=1
I would say almost zero chance of her being a radical muslim. This is not how devout Muslim women dress nor a job that they take.
Yep – she looks and dresses like my Catholic, Vegas-crazy Filipino co-workers – they are as far from Muslims as you can get. They were actually pretty afraid of the Muslims – told me stories about how everybody back home would lock the doors or get out of town once the Muslims started shaving their heads (apparently the precursor to rampage).
Hoping she can step forward and shed some light on why he did this.
Really difficult to keep the barrel down. And this old dude was not in good physical shape.
The shooter scored high accuracy from great distance in low light conditions. Judging by the headline casualty numbers at least 300 rounds hit a human target. I ballpark that number with multiple wound victims in mind. Some of the casualties were trampled etc and not shot.
There are good clear recordings of the rifle. Bursts and then reload silent pauses. His actual on target percentage will be figured out exactly and it will be high considering.
He might have trained for weeks or months for the attack. Or maybe he didn't fire a shot at the concert because his actual role was only to be the dead body in the hotel room.
Is it established that the rounds were .308? The poster seems to assume that he was shooting a M-14 – a weapon that was notorious for being difficult to control free hand on full auto. But NickG thinks he probably was shooting an AK-47 or AR-15 type rifle. Remember the AR-15 assault rifle replaced the M-14 for just this reason.
If NickG is right and no one knows for sure at this point, then this is a pointless discussion.
There is this clip of a man, who looks a heck of a lot like the official photo of Stephen Paddock, being greeted at an anti-Trump rally in Nevada with “Hi Steve!”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=16&v=Pbsa1CiO5Ls
The blonde woman with him at the rally apparently looks a lot like his sister-in-law.
Nor was that video made to be intelligible, as far as I can tell, cutting quickly between pictures, so you couldn't get a good look at the guy. Moreover, it makes the argument that: 1.) the guy in the video is wearing a pink NASA shirt, 2.) a guy named Steven Paddock once worked at NASA Goddard, ergo this guy is that guy. It's a croc. The NASA guy is "Steven" with a "v", not with a "ph". Nor would an accountant/auditor be named by the NASA director to work on a Mars mission study.
The people who make videos like that are credulous fools.
In other countries they just run over people with trucks.
Paddock’s father was a serial bank robber who was on the FBI’s most wanted list. If the father had been executed after his first felony, the sociopathic genes might never have been passed on to an offspring. Good argument for capital punishment. Getting rid of lousy gene lines.
It’s very like the son was an arrogant jerk whose relationship was breaking up, and who wanted to become as notorious as dear old dad.
Haven't seen The Accountant, but the pitch was autistic accountant with a rifle taking no prisoners.
Then Breaking Bad with the middle-aged nondescript white guy turning all his unused brainpower into criminal masterminding, with the big finale executed thanks to a machine gun.
I’ve seen The Accountant. It got to cable quickly – not an endorsement of movie quality.
The main problem with The Accountant is Ben Afflick. We are all supposed to believe that Autism makes you terrific at math. But this accountant had a father who also trained him for years in martial arts. When he grew up he became a deadly assassin with an accountancy cover.
So plausibility is not a virtue of this film
I'm not looking forward to that form of cultural enrichment.
Leftists get everything they know about guns from TV and film. This is really bad, because TV and film portrayals of firearms are egregiously incorrect, in many ways. E.g., a gun goes off inside a car with the windows closed; in real life, everyone inside is now deaf for a while, probably with long-term hearing loss. They're certainly in quite a bit of pain, at least right afterward. In movie life, the two hitmen discuss how awful it is that Marvin just got accidentally shot in the face, with no thought given to the noise. Guns are stupendously loud. Firing them outdoors without ear protection results in immediate tinnitus, and probable long-term hearing loss. Sound suppressors are simply a safety issue, and a way to prevent noise pollution. But in the minds of leftist TV/film learners, they're solely the domain of assassins.
Yep, and the most Hillaryous thing is that she still believes anybody gives a damn about what she thinks. Even the Ds wish she would STFU and go away.
OK, I’m trying to see how what the shooter did would be a difficult thing to do. According to one article I read, Paddock was a quarter mile from his target — so 440 yards. He was on the 36th floor. How much is a floor in that hotel? Let’s say 5 yards. That’s 180 yards up in the air. So, Pythagoras says that he was 480 yards from his target (unless the article I read already did this correction: I can’t tell). How wide was his target? Screwing around with google maps, I don’t see how it could have been much less than 60 yards wide. So, let’s figure out how big the angle described by his target was. Half the angle is going to be described by a triangle with 30 as the opposite side, 480 as the adjacent side and sqrt(30^2+480^2)=481 as the hypotenuse. So, the sine of the half-angle is opposite/hypotenuse = 30/481 = 0.062. The angle whose sine is 0.062 is 3.57 degrees. So, his target was seven degrees wide. That’s big.
Maybe it’s not clear how wide that is. A human head (9 inches wide) is seven degrees wide at 72 inches (4.5*481/30) range — two yards. Could you hit a stationary human head with a .308 rifle at two yards? At least, say, 50% of the time? I’m not up to much, riflery-wise, but I think I could handle that.
I guess we should account for drop. A ballistics table I googled up says that a .308 drops 42 inches in 450 yards. So, the drop will make his first shots (before he starts to correct for it) drop short of the target he aims at by something like 42 *(440/180) = 102 inches. That’s three yards. Nothing, given how big his target is. Wind could mess him up, too, but unless a tornado was going by, it’s going to mess him up by feet, not tens of yards.
Maybe I’ve screwed up these calculations by a order of magnitude somewhere?
Don’t forget accountant.
I haven't heard what calibres the shooter used, though I suspect the bulk of it was not battle rifle cartridges, such as the .308 - 7.62x51 and more likely to have been from AR and AK type platforms - 5.56x45 and 7.62x39 respectively, these generate about half the energy of a .308. We have yet to have a total of the number of rounds fired - it's going to be in the tens of 10os if not over 1,000. I heard some of the video and he was dumping whole magazines in one go, this is not the signature of a highly trained shooter. But then he was dumping them, at least until the crowd scattered, into a tightly packed throng of thousands of people.
So no big skill set here. It's not technically difficult to hit many folks pouring fire into a crowd of thousands from the 32nd floor. This gives a range of only around 100 metres. Also, in this scenario - the angle of fire down onto paving, would have resulted in amplified casualties because of ricochet injuries. Rounds and jagged bullet jackets would be coming off the paving and staying relatively flat - close to the ground - ricochets tend to stick fairly close to the surface they come off, they can cause very nasty injuries.
It was about 2 hours from the start of the shooting until the SWAT team burst into his room. How long the shooting actually went on for, I haven't heard. If he used precision fire I would have expected more dead, given there are no reports of rifle fire having been returned from the ground.
Yes. This is the sort of analysis we need. 100M hypotenuse, automatic ARs on bipods. Fish in a barrel. So was John F. Kennedy.
Upper stock separates from lower stock, 7 – 8 pounds unloaded … what, three suitcases to get everything in? Career gambler with a knack for real estate rolls into the hotel and sets up shop. Nothing to draw much attention so far. And apparently retrofitting or even acquiring full auto is fairly easy.
San Bernardino: two midwit Pakistanis earn enough disposable income to jet over to Islamabad to get sermonized and arm up like a Marine Corps fire team.
I’d like to know what triggered these individuals and how they acquired such explosive undercurrents but apparently it doesn’t take much. And in the old days if you went berserker mode all you had was a sword or muzzleloader. Technology enables the super-berserker. Our tech is so good and idiot-proof, any schlep can be a berserker. Retired accountants can be berserkers. I’d love for there to be an elaborate conspiracy, but Occam’s Razor seems to have whittled it down.
I think Steve is on to something here. Watching that interview with his brother, these are not people who spend a lot of time thinking about ontological issues.
"Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron);"
In other words, it was understood back then that movies (and this was before TV and the internet which are even more mass in nature) were mass media that would be viewed by EVERYONE and not just by sophisticates who can distinguish art from reality and so you had to tread carefully. It's sort of sad that people 80 years ago had a more sophisticated understanding of human nature than our elites do today.
Nobless oblige had a meaning then that is lost today on ((certain people)) in Hollywood.
“Killed himself when the police tried to arrest him” is the new “died while trying to escape” or “committed suicide in his jail cell.”
There is law in the courts and there is street justice.
One of the things that has not been highlighted in the press reports is that the police did not break into the room until maybe a half an hour or more after the shooting had stopped (because the shooter had killed himself at that point). The police did essentially nothing that saved lives.
We know the shooting started at 10:08 and the police breached his room around 11:10….when did the shooting stop ? It does appear the police did little…a security guard was shot when he made his presence known to the shooter around 10:30…The police were on his his floor at 10:30 and just waited for over 30 minutes before trying to enter his room…seems strange…was the shooter still shooting people after 10:30 ? What were the police doing from 10:30 until 11:00 ? just waiting for him to stop shooting ?
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
Great Stuff. The first thing I would add is that Cheers was celebrating something which was palpably fading away at the time it was made. That show was almost nostalgia even in the 80s.
This promotion of atomization in the US goes much further back than the 1960s, though. Read _Slaughter of Cities_.
Lots of urban neighborhoods had been lost by the 80s, but there were still lots of white working/middle class areas where Regular Joes could have a beer with their buddies after work. Suburbanization was cutting people off from each other, but it was still a very social time. The urban pub culture wasn't what it was back in the 50s and early 60s, but it was still pretty active.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll check it out.
A rifle round makes two noises.The first is the pressure wave that is released when the charge emerges from the muzzle - this is why blanks still make a noise The second is the sonic boom of the bullet breaking the sound barrier. "Silencers" only work on the 1st noise. And in an urban area there are all sorts of echoes too.
Thanks. Could someone hear the pressure wave from as far away as the concert-goers were from the shooter (under the conditions when and where this occurred)? Or are the gun-shot sounds on the videos just the sonic booms?
(I’m not working up any kind of conspiracy theory with this. I’m just curious.)
The '60s and '70s were a golden age for the passionate, methodical murderer. It would have been possible then for an intelligent person to outsmart the cops and cover his tracks enough so as never to be convicted. This represents what we could perhaps call the third stage of possible homicides.
The first stage is the Wild West. In a frontier scenario, men kill each other over cattle and land, and do not fear the consequences because there aren't any. In fact, they don't even really think of this as crime; it's just the way you do business in a lawless territory. This situation prevails until a new sheriff rides into town to bring law and order. The sheriff is cast as the hero and the presence of law and order is deemed progress over barbarism, but there is always a strong undercurrent of lament for the lost freedoms of the open range.
The second stage is the gangster murders of the Great Depression and Prohibition. It is characterized by the presence of powerful crime syndicates which have attained rough parity in terms of arms and legitimacy with the representatives of the official government. The gangs actually control territory and run industries; there is interaction between the mafia bosses and official politicians, and there is even talk of the crime families going legitimate (which entails that they will be accepted into society without much reprisal for their past criminality). In this stage law and order exists but it is a fragile thing, divided unequally among several factions.
In the third stage, the Columbo stage, hegemony is achieved. There is one power and one law for all, but each person still thinks of himself as a Kantian end-in-himself, a free citizen of a republic. Although the law is taken as something transcending individuality, it is still paradoxically thought of as the private possession of each, meaningless outside of the context of a free man and his needs and aspirations. Therefore, when certain persons feel that their situation has become unfair and untenable, it occurs to them to plot murder as a means to restore local justice. The guiding maxim of the age is, "I have a right to be happy." If you interfere with my happiness, then you are "in the wrong." Serial killers are pathological manifestations of the same idea.
By the fourth stage, the stage of anarcho-tyranny which is where we're at today, the whole notion of Kantian citizenship has been largely given up with a shrug. There is an imperial police power, omnipresent but often ham-fisted, and a huge population of rather docile citizens who are legally prevented from being dangerous. The whole idea of citizenship in this era seems to be, "As a citizen, I am contractually obligated to never, ever do anything dangerous, either in attack or in defense." This hapless citizenry exists side by side with an equally large and growing underclass of non-citizens who have long since dropped any vestiges of higher cultural existence. There is plenty of thuggish violence among them, including many murders, but nobody really cares. Meanwhile, a handful of very malcontented individuals exploit the asymmetry between a feckless population on the one hand, and a preponderance of technical means on the other hand, to commit a steady stream of highly sensational mass murders. Again, this is just a pathological manifestation of the victimology complexes and identity politic which pervade the society at this stage.
The fifth stage, which has not yet transpired but will occur in the lifetimes of many now living, will involve massive amounts of unapologetic mob violence. No political cause, no idea, nothing of higher symbolic value is brought to the fore in these clashes; it is simply the scabrous clawing at one another of overpopulated rats in a fetid cage. These battles will consume our hundreds of millions of useless eaters, putting an end to any concerns over unchecked population growth, but they will leave the country scorched and almost devoid of high culture except in a few isolated pockets. Eventually life will stabilize at a lower level of complexity where notions reminiscent of feudal honor and the need to guard against vagabondage will once again define the forms of permissible violence.
That was a fun read. Kind of a just so story, though.
60/30k is only 1 in 500 people. 50 is a lot of people for a mass murder in 2017 but it's low compared with the potential. I would think a 64 year old with a clue would be able to pull something like this off.
There are some unexplained things. For example:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/embed/video/1547089.html
It's a pretty rare thing to have random people say to you that everyone's going to die tonight. So when it is said, and then it happens, it seems more than coincidence.
Sure, but 1-(1-rare)^30000 might not be a small number at all.
I haven't heard what calibres the shooter used, though I suspect the bulk of it was not battle rifle cartridges, such as the .308 - 7.62x51 and more likely to have been from AR and AK type platforms - 5.56x45 and 7.62x39 respectively, these generate about half the energy of a .308. We have yet to have a total of the number of rounds fired - it's going to be in the tens of 10os if not over 1,000. I heard some of the video and he was dumping whole magazines in one go, this is not the signature of a highly trained shooter. But then he was dumping them, at least until the crowd scattered, into a tightly packed throng of thousands of people.
So no big skill set here. It's not technically difficult to hit many folks pouring fire into a crowd of thousands from the 32nd floor. This gives a range of only around 100 metres. Also, in this scenario - the angle of fire down onto paving, would have resulted in amplified casualties because of ricochet injuries. Rounds and jagged bullet jackets would be coming off the paving and staying relatively flat - close to the ground - ricochets tend to stick fairly close to the surface they come off, they can cause very nasty injuries.
It was about 2 hours from the start of the shooting until the SWAT team burst into his room. How long the shooting actually went on for, I haven't heard. If he used precision fire I would have expected more dead, given there are no reports of rifle fire having been returned from the ground.
Actually, it’s a 300 meter hypotenuse.
Still within the effective range from 32-stories up with a bipod and just firing into a crowd.
I think this guy was an Anti FA nut, some one spotted him in at one of the protests when Trump visited Reno, after Trump visited Phoenix. He was wearing a pink NASA shirt and one of those pink vagina hats.
This is why demographic change is so important
People of Color are more religious, do not like guns, believe in a strong community, are more accepting, use less drugs, don't like country music, like children, etc....
Oh Tinys….all this pimpin o da bnack communipy by a little gay white boy…..you’n be makin us look’n bad.
Now why’ns don’t you go back to dat mensroom at da public park and make an afternoon of it?
- Leonard Pitts
https://twitter.com/mikeenochsback/status/915240750501302273
Silents are no better. "Greatest" do not deserve the moniker. Hart of 1965 Immigration act was of that generation. Tom Brokaw invented the term apparently. Figures.
Surely if he did this for anti-white reasons he would have put much more effort into letting his motivations be known? The Korean Virginia Tech killer whose name I can never be bothered to remember, for example, left behind plenty of video footage which he sent to the media where he ranted about the shallow materialism of his fellow students. There doesn’t seem to be anything like that here.
If you’re trolling, bravo. If you’re serious you should hire someone to remind you not to post on the internet.
I was not sure whether to laugh or cry when I read this article
https://theintercept.com/2017/10/02/lone-wolf-white-privlege-las-vegas-stephen-paddock/
Laugh because there are some folks who actually believe this or cry because there are some folks who actually believe this. In spite of my eschatological optimism, this stuff could almost drive me to despair. I am beginning to believe the US is doomed.
Leftists get everything they know about guns from TV and film. This is really bad, because TV and film portrayals of firearms are egregiously incorrect, in many ways. E.g., a gun goes off inside a car with the windows closed; in real life, everyone inside is now deaf for a while, probably with long-term hearing loss. They're certainly in quite a bit of pain, at least right afterward. In movie life, the two hitmen discuss how awful it is that Marvin just got accidentally shot in the face, with no thought given to the noise. Guns are stupendously loud. Firing them outdoors without ear protection results in immediate tinnitus, and probable long-term hearing loss. Sound suppressors are simply a safety issue, and a way to prevent noise pollution. But in the minds of leftist TV/film learners, they're solely the domain of assassins.
Exactly!
I just spent an intense weekend of training on the range (www.tdsatulsa.com) a couple of weekends ago. On one of the drills I forgot to put my “ears” back on after the instructor finished talking. We were only shooting 9mm semi-automatic pistols and it was in open outdoors. It was loud!
A pro would have herded the crowd into a kill box and then poured it on.
Figuring out height + defilade + ambush against a crowd ain't exactly Seal Team 6 shit.
I was a Ranger. Rangers are the best marksmen among the special operators. You were a dumbass Marine.
.308 is the round used by western military for long range shooting. Light machine guns, battle rifles, sniper rifles all are chambered for .308. They are effective way past 25m. Even the smaller round the 5.56mm is effective much further than 25m even on full auto.
Was that a typo? Do you just not understand firearms? Are you copy and pasting something you read?
I haven't heard what calibres the shooter used, though I suspect the bulk of it was not battle rifle cartridges, such as the .308 - 7.62x51 and more likely to have been from AR and AK type platforms - 5.56x45 and 7.62x39 respectively, these generate about half the energy of a .308. We have yet to have a total of the number of rounds fired - it's going to be in the tens of 10os if not over 1,000. I heard some of the video and he was dumping whole magazines in one go, this is not the signature of a highly trained shooter. But then he was dumping them, at least until the crowd scattered, into a tightly packed throng of thousands of people.
So no big skill set here. It's not technically difficult to hit many folks pouring fire into a crowd of thousands from the 32nd floor. This gives a range of only around 100 metres. Also, in this scenario - the angle of fire down onto paving, would have resulted in amplified casualties because of ricochet injuries. Rounds and jagged bullet jackets would be coming off the paving and staying relatively flat - close to the ground - ricochets tend to stick fairly close to the surface they come off, they can cause very nasty injuries.
It was about 2 hours from the start of the shooting until the SWAT team burst into his room. How long the shooting actually went on for, I haven't heard. If he used precision fire I would have expected more dead, given there are no reports of rifle fire having been returned from the ground.
No offense, but the British Army is a joke:
Maybe it's not clear how wide that is. A human head (9 inches wide) is seven degrees wide at 72 inches (4.5*481/30) range --- two yards. Could you hit a stationary human head with a .308 rifle at two yards? At least, say, 50% of the time? I'm not up to much, riflery-wise, but I think I could handle that.
I guess we should account for drop. A ballistics table I googled up says that a .308 drops 42 inches in 450 yards. So, the drop will make his first shots (before he starts to correct for it) drop short of the target he aims at by something like 42 *(440/180) = 102 inches. That's three yards. Nothing, given how big his target is. Wind could mess him up, too, but unless a tornado was going by, it's going to mess him up by feet, not tens of yards.
Maybe I've screwed up these calculations by a order of magnitude somewhere?
Excellent points. The dude had a massive, difficult to miss target: 20,000 people all crammed together in an open parking lot. He didn’t need to be an accurate shot, just needed to shoot into that dense crowd and somebody was going to get hit.
Sometimes but not in this case (nor in the case of most mass shooters – they don’t intend to survive). The guy stopped shooting somewhere around 10:30. He heard the cops (security guard) outside his door and assumed that they would be bursting in at any moment, so he killed himself (as he had planned) at that point. Instead the cops waited another 30 minutes until they could organize a SWAT team, set an explosive to blown down the door, etc. There is no reason to believe that the guy was in there alive and not shooting for 1/2 an hour while he was waiting for the cops to get their act together.
I don’t doubt that the police had no intention of taking him alive. Once you’ve shot a cop you are a marked man. But he spared them the trouble.
TBH, the guy at the rally looks like his beard is whiter and it extends farther up his chin than Paddock’s. But wearing a pussy hat and being a mass murderer are usually not associated with each other. Even if it is him, this doesn’t mean that it is time to take down all the statutes of Betty Friedan (if any) and cancel the plans to put Harriet Tubman on the $20. We should do these things anyway, but not because of Mr. Nutjob, even though this is what the left does when the situation is reversed.
“We have more work to do when more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America.” President Barack Obama
Would look all right
If I could see it on the silver screen
Decades ago they learned that if you gave publicity to suicide you got more of it. So for years media outlets began downplaying it. Then with the whole gay kids being bullied into suicide they pushed the publicity again.
The narrative was more important than the additional suicides.
The narrative needed is more important than the additional shootings.
Thank God there were no ((certain people)) in Hollywood back then or until 1968 when the Code was abolished.
I kid, I kid, but in fact the Code was driven in large part by the Catholic Church. ((Certain people)) accepted it because it limited competition from other ((certain people)) who would have been willing to be more daring in the interest of making a profit. The Code created a cartel where you didn’t have to worry about being outflanked by your competitors (or being attacked by the Church) – you could all buy into the protection scheme and make the same pap and compete on who had the best gimmick – a tap dancing girl or a dog or a chimp or a mule or a diving diva. The Code has been described as “a Jewish owned business selling Roman Catholic theology to Protestant America.”
It strikes me as a similar divide today between the Antifa today and the Boomer Left. The Boomer Left still had some residual belief in equality of law for all, such as upholding the First Amendment for the KKK. The Antifa Left of today holds no such pretenses; to them, the First Amendment is not allowed for anyone they deem "fasicst", and they use violence to uphold that denial of rights.
My guess is that the perception is probably more of a deterrent than the reality. CSI and Law and Order might have some marginal use after all.
It's very like the son was an arrogant jerk whose relationship was breaking up, and who wanted to become as notorious as dear old dad.
AFAIK his father never killed anyone. We don’t have the death penalty for bank robbery.
We must notify the FBI immediately of this line of investigation.
It’s a hypothesis. Abandon it if it isn’t consistent with the evidence. But if the FBI and local law enforcement don’t consider it until subsequent evidence refutes it, they’re not doing their jobs.
Still not much speculation on motive among the commentariat here.
Why did the shooter do this?
And was he really making money on slot machines and video poker as opposed to blowing money he made elsewhere on his real estate stuff? I.e, was he a professional gambler or just a degenerate one.
The brother was interesting. Hard to say anything about his state of mind from his demeanor, how often does one field that sort of news. However, his repeated comments about everything about his brother being public record was a little odd.
Aren’t pussy hats something brand new? Isn’t it just the latest s**t test White ladies are throwing at their men? Doesn’t the public wearing of a pussy hat by Stephen Paddock make his murder-suicide seem more, rather than less likely?
Something’s gotta give in the mind of a White man surrounded by a “#Resistance” that seems congenitally unable to sort the trivial from the important. Shooting up a country music festival might be a male Boomercuck’s way of saying “get out of the way, I’ll do it” in a way that’s not going to be met with second-guessing and endless, sewing circle nattering. He got to mansplain like he’s never mainsplained before. Lone gunmen don’t get bogged down in meetings.
By the way, pussy hats are so frigging White lady it hurts: they’re artsy-craftsy, “naughty”, “fun”, scolding (in that “you can’t handle my realness” kind of way), essentially trivial and rhetorically self-sabotaging. Wearing it probably made something snap in Stephen Paddock. I don’t like pussy hats or contemporary country music but I can’t go along with his apparent solution to either of them.
Steve,
Is there some way we can get a break from the tiny duck troll at times like this? He’s past being tiresome and boring and moved into the actively offensive and needlessly repetitive range.
I mean for goodness sake his comedy act is old.
Thanks
Girls can pass the ranger course how tough can it be?
On the East Coast, this is true. It’s much different west of the Mississippi.
My husband is from Colorado. I can think several people I met through him who fit the profile of everything you said and they are die hard lefties. Colorado should have been an easy win for Trump. But I saw all sorts of signs when we visited the summer before last that were essentially: a pox on both of them. #NeverTrump messed with Trump’s primary chances. Hillary won CO, in the end.
Colorado is that the real weird combo of white pot heads and don’t touch my guns types that ironically seem like they’re “natural” conservatives but appear to mostly express commie like tendencies when they vote. Those are spread all over West and sometimes they hit Florida, too.
If the shooter fits that Western social profile, I can easily see him doing a mass shooting at a country music concert to “get back” at the southern/capitalist culture, or really Trump, that carried the day.
Psst…they’re communists with dumb hats. Of course mass murder is associated with them.
Catholic theology is not that different from Protestant theology. The moral framework regarding almost everything of practical importance is the same. Only since cultural Marxism took hold was there any differentiation at all, and then the difference is limited to birth control and divorce.
Some of Hollywood’s finest movies were produced under the Code. It forced Jewish owned business not to take short cuts and sell movies on cheap sensationalism. Writers were forced to think and negotiate how much sexuality and vulgarity ended up in a movie. What did end up there floated along on married couples and complex plot lines, and a much wider variety of female characters than today.
There no race riots under the Code because you couldn’t produce a Birth of Nation and induce them. You could let your kid see any movie and know it was clean.
So it was indeed a dark era. It’s amazing we all survived such terrible censorship where movie makers and Hollywood actors couldn’t force the worst of their thoughts on all of us.
As it stands right now, today, post Code, Hollywood is almost dead. It has no idea how make a movie suitable for families or women, who were the bulk of the audience during the Hays era. I’ve seen predictions that the Hollywood as we know it is about ready to implode, precisely because it does not seem to able to adapt to niche entertainment anymore. Just full on sex or blow-em ups on the screen. At this point, good riddance.
Maybe we can get another code and another golden era.
Was up finishing some work late Sunday night/into Monday morning when this unfolded, so I observed it in IRT. By the time local LE reported over 50 dead and hundreds injured I thought of two things:
–Thomas Whitman (brain tumor)
–Emmet Till (sociopathic father)
“Crazy” is a useless term. Ditto “mentally ill.”
We’re in this gap between Bedlamesque/Snake Pit treatment of these behavioral extremes and the coming era of genetic identification and population distribution of alleles associated with this sort of behavior.
It would be nice to have a law that says that a requirement for all murderers, murder-suicides, or suicide-by cop individuals is robust and extensive sampling of their DNA. Then we might be able to start assembling better understanding from study of that.
I had one other thought on it…but won’t tack it on here.
The problem is that older people tend to look more similar to each other as they gray and get wrinkles.
Was that a typo? Do you just not understand firearms? Are you copy and pasting something you read?
My comment was limited to fully automatic hand-held fire. And by effective I meant likely to hit the target. Yeah, LMG’s, battle rifles, battle carbines and bolt guns are effective basically to the limits of the shooter’s ability to estimate range, align the sights, and hold and squeeze. But on full-auto, forget it. Most M-14s had the full auto feature blocked and the M16A2 was limited to three-round bursts.
For the most part, what you have written is totally wrong as the others point out.
However, it has some slight validity. It appear that the shooter was using something called a “bump stock” which is a legal way to make your semi-auto fire like an auto. Nowadays (and ESPECIALLY after yesterday) every fool and his brother now knows about bump stocks. Back in the day it was possible that your local gun shop didn’t even carry bump stocks (if they had existed back in the day) and someone like Paddock might not have known even to ask for one. Then again, they could have advertised bump stocks in the back of Field & Stream and it would have been about the same as today.
There were also cultural differences – nowadays people buy bump stocks (and AR-15s in general) so they can live out their commando fantasies because they will never serve in a real military. Back in the day, most guys actually HAD been in the infantry and the last thing they wanted to do was relive that. If they bought a rifle it was to hunt deer and the lasting thing they wanted was some gizmo that would waste a lot of ammo while decreasing accuracy.
Except the Hays Code ((certain people)) seemed to have a lot more love of America than post-Hays Code ((certain people)). They were even willing to blacklist communist writers in their own industry, despite their own communist sympathies.
It strikes me as a similar divide today between the Antifa today and the Boomer Left. The Boomer Left still had some residual belief in equality of law for all, such as upholding the First Amendment for the KKK. The Antifa Left of today holds no such pretenses; to them, the First Amendment is not allowed for anyone they deem “fasicst”, and they use violence to uphold that denial of rights.
The first is the bang, the second is the crack.
You can stop right there. Engaging a single man-sized target with an M4 (with or without a red-dot or other optic) from 480 yards isn’t a big deal. It takes skill, but it’s not a big deal.
But we’re talking about a crowd of 10k or more. Accuracy simply isn’t an issue; the target is bigger than the margins of accuracy. A lot bigger. It was like shooting fish in a barrel; every wild flier was a hit, too.
.308 is a good round, but it’s kind of like the Big Mac; it’s so common because of standarization. It’s not a particularly good long range round by modern standards. These days you’ll find more people championing 6.5mm, .338 Lupua, and a variety of other rounds. Although Stalin was right, quantity has a quality all its own; there’s much to be said for ubiquity of round.
Who seems to think that firing from the high ground with automatic weapons into a crowd of completely exposed, closely packed people at <500 yards is challenging marksmanship?
Are you insane? Or just totally incompetent with a rifle?
This dude, with little experience, managed to kill 59 and wound 500 in ten minutes, so ya know it isn’t exactly olympic match shooting.
Killing or wounding one per second or so.
Me too. Being a dumbass Marine is a lot of fun. Why do you think so many guys sign up for it? And, remember, there is no such thing as a ex-Marine, dumbass or otherwise (if such exists). So you get to be a dumbass Marine the rest of your life, which is really cool because, among other things, women dig it and men respect you.
Plus, everyone, like Rangers, always compares themselves against Marines and goes to great pains to explain to anyone listening (which is nobody) about how they are tougher than Marines, etc.
Or, how they were going to join the Corps, but, well, life or something.
You non-Marines are insecure.
Oh yeah, fake all the gun purchases in Mesquite, all the surveillance video in the casino showing him bringing in bag after bag of gear- easy peasy. Not hard to do at all. He even supposedly took video of himself doing the shooting, like the guy who killed the two reporters in Virginia. Posthumous fame appears to have been part of his goal. I'm shocked he didn't break to upload the videos to social media or livestream it on Facebook.
Wait what? Is there a link to the surveillance videos? This is the key point of the whole thing … if vids of him bringing in bags of stuff exist, then it is more likely he did it.
It would be remarkably difficult to fake this. And why would they? He was just a callous, angry, malicious man with no regard for the lives of other human beings. There is a large minority of such people in the general population. They're generally kept in check, by their own efforts or society's, but occasionally one goes berzerk. He had probably stayed in Mandalay Bay before, noticed from the window that the concert venue made a big fat juicy target, and began his planning. He didn't care who he was killing. He just wanted to exit this world in a rush of adrenaline and half a dozen other hormones and make a name for himself while doing so.
However, it has some slight validity. It appear that the shooter was using something called a "bump stock" which is a legal way to make your semi-auto fire like an auto. Nowadays (and ESPECIALLY after yesterday) every fool and his brother now knows about bump stocks. Back in the day it was possible that your local gun shop didn't even carry bump stocks (if they had existed back in the day) and someone like Paddock might not have known even to ask for one. Then again, they could have advertised bump stocks in the back of Field & Stream and it would have been about the same as today.
There were also cultural differences - nowadays people buy bump stocks (and AR-15s in general) so they can live out their commando fantasies because they will never serve in a real military. Back in the day, most guys actually HAD been in the infantry and the last thing they wanted to do was relive that. If they bought a rifle it was to hunt deer and the lasting thing they wanted was some gizmo that would waste a lot of ammo while decreasing accuracy.
I suspect a good chunk of the injuries and perhaps some deaths stemmed from a stampede rather than bullet wounds.
I thought that too, originally, but I saw several videos from people in the venue and was remarkably impressed by the manner in which the concertgoers behaved. No one seemed to be getting trampled. A doctor at one hospital that treated over 100 victims stated that virtually all of the patients were treated for gunshot wounds. I'm sure quite a few minor injuries were caused by the rush to get out, but I wouldn't be shocked if none of the deaths were.
However, it has some slight validity. It appear that the shooter was using something called a "bump stock" which is a legal way to make your semi-auto fire like an auto. Nowadays (and ESPECIALLY after yesterday) every fool and his brother now knows about bump stocks. Back in the day it was possible that your local gun shop didn't even carry bump stocks (if they had existed back in the day) and someone like Paddock might not have known even to ask for one. Then again, they could have advertised bump stocks in the back of Field & Stream and it would have been about the same as today.
There were also cultural differences - nowadays people buy bump stocks (and AR-15s in general) so they can live out their commando fantasies because they will never serve in a real military. Back in the day, most guys actually HAD been in the infantry and the last thing they wanted to do was relive that. If they bought a rifle it was to hunt deer and the lasting thing they wanted was some gizmo that would waste a lot of ammo while decreasing accuracy.
It’s equally likely that she’s a compulsive liar. Wouldn’t be the first time, either.
Two tripods? One for each window? Or he dragged the tripod rig between the windows?
People are not grok-ing that the shooter was 300+ feet off the ground. The concert was not directly adjacent to the building.
It will come out in the next few days just how complex a shoot this was. There was a lot going on in that hotel room during the shoot. Can't wait for the CIA's reenactment animation.
Perhaps he preloaded the weapons and the pauses in the recording are actually him moving to the next tripod rig across the room! Maybe he had six stations set up?
The old man either secretly trained for the job to a pro level... or he didn't do it.
Why would the CIA do a “reenactment animation” for a domestic crime? Oh, please do tell! I know you have a theory!
The point is the tracers are irrelevant. People in Las Vegas are not driving around with high powered scoped bolt action rifles, which is the only weapon you really need to fear in that circumstance at that range.
The original post commentee that a pro would use tracers. In this circumstance, I don’t think so. I wouldn’t, if I were operating with the same objectives. Murphy’s Law would dictate that by firing tracers into a crowd of rednecks, including guys with military experience, someone would return fire and even if you had body armor on, someone would fluke the shot to the head. Likely to happen? Probably not with a pistol. Worth chancing? No, IMO.
Instead, he used flash suppressors. However a lot of that would just be to maintain night vision.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/4600926/revealed-las-vegas-gun-maniacs-terrifying-arsenal-of-23-guns-from-military-assault-rifles-to-ak-47s-with-a-bump-stock-device-allowing-him-to-fire-800-rounds-every-minute/
You can buy tracer rounds. With the amount of thought and preparation that went into this, if Paddock thought tracers would have added value he would have used them.
Anything with a pistol or probably even with an AR at that range and under fire would’ve been suppressive fire, but keep throwing lead downrange, you might hit something. Of course, you also might draw fire right onto you.
Most likely though, guns were banned from this event. Most concerts I’ve been to don’t allow weapons even if you have a carry permit (I think Nevada’s laws are silent on point but I know they ban carrying if you drink past 0.10 BAC).
You probably would. That's why I suggested that the only people who would try such a thing would be those who could pinpoint the shooter and also have cover to hide behind, preferably some thick concrete.
I worried about this too, and apparently so did a lot of other people, since MidwayUSA had a run on them overnight. I doubt it though. The NRA is one group Republicans in Congress can’t afford to piss off going into an election year, especially with nearly nothing else to show for legislative accomplishments. Ditto Trump, if Steve Bannonn is to be believed.
Of course he does! He probably has a whole bunch of links of the highest quality, but that doesn’t mean that he necessarily wants to share them with you. It’s almost as if — and I hate to say this on a forum for gentlemen– you’re suggesting that he’s making the info up or got it from a less than reliable source. Mr. Tiger does not post anything until it meets the highest standards of Internet journalism!
I don’t see a Muslim working for casinos.
Leftists get everything they know about guns from TV and film. This is really bad, because TV and film portrayals of firearms are egregiously incorrect, in many ways. E.g., a gun goes off inside a car with the windows closed; in real life, everyone inside is now deaf for a while, probably with long-term hearing loss. They're certainly in quite a bit of pain, at least right afterward. In movie life, the two hitmen discuss how awful it is that Marvin just got accidentally shot in the face, with no thought given to the noise. Guns are stupendously loud. Firing them outdoors without ear protection results in immediate tinnitus, and probable long-term hearing loss. Sound suppressors are simply a safety issue, and a way to prevent noise pollution. But in the minds of leftist TV/film learners, they're solely the domain of assassins.
From what I’ve heard (no pun intended), suppressors on ARs are gradually becoming SOP in law enforcement. ARs are the go-to weapon now facing any “bad guy with gun” encounter when available, and firing one unsuppressed indoors is an instant worker’s comp case.
Unfortunately you can’t agree to the same post you lol to. It is more agree than lol in this case, and the lol is sardonic.
Silents are no better. “Greatest” do not deserve the moniker. Hart of 1965 Immigration act was of that generation. Tom Brokaw invented the term apparently. Figures.
Even the current Queen Elizabeth II has the attitude of "don't blame me man, I just work here". George W. Bush insisted publicly he was "the decider" but he knew deep down he was just a guy paid to sit in a chair and look busy. Even so, Dubya didn't have to go up on a roof and shoot at people in order to feel like he was a somebody; he could order air strikes.
Maybe one reason White and Asian guys become mass shooters is so as to be the Decider just before killing themselves? Maybe mass shootings are a glitch of mass man societies?
“Because people who believe in a “judgmental God” never commit mass slaughters.”
Generally speaking they don’t. If we’re going to this Las Vegas style, the least likely person to attempt to kill you would be a God fearing Christian. Most likely are atheists, particularly when they get complete control of nation state (Communism)
That Christians have killed and atheists have not isn’t the point. We’re talking best odds.
Most likely though, guns were banned from this event. Most concerts I’ve been to don’t allow weapons even if you have a carry permit (I think Nevada’s laws are silent on point but I know they ban carrying if you drink past 0.10 BAC).
Anything with a pistol or probably even with an AR at that range and under fire would’ve been suppressive fire, but keep throwing lead downrange, you might hit something. Of course, you also might draw fire right onto you.
You probably would. That’s why I suggested that the only people who would try such a thing would be those who could pinpoint the shooter and also have cover to hide behind, preferably some thick concrete.
I’ll leave it here.
Most likely though, guns were banned from this event. Most concerts I’ve been to don’t allow weapons even if you have a carry permit (I think Nevada’s laws are silent on point but I know they ban carrying if you drink past 0.10 BAC).
A pistol at 400 yards is worthless. If you hit something, it wouldn’t likely be the shooter but someone on a lower floor. A sniper could have taken him out but where is a sniper when you need one? The guy was apparently only shooting for 13 minutes. That was an eternity to those who were trapped in that field like fish in a barrel but OTOH not enough time to realistically deploy an effective response. OTOH, the fact that it took the cops another hour was shameful.
Why would you “worry” about this? Is a bump fire stock something that anyone really NEEDS? I realize that the NRA regards any attempt at gun regulation to be the camel’s nose in the tent (and for the most part they are right – Pelosi & co. would love nothing more than to get rid of civilian gun ownership period) but this is a stupid worthless device and it would be no great loss to anyone (except the people who make $ from them) for ATF to ban it. If you agree (and I realize that you may not) that full automatic weapons should not be legal, this thing appears to be just a loophole for using a semi as virtually a full automatic and it would not be wrong to close such loopholes, especially now that dozens are dead in part it seems directly because of this device. Political reality is that they are going to have to do SOMETHING and this seems to be an appropriate scapegoat and no great loss to society. Contrast this with Hillary’s call for banning silencers – now THERE is a stupid reaction.
As Neal Knox of the Firearms Coalition stated, quoting some Russian proverb about throwing lambs to the wolves from your sled that was being pursued, eventually you are going to run out of lambs. Will you sacrifice hand cranks next? String? Remember the battle cry of the gun controllers: "No one NEEDs an XXX!" This was proven when the the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Morton Grove' s handgun ban LEGAL when they stated as long as you were able to obtain SOME gun, then a ban on any particular gun was LEGAL.
It's also likely the bump stock did not do anything of substance. It is just as likely that it wasted ammunition as it is that it increased the kill count. He also had a pilot's license and ammonium nitrate in his car. Would you feel better today if he would have flown a giant fertilizer bomb into the crowd killing many more but had not used any guns or bump stocks.?
And it worked pretty darned well, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UdHjV_KZT8
None taken, I was a Royal Marine.
They don’t really look that similar to me. “Bald guy with beard” is not that uncommon a look, especially among aging leftists. I don’t really hear the word “Steve” either – just “Hello, [indistinct].” The way the video maker repeated that sound clip over and over actually made it harder rather than easier for me to make out the words. But the NASA shirt is intriguing if Paddock did in fact work for NASA – has that been confirmed?
Maybe because they’re largely false flags? The alleged perp killing himself is one of those signs of a false flag that’s an iron law that’s just about as strong as the magical passport appearing iron law of false flags.
Hotel security located the guy within 20 minutes after he started shooting. After hitting a security guard through the door (whom he detected via a camera he had installed that covered the long hallway leading to the hotel suite), the shooter stopped firing into whatever crowd remained after 13 minutes of gunfire.
With the videos it’s difficult to tell, because there would also be echos, from hard surfaces/ sides of buildings. In one of the videos I did hear a couple of ricochets.
There is definitely a crack-thump thing with rifle/ intermediate (AR) rounds, this difference between the crack – the sound of the supersonic bullet passing over, and the thump – the sound of the discharge which propelled the bullet out the barrel, is used by infantrymen to estimate the range of the shooter.
A 5.56 mm 62 grain AR bullet leaves the barrel at a bit over 3,000 feet per second, which is a bit under 3 times the speed of sound (about 1,100 feet per second). AR bullets slow down fairly rapidly and take roughly half a second to travel 300 meters. The sound of the discharge, the rifle being fired, will take roughly a second to reach that distance. So being shot at, if you are NOT hit you will hear a crack – the supersonic sound generated by the bullet as it passes you, before the sound of the shot itself, which will reach you and sound like a thump, about half a second later. When there is automatic fire these sounds run into each other, and on top of this, in an urban environment with tall buildings, you get echos.
Troops are taught and learn to listen for the thumps – the sound of the discharge – to determine from which direction the shot came. At night the muzzle flashes would have been extremely obvious from the 32nd floor. But you have to have your head up, and to do anything useful, you’d have to be toting a rifle, and have the amount of fortitude few understand. It seems this didn’t happen.
The crack- thump and echos in an echo generating urban environment make it sound like multiple shooters firing at the same time; perhaps accounting for some of the accounts of multiple shooters and being responsible for the start of some of the conspiracy theories amongst the ignorant and suggestible.
This Vegas killer was not insane, not by any measure. He was a successful small businessman, had a pilot's license (one has to have a certain amount on the ball to get one of those). Was not tormented by a tyrannical boss at work, was not an apergy, incel nerd. He made the free choice to commit an act of monumental wickedness. I think that Sailer's point is correct. He was a post-Christian. Did not fear God or the consequences of his act. Most likely did not believe that there is some form of after-life, on which the accounts of this life will be settled. Probably did not believe in the existence of God, or at the very least, a judgmental God.
Also, no kids. (AFAICT)
It’s not just post-Christian, it’s basically having no real connections to the transcendent at all. Nothing beyond self. In this guy’s case, he’s bumping on into being elderly without family, faith, community or nation to live for. And apparently instead of just banging the girlfriend or offing oneself, this scumbag was sociopathic enough to decide to just kill a bunch of people.
And, let’s be honest, this isn’t just the decline in our society, there’s an HBD angle. His dad was a useless POS too. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
"No Gods, No Masters"
I'd wager that the murderous fiend in Las Vegas thought much the same thing.
If gun-grabbers are dying on that hill, they’re not dying on a hill I’m worried about. There’s always reason to worry over the 2nd. So, basically political reasons only. Truth is, I wouldn’t care if they banned them. Doesn’t mean I don’t want them to have to die to take that hill.
You probably would. That's why I suggested that the only people who would try such a thing would be those who could pinpoint the shooter and also have cover to hide behind, preferably some thick concrete.
And you would have to have a suitable weapon (some sort of bolt action rifle). And you would have to have the scope set up for firing up at a high angle. And have the presence of mind to do this amid carnage and panic. And within 13 minutes, after which the guy stops firing anyway. It’s not impossible for all the stars to align in this way but it’s not bloody likely either, which is why nothing of this sort happened.
It made a lot more sense to locate the room he was shooting from and approach him from inside the building, which is what ended up happening. Now the security guard was dumb to walk right up to the door when this guy was clearly “armed and dangerous” (to say the least) and he was lucky to get away with only a leg wound. But he was really the hero of the evening as apparently his approach was enough to get the attacker to change his focus from shooting out the window to waiting for the cops to come thru the door. He must have wondered why it took them another hour.
So any return fire other than highly accurate scoped sniper is really just a force multiplier for the murderer to kill more innocent.
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
I agree, by my observations social atomization seems to have hit Whites the hardest. I see many families out on social outings, but nearly all of them are immigrant families from the third wold.
I see plenty of whites out, but typically they're in small nuclear families or maybe with 1-2 friends. Big gatherings of friends and family seem to be uncommon among American whites. Even among young people, hanging out with friends is just not that common these days. It's very strange.
One of the things that has not been highlighted in the press reports is that the police did not break into the room until maybe a half an hour or more after the shooting had stopped (because the shooter had killed himself at that point). The police did essentially nothing that saved lives.
It has long been SOP for police to establish a perimeter and wait when one of these mass shooting occurs. In some cases the shooter happens by chance on an armed man or off duty cop who engages him in a gunfight as at a few Church shootings and the Utah mall shooting but responding police usually wont engage in a shootout.
In the San Ysidro McDonalds massacre in 1984 the killer was shooting people as the police stood outside waiting patiently. There were reports that some cops wanted to enter and engage the shooter and were ordered otherwise. Similar police non- actions were reported at Luby’s restaurant in 1991, Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Pulse Bar. Even Breivig in Norway got tired of killing and called up police to say he was ready to surrender.
The Daily Mail claims that all shot were fired within 8 minutes. After which the shooter shot a security guard who came to his door (shooting through the door). Then police came and waited 30 minutes for SWAT to arrive to blow open the door finding a dead man on the floor in the room.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4944234/Two-23-rifles-inside-Stephen-Paddock-s-room.html
The daily mail article has many pictures of the inside of the hotel room.
Silents are no better. "Greatest" do not deserve the moniker. Hart of 1965 Immigration act was of that generation. Tom Brokaw invented the term apparently. Figures.
I’ve come to think the generational decline has been roughly steady since the First World War. Individuals can be good or bad but mass societies produce “mass men”, as Ortega y Gasset called them (us?). Everybody’s in charge and nobody’s in charge. Everybody’s to blame and no one is. Everybody can look out for themselves and slack off because someone else, somewhere is probably making sure things are still running properly.
Even the current Queen Elizabeth II has the attitude of “don’t blame me man, I just work here”. George W. Bush insisted publicly he was “the decider” but he knew deep down he was just a guy paid to sit in a chair and look busy. Even so, Dubya didn’t have to go up on a roof and shoot at people in order to feel like he was a somebody; he could order air strikes.
Maybe one reason White and Asian guys become mass shooters is so as to be the Decider just before killing themselves? Maybe mass shootings are a glitch of mass man societies?
Also, none of these Return Fire! heroes seem to consider that every shot that misses (i.e., most of them) is going into a hotel (i.e., a warehouse of people).
So any return fire other than highly accurate scoped sniper is really just a force multiplier for the murderer to kill more innocent.
She has a very typical Filipina look; no mysteries there. She seems to have been a bigamist, and perhaps something of a scammer herself, and now suddenly after being almost immediately let off the hook, she’s a ‘person of interest’ again.
Her maiden name is reported as being ‘Natividad’, which obviously points away from any Muslim background.
It’s certainly interesting that Paddock wired $100K to an account in the Philippines, but our favorite razor suggests he was simply giving his girlfriend some money to live on when he knew he’d be dead soon.
The video I linked to actually shows what a joke the Royal Marines are.
Basic Royal Marine 'other ranks' recruit training is 32 weeks, the longest in NATO. It ends with the award of the Commando's green beret and produces trained commando soldiers qualified to immediately go on operations in a Commando unit.
The USMC is an astonishing organisation and is about 30 times the size of the Royal Marines - off the top of my head 7,000 RMs vs about 200,000 US Marines. It returns huge value for money to the US Department of Defence, utilising not alot more than 5% of the US defense budget, but the USMC basic recruit training course cannot reasonably be compared to Royal Marine Commando Training.
I thought immediately of Charles Whitman when I saw the initial news reports. There’s something about the isolated, elevated firing position that jibes.
Paddock obviously will be autopsied, but I’ve seen nothing about when (and if) the results will be publicized.
I agree with the other commenters here. There’s almost no chance of Paddock’s girlfriend being from a Muslim background — her maiden name is ‘Natividad’.
But who knows what she got into as an adult?
I found it bizarre that yet again an obvious potential accessory to a horrific crime was given an almost immediate ‘all clear’ public exoneration before essentially anything was known about the circumstances of the crime. What’s up with this?
I haven’t seen any surveillance video yet, but I would guess some will be released soon. Sure, it’s easy to fake records of gun purchases, but he was apparently known by employees of several gun stores in and around Mesquite.
It would be remarkably difficult to fake this. And why would they? He was just a callous, angry, malicious man with no regard for the lives of other human beings. There is a large minority of such people in the general population. They’re generally kept in check, by their own efforts or society’s, but occasionally one goes berzerk. He had probably stayed in Mandalay Bay before, noticed from the window that the concert venue made a big fat juicy target, and began his planning. He didn’t care who he was killing. He just wanted to exit this world in a rush of adrenaline and half a dozen other hormones and make a name for himself while doing so.
But who knows what she got into as an adult?
I found it bizarre that yet again an obvious potential accessory to a horrific crime was given an almost immediate 'all clear' public exoneration before essentially anything was known about the circumstances of the crime. What's up with this?
I think this is a better approach than the usual police approach of arresting a bunch of innocent people and then letting them go a few days later. If she is some sort of accessory they have plenty of time to indict her later after a full investigation but at this point it really seems like she had no part in this and was off on a trip to Japan with her girlfriends. Gold digging Filipina ladies have many faults but mass murder isn’t usually one of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UdHjV_KZT8
I got to see the handiwork of the SAS firsthand. Tough, gritty mo-fos with, er, very different ROE’s and detainee treatment than the U.S. military. I sure as heck am glad they’re on our side.
I suspect a good chunk of the injuries and perhaps some deaths stemmed from a stampede rather than bullet wounds.
I thought that too, originally, but I saw several videos from people in the venue and was remarkably impressed by the manner in which the concertgoers behaved. No one seemed to be getting trampled. A doctor at one hospital that treated over 100 victims stated that virtually all of the patients were treated for gunshot wounds. I’m sure quite a few minor injuries were caused by the rush to get out, but I wouldn’t be shocked if none of the deaths were.
I don’t see what the point of having voted for Trump or Republicans is if the only gun legislation they can pass is a ban on something, same as if the only immigration legislation is an amnesty (DACA), or the only economic legislation is a tax cut (while leaving Obamacare in place), etc. I could maybe kinda sorta agree with trading a bump stock ban for the RAISE act (lifts restrictions from suppressors) and national concealed carry reciprocity. But if the only gun legislation Republicans pass is something that gives the Democrats any victory and takes away something, then they can go to hell, as far as I’m concerned.
http://truthfeednews.com/illinois-business-owner-praises-shooting-of-white-people-in-vegas
http://truthfeednews.com/illinois-business-owner-praises-shooting-of-white-people-in-vegas
The most recent reports I have seen is that the gunman had semi-autos with "bump fire" stocks as I suspected yesterday. He appears to have had (at least one) AR-15 with a bipod and a 100 round magazine. Watch the video that goes with the link below and you will clearly see some of his setups. In addition to the one with the bipod the other has a handle at the front of the barrel that can be used to help keep the barrel down when firing auto.
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/03/las-vegas-shooting-gunman-used-bump-stock-device-to-speed-fire/
The first rifle with the bipod appears to have regular Magpul magazine with a window (at least that’s the magazine next to the rifle). The second rifle with a forward grip is the one with a 100-round Surefire magazine.
Forward grips are just good ergonomics for some people. It is NOT specifically for “help[ing to] keep the barrel down when firing auto,” although, yes, the good ergonomics of a forward grip can help with that.
Those screens are 24/7 propaganda feeds.
Gun fights in a small valley surrounded by mountains create the same problem. In fact, gun fire often sounds like it’s coming from the opposite side in that situation.
I’m certain NickG knows about this, but for some of you who are not familiar with this round… it was developed because the earlier standard 5.56mm 55 grain bullet (though quite destructive to the human body when it tumbles inside) was notoriously poor in terminal effect at extended ranges. Not only is the 62 grain version marginally heavier (thus more resistant to environmental forces acting upon its trajectory), it also has a steel tip designed to increase penetration, especially at longer ranges. This tip for milspec ammo is painted green, hence “green tip.”
For all the hullabaloo, the bottom line is it's still a .22 caliber rifle. There is a reason most states won't let you hunt deer with them.
Excellent quote. Thanks for bringing this up.
A lot of Americans, cut off from their roots, try to find meaning in sportsball games or various forms of status-striving (buying a new home in the suburbs, flashing the trendiest Ipad, getting a promotion, maximizing their net worth, making an “awesome” social media profile with lots of followers). Unfortunately, there’s not much meaning in any of that. So lots of people end up hooked on anti-depressants, opioids, or binge eating. They’re empty people.
Whenever I go to the park, I always see huge Mexican families.
I see plenty of whites out, but typically they’re in small nuclear families or maybe with 1-2 friends. Big gatherings of friends and family seem to be uncommon among American whites. Even among young people, hanging out with friends is just not that common these days. It’s very strange.
This promotion of atomization in the US goes much further back than the 1960s, though. Read _Slaughter of Cities_.
I think the 80s were a very fun, extroverted, and outgoing time. Lots of people were out and about at pubs, malls, beaches, bowling alleys, streets. What ever happened to that? People just huddle inside these days. When they go out, they stay quiet and stay on their smartphone. What a cultural change.
Lots of urban neighborhoods had been lost by the 80s, but there were still lots of white working/middle class areas where Regular Joes could have a beer with their buddies after work. Suburbanization was cutting people off from each other, but it was still a very social time. The urban pub culture wasn’t what it was back in the 50s and early 60s, but it was still pretty active.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I’ll check it out.
If you don't believe me, try cutting yourself off completely from the internet at home for a few days. You'll channel surf for a while, read some books, mess around with some tools in the garage, and the day will feel a lot longer. You'll get bored more quickly and feel a greater urge to leave the house.
Reminds me of when a guy sent a piece of string to the BATF and asked if this was an automatic weapon (Apparently, you could hook one end of the string onto the operating handle (AK-47?) and the other end to the trigger). The BATF at first refused to return the string and then relented, realizing the stupidity of that act.
As Neal Knox of the Firearms Coalition stated, quoting some Russian proverb about throwing lambs to the wolves from your sled that was being pursued, eventually you are going to run out of lambs. Will you sacrifice hand cranks next? String? Remember the battle cry of the gun controllers: “No one NEEDs an XXX!” This was proven when the the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Morton Grove’ s handgun ban LEGAL when they stated as long as you were able to obtain SOME gun, then a ban on any particular gun was LEGAL.
Lots of urban neighborhoods had been lost by the 80s, but there were still lots of white working/middle class areas where Regular Joes could have a beer with their buddies after work. Suburbanization was cutting people off from each other, but it was still a very social time. The urban pub culture wasn't what it was back in the 50s and early 60s, but it was still pretty active.
Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll check it out.
It was a lot more boring to stay at home back then and you had to meet people in person to talk to them. You got the paper in the morning, read it, and then there was little stimulation at home for the rest of the day. Cable TV wasn’t around or it was just starting, and it wasn’t great anyway. You had to leave the house and go places and meet people to get any stimulation. That’s not the case any longer with high speed internet piped directly into people’s homes.
If you don’t believe me, try cutting yourself off completely from the internet at home for a few days. You’ll channel surf for a while, read some books, mess around with some tools in the garage, and the day will feel a lot longer. You’ll get bored more quickly and feel a greater urge to leave the house.
Sorry, left out “barrier,” as in “to increase barrier penetration.”
So what both you and Svigor are saying is that you don’t really give a damn about bump stocks but you would like to use them as a bargaining chip or as a way to force the Dems to spend political capital on them so they won’t have as much left to spend on worse kinds of gun control. I’m a pretty cynical guy but not THAT cynical. Bump stocks (to me) have no social utility and may have played a role in the Las Vegas shootings so I wouldn’t mind seeing them go, bargaining chip or no. Public policy is not supposed to be some game where one side or the other does nothing but score cheap points against the other side although it sure seems we are headed that way.
It's not even clear the bump stock resulted in more casualties. He was pouring fire into a large, tightly-packed crowd. He might have killed just as many people strictly with semi-auto fire.
In any event, the Democrats never offer anything up as a compromise, and Republicans shouldn't either.
And I'm not going to subscribe or give an inch to the "no social utility" argument. Gun banners just as readily make the same argument about pretty much anything (from ARs to semiautomatics to all guns). The presumption in a free society is not that we only may own that which is specifically allowed to us, because it has "social utility" or based on any other criteria. And treating bump stocks as some sort of grave social evil, given that this is the first — and as far as I know only — crime they've been involved in is subscribing to the same sort of moral panic gun controllers always exploit and inflame.
And that's my point: if the only action on guns by a Republican majority and a Republican President who openly credits the NRA with his victory (and I'm quite sure he's right about that, given that there are almost certainly more than 70,000 NRA members in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) in this term is to knuckle under and subscribe to a media and left-wing moral panic, they're terminally weak and should be replaced.
The main problem with The Accountant is Ben Afflick. We are all supposed to believe that Autism makes you terrific at math. But this accountant had a father who also trained him for years in martial arts. When he grew up he became a deadly assassin with an accountancy cover.
So plausibility is not a virtue of this film
“Uh, oh, all the Muslims in town are shaving their heads …”
I’m not looking forward to that form of cultural enrichment.
The later round is only usable in barrels with a much higher rate of twist rifling. I’ve fired a few from my 12″ Contender barrel with predictably poor results.
For all the hullabaloo, the bottom line is it’s still a .22 caliber rifle. There is a reason most states won’t let you hunt deer with them.
1:7 barrel twist can utilize bullets up to 80 grain well, and is typically found in latest military rifles and carbines chambering 5.56mm.1. People aren't deer.
2. Some states allow handgun hunting of deer and require a minimum of 357 magnum out of a 6" barrel. That does A LOT less damage than a 55 grain 5.56mm. Hunting laws are not directly relevant to the question of anti-personnel ballistics.
3. The 55 grain bullet does crazy damage to an unarmored human body within 150 meters or so while having low barrier penetration (i.e. less likely to over-penetrate walls). It makes for a very good (and relatively safe) CQB ammo. I switched from oo buck out of a 12 gauge to 55 grain out of a 5.56mm for home defense long gun years ago. I even like the 42 grain frangible ammo for that role, but found its supply expensive and inconsistent, so stuck with the massively more popular, available, and less costly 55 grain.
A relative met a CIA-type dude (African-American!) while in City College in Chicago. Said he used a Remington XP-100 .221 bolt action pistol for his work and that he was trained to hold extra rounds between his fingers. Showed him three bullet holes in his arm from a small-caliber weapon (Czech Scorpion machine pistol?).
https://youtu.be/KfzQ4uKvE7c
Provided you don’t pack the case over capacity, straight walled cartridges like .45 LC, .45-70 and similar are safe to load with black powder using load data for these calibers. I’ve shot black powder out of stainless Ruger single actions in .44 Spl and an old M1917 S&W (that had been hard chrome plated) in .45 Auto Rim with no bad effects.
Although there were considerably necked down black powder cartridges, trying it in the more modern rifle cartridges with severe neck angles would perhaps be a bad idea.
Remember BP is really, really corrosive, so only shoot it in junkers or in stainless guns.
As far as making your own ammo, many people cast their own bullets, and if you were desperate and had a lathe you could turn cartridge cases. Making your own primers would probably be suicidal, but even black powder manufacture is not really practical at home. It takes a lot of time and is very messy and leads to explosions.
But under REAL survival conditions, you probably won’t have time even to reload with existing components. Stow a can or two of your favorite powder and a few thousand primers away, but your best investment is probably .22 Long Rifle, your rifle caliber and your pistol caliber in that order.
He doesn’t look like him to me. Nor did I hear Steve. There are lots sixty-something guys with beer-bellies and white goatees. It’s hardly definitive
Nor was that video made to be intelligible, as far as I can tell, cutting quickly between pictures, so you couldn’t get a good look at the guy. Moreover, it makes the argument that: 1.) the guy in the video is wearing a pink NASA shirt, 2.) a guy named Steven Paddock once worked at NASA Goddard, ergo this guy is that guy. It’s a croc. The NASA guy is “Steven” with a “v”, not with a “ph”. Nor would an accountant/auditor be named by the NASA director to work on a Mars mission study.
The people who make videos like that are credulous fools.
And conceding something – anything – to the Democrats always works out so well for the Republicans, doesn’t it?
It’s not even clear the bump stock resulted in more casualties. He was pouring fire into a large, tightly-packed crowd. He might have killed just as many people strictly with semi-auto fire.
In any event, the Democrats never offer anything up as a compromise, and Republicans shouldn’t either.
It's not just post-Christian, it's basically having no real connections to the transcendent at all. Nothing beyond self. In this guy's case, he's bumping on into being elderly without family, faith, community or nation to live for. And apparently instead of just banging the girlfriend or offing oneself, this scumbag was sociopathic enough to decide to just kill a bunch of people.
And, let's be honest, this isn't just the decline in our society, there's an HBD angle. His dad was a useless POS too. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.
Driving home from work today, I was behind a pick-up truck with a bunch of bumper-stickers on it. One of them – the biggest one – caught my eye:
“No Gods, No Masters”
I’d wager that the murderous fiend in Las Vegas thought much the same thing.
One of the things that has not been highlighted in the press reports is that the police did not break into the room until maybe a half an hour or more after the shooting had stopped (because the shooter had killed himself at that point). The police did essentially nothing that saved lives.
That police-inactivity has happened in many other cases, as commenter “jesse helms think-alike” also pointed out. Nidal Hissan, who carried out the rampage-murder at Ft. Hood wasn’t engaged and dropped by SWAT, but by two patrol cops who just happened to be nearby (DoD cops, I expect).
SWAT often seem to be kind of useless – essentially just hunkering down and engaging in “force-protection”.
I wouldn’t say I don’t give any damn about bump stocks but I’d consider it a lesser priority than those other issues. Frankly, I don’t understand what the point is of the Hughes Amendment (post-1986 machine gun ban) period, and why machine guns of any kind couldn’t be handled like any other NFA Title II weapon (or potentially even more stringently, but the pre-1986 grandfathering is absurd).
And I’m not going to subscribe or give an inch to the “no social utility” argument. Gun banners just as readily make the same argument about pretty much anything (from ARs to semiautomatics to all guns). The presumption in a free society is not that we only may own that which is specifically allowed to us, because it has “social utility” or based on any other criteria. And treating bump stocks as some sort of grave social evil, given that this is the first — and as far as I know only — crime they’ve been involved in is subscribing to the same sort of moral panic gun controllers always exploit and inflame.
And that’s my point: if the only action on guns by a Republican majority and a Republican President who openly credits the NRA with his victory (and I’m quite sure he’s right about that, given that there are almost certainly more than 70,000 NRA members in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) in this term is to knuckle under and subscribe to a media and left-wing moral panic, they’re terminally weak and should be replaced.
However, it has some slight validity. It appear that the shooter was using something called a "bump stock" which is a legal way to make your semi-auto fire like an auto. Nowadays (and ESPECIALLY after yesterday) every fool and his brother now knows about bump stocks. Back in the day it was possible that your local gun shop didn't even carry bump stocks (if they had existed back in the day) and someone like Paddock might not have known even to ask for one. Then again, they could have advertised bump stocks in the back of Field & Stream and it would have been about the same as today.
There were also cultural differences - nowadays people buy bump stocks (and AR-15s in general) so they can live out their commando fantasies because they will never serve in a real military. Back in the day, most guys actually HAD been in the infantry and the last thing they wanted to do was relive that. If they bought a rifle it was to hunt deer and the lasting thing they wanted was some gizmo that would waste a lot of ammo while decreasing accuracy.
Unfortunately, the “slight validity” of my point is also the whole point: it explains the difference between 10 people being murdered in a 1990′s rampage shooting vs. 50 killed + 500 wounded last weekend.
A few decades ago, odd-ball white-collar aspiring mass murderers may have had these fantasies but — minus military training or a tie to society’s underbelly — wouldn’t know where to begin. Today, the socially- and reproductively-inept Lanzas / Chos / Breiviks / Stephen Paddock’s of the world can access a wealth of information online, which is also the world they are most comfortable in.
In 30k people in the US, someone will be armed. Who knows with what. It only takes one bullet to seriously mess up your day, even a fluked shot with iron sights.
But its not like the big dark hole with flashes coming out of the otherwise gold faced building would give away your position.
I had to strain and read comments to find it but it is there... right where you'd think in the rightmost smashed window. Of course it is not easy to see. The camera operator has the virtue of being there with full resolution of natural vision and still doesn't know where to point the camera directly.
https://youtu.be/iuv4cLjQqNE
Now tell me you'd not know where the tracers are coming from.
https://youtu.be/dq4xnRGZMOI
At the UT-Austin shooting in 1966 civilians did return fire. A mixed result: fire from tower was somewhat supressed but Austin POs Alvarez & McCoy, up on the tower to apprehend/stop the sniper, were fired upon by civilians who did not realize who they were.
It's not just post-Christian, it's basically having no real connections to the transcendent at all. Nothing beyond self. In this guy's case, he's bumping on into being elderly without family, faith, community or nation to live for. And apparently instead of just banging the girlfriend or offing oneself, this scumbag was sociopathic enough to decide to just kill a bunch of people.
And, let's be honest, this isn't just the decline in our society, there's an HBD angle. His dad was a useless POS too. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.
According to his brother, he did look after his mother and his brother and set them up financially.
But we're talking about a crowd of 10k or more. Accuracy simply isn't an issue; the target is bigger than the margins of accuracy. A lot bigger. It was like shooting fish in a barrel; every wild flier was a hit, too..308 is a good round, but it's kind of like the Big Mac; it's so common because of standarization. It's not a particularly good long range round by modern standards. These days you'll find more people championing 6.5mm, .338 Lupua, and a variety of other rounds. Although Stalin was right, quantity has a quality all its own; there's much to be said for ubiquity of round.
.338 Lapua is a hard kicking high muzzle energy round for long distance sniping from heavy dedicated sniper rifles. Next step up is the .50 BMG.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4943330/Marseille-knifeman-named-29-year-old-Tunisian.html
Some of them have automatic weapons too. Like at Bataclan.
The stabber in Marseille killed two girls of Moroccan Jewish descent.
Marylou is a Christian name.
Do tell…
I agree in large part with this, especially within the context of serial killings dropping off the map (My theory why: MKUltra medical experiments have ceased post-Church hearings + increase in mass surveillance + everyone a camera man w/ a cell phone + increase of concealed carry) meaning you only get one shot (ahem) to make your spree killing count, so let’s get after the softest target you can to video game the body counts*.
*Assuming this wasn’t some deep state, gun-running operation run under the FBI’s nose and they’ve spent the last 48 hours concocting their cover story.
Eagles: JAMES DEAN:
Very informative comment. Thank you.
The whole notion of having to do something is wrong headed. There’s no need to ban anything. This is a people problem, possibly an idealogical one, but not a thing problem. Why give anything to the gun grabbers? It’s weaknesses.
It’s also likely the bump stock did not do anything of substance. It is just as likely that it wasted ammunition as it is that it increased the kill count. He also had a pilot’s license and ammonium nitrate in his car. Would you feel better today if he would have flown a giant fertilizer bomb into the crowd killing many more but had not used any guns or bump stocks.?
You are full of shit. I was never a Marine, you aren’t a Ranger and I saw what Ranger “marksmanship” did to Pat Tillman.
Been back and checked it out. The editor of that clip juxtaposed sections of a Royal Marine Commando officer training BBC documentary from the 80s – here’s Part 1 – with USMC recruit training. The proper comparison would be with the USMC Infantry officer course – which is about 3 months. Royal Marine officer training is arguably the longest and toughest initial officer training course in NATO, it’s an extremely tough 15 month course.
Basic Royal Marine ‘other ranks’ recruit training is 32 weeks, the longest in NATO. It ends with the award of the Commando’s green beret and produces trained commando soldiers qualified to immediately go on operations in a Commando unit.
The USMC is an astonishing organisation and is about 30 times the size of the Royal Marines – off the top of my head 7,000 RMs vs about 200,000 US Marines. It returns huge value for money to the US Department of Defence, utilising not alot more than 5% of the US defense budget, but the USMC basic recruit training course cannot reasonably be compared to Royal Marine Commando Training.
Not at all.
A rack AR type rifle, or pretty much any centre fire rifle with iron sights would have been just fine, though some sort of optic would be nice. Shooting up-slope – or indeed down, the effect is the same – you would have to dope a bit low, that is adjust your point of aim a little low for any given range, probably about 3 inches at 300 metres. This is not a biggie.
But even if you have an AR any normal copper is going to be very reluctant to start cracking off rounds towards the windows of an occupied hotel; hell even SWAT teams will be reluctant to do this before clearing the hotel room by room. Especially given the collateral risks and the current backdrop of BLM/ Fergurson etcetera. You’re going to be inclined to practice defensive CYA policing. This effect is likely a large part of the reason US murder rates are up in the more vibrant cities.
Yeah I wouldn’t piss on the left if they were on fire. But if I were really that cynical, I wouldn’t have made the admission against interest in the first place.
Yep. Forgoing “bad” weapons and tactics your enemies use wholesale is for losers.
*Assuming this wasn't some deep state, gun-running operation run under the FBI's nose and they've spent the last 48 hours concocting their cover story.
Finally we have the video game connection. I can’t be the only one creeped out by first-person shooter games. Why do we have to have every male on earth fantasizing about shooting people?
Reality Bending Drugs …
There are reports that Stephen Paddock was on Valium, the anti-depressant drug that can cause aggressive behaviors.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/the-strip/las-vegas-strip-shooter-prescribed-anti-anxiety-drug-in-june/
There is evidence that Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter was a “pill popper”. Friends relate he used Suboxone, which is even more hardcore than Xanax … a benzodiazepines that is more potent than Valium.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/06/was-charleston-shooter-on-powerful-mind-altering-drug/
There are also references that relate that up to 20% of the female population are on anti-anxiety or anti-depressant drugs of one kind or another … Valium, Xanax, and other reality-altering drugs. “Mother’s little helpers” they are called.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2289311/Valium-Its-addictive-heroin-horrifying-effects-given-millions.html
There are also repeated references in the media that Islamic jihadists and terrorists are avid drug users.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/24/islamist-terrorists-drug-taking-jihadist
Wouldn’t it be something if future generations did their due diligence and concluded that the social rot associated with feminism and many of the massacres and terrorist attacks of our era could be explained as nothing more than people zonking out on mind-altering drugs, most of which were prescribed by their doctors?
And here we thought the perps had something serious to say.
I grew up in an era when it was common for boys as young as 6th Grade to have 410 shotguns and/or 22 rifles in their closets. No one was shot, no one was injured, and no one died. We didn’t have “pussy” marches either. Of course, we didn’t have Valium, Xanax, or Suboxone, etc.
For social peace, perhaps drug control is more important than gun control.
As to the women of today all being on Prozac, well, modern life is stressful and elongated. Your life may be awful and you know that it'll be awful for the next 40 years.
Bump stocks (to me) have no social utility and may have played a role in the Las Vegas shootings so I wouldn’t mind seeing them go, bargaining chip or no. Public policy is not supposed to be some game where one side or the other does nothing but score cheap points against the other side although it sure seems we are headed that way.
Bullshit.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
It’s all about bargaining chips. That’s politics, and that’s how the game is played.
The biggest problem with our political divide is that Democrats have all the Jews, and Jews know how to haggle. “Can I have this?” “Sure, what do I get in exchange?” It doesn’t matter that maybe they even want that, too. All that matters is that you want it more than them, and they’re willing to hold it over your head to get something they want even more. (Note that I’m not being anti-Semitic here. I’m saying this in admiration.)
The Democrats also have all the blacks, who are persistently stubborn. “Can I have this?” “No.” “Why?” “Because you want it.” If you want it they won’t give it to you. You have to fool them into believing it’s what *they* want.
Republicans? We have all the good white Anglo-Saxon(ish) Protestants, who are really good at being tricked into doing something against our best interests because it’s “the right thing to do.” All you have to do is convince us that we can’t make arguments about why it’s the wrong thing to do (“that’s racist!”) or convince us that we are guilty of more crimes than all the other shitty countires in the world, and WASPs will do just about anything you want.
The same holds true for DACA. A stupid, conniving argument about why we’re morally obliged to give citizenship to enough illegals to populate an entire state (probably 2 million or more when all is said and done), when the last election was decided by less than 80,000 votes. But too many good, decent, moral Republicans are just naive enough to buy that deceitful argument.
No, damnit, it’s all about bargaining chips. “Can we outlaw these types of firearms? They cause too much misery and death.” “Sure. Can we outlaw Muslim immigration? They, too, cause too much misery and death.” That’s how the game of politics is played.
I think the epidemic of suicides across the First World, as well as the increase in insane motiveless spree killers, is the result of the pharmaceuticals having successfully bribed the scum at the FDA (and its foreign equivalents) to allow dangerous psychotropic trash on the market. These drugs largely do the opposite of what they claim to do, they damage patients physically and oftentimes psychologically, and I think they are responsible for countless needless deaths worldwide.
Just as leaded gasoline was allowed on the market and damaged health worldwide for generations, psychotropic drugs are given out irresponsibly by ignorant general practitioners and empathy lacking money oriented psychiatrists to patients who have been overdiagnosed in order to keep them returning to the psychiatrist’s office. Many people given psychotropic drugs are more or less normal people suffering internally from external problems (such as deaths in the family, divorce, or an inability to get satisfactory sex) and the drugs cause their brains to malfunction and turn them genuinely crazy (or at least temporarily insane). Other people given these drugs have genuine neurotic mental problems (such as anxiety and panic attacks, OCD, and irrational depression) but counseling and other external changes could help these people better then giving them drugs that don’t cure their problems (I believe psychiatry is largely pseudoscientific money making quackery) and sometimes turn them psychotic, suicidal, and even occasionally homicidal. Even genuine innate psychotics (who probably should simply be locked up) suffer brain damage from psychotropic drugs. These things are dangerous and were let on the market through dubious “testing” and compromised health officials and I suspect are at the root of most of the spree killings of the last 20 years.
See the following: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/10/no_author/the-mass-shooting-problem-like-organised-terrorism-is-a-drug-problem/
Nor was that video made to be intelligible, as far as I can tell, cutting quickly between pictures, so you couldn't get a good look at the guy. Moreover, it makes the argument that: 1.) the guy in the video is wearing a pink NASA shirt, 2.) a guy named Steven Paddock once worked at NASA Goddard, ergo this guy is that guy. It's a croc. The NASA guy is "Steven" with a "v", not with a "ph". Nor would an accountant/auditor be named by the NASA director to work on a Mars mission study.
The people who make videos like that are credulous fools.
Those are all valid points, except the last one. The people putting those videos together are a mixed bag and not all fools. Unfortunately, we’re forced to sort through stuff like this because the legacy media is little better. That’s where we are right now.
This made me LOL. It makes a nice matching bookend to the original “third law” of Arthur C. Clarke. From the Space Age to Idiocracy in fifty years.
https://twitter.com/CounterFund/status/915605637849022464
These days lots of Americans are loners without much connection to anyone (family, friends, local neighbors, civic group, bowling league, church, ethnicity, school buddies). Back when people were socially connected, even a lunatic might feel some vague sense that he's a member of society. The lunatic's friends/relatives/acquaintances might've also been able to put a little decency into him.
These days a lot of people go to work and go home. Other than their spouse and kids, they may not even really have anyone to talk to regularly. If they're unmarried/divorced and not living with any children, then they just spend time totally alone (maybe they see other relatives a few times a year, like at Thanksgiving). As for younger people, they may have hundreds of "friends" on social media, but there are shocking number with few or no real friends in real life.
Even having random conversations with strangers is a lot less common than it used to be, especially among younger people. If you want to talk to someone you don't know these days, people think that's "creepy" and "weird." Most people just stare at their smartphones all the time, so they're often too distracted to even say anything to.
Back a few decades ago, it was common for men to go to the bar after work and shoot the breeze with regular friends. There was actually a show about this subculture. Anyone rember Cheers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS0VQOHX7lM
You couldn't make a show like that these days. People just couldn't relate to such a place. In the past, there used to be a lot of places like that. It was a place to bond and now those places are mostly gone. I've actually read a lot of articles about the decline of the neighborhood bar.
Cheers Lyrics: "You want to go where everybody knows your name. Where they're always glad you came."
Robert Putnam wrote a book called "Bowling Alone," which discusses the decline in civic and recreational organizations. For example, people are a lot less likely to join bowling leagues these days. Other examples he gives are the Knights of Columbus, B'nai Brith, labor unions, Parent-Teacher Association, Federation of Women's Club, League of Women Voters, military veterans' organizations, Boy Scouts, the Red Cross, Lions Clubs, Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, United States Junior Chamber, Freemasonry, Rotary, and Kiwanis.
Remember how many people used to bowl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJ-jMGQtm0
Remember how out-and-about everyone used to be in public spaces?
For example, the malls used to be packed. People used to go there to socialize. Now they go there to shop - and then go home. Here's an interesting link to a lot of photos of a malls from 1989.
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/80s-shopping-malls/#dvt0U.xQxiqQ
Remember video game arcades? Whatever happened to those?
The point is that opportunities for connection and social interaction have dominshed a lot over the past 25-30 years. (No, "social media" doesn't count). So lots of marginal, disconnected individuals feel no sense of empathy with anyone and there's no one to even see the warning signs.
There were comments several months ago about how Homer Simpson is an anachronistic figure even though he is still on the air – good job without a college degree, wife who stays at home, etc. I guess his regular attendance at Moe’s is another one (although Moe’s, unlike Cheers, was never portrayed favorably at any point in the show’s history).
They definitely have to open this Vegas shooter's brain. Anything less will be construed as a coverup.
Not be indelicate, but his brain apparently got effectively splattered, so I’m not sure how much an autopsy will be able to tell us about his neurological state.
Buggery.
it is remarkable that the Black homicide rate is so high, especially since 20% of Blacks between the age of 20-30 are incarcerated….most of the dangerous thugs are in jail, almost a million Black men are locked up …yet the homicide rate is still at very high levels
“We have more work to do when more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities across America.” President Barack Obama
You would have to be concerned that no trace DNA would be found on the victim. Where is your phone during this time? Do you carry it and chance that the pinging from it is being recorded as you carry out the crime? Do you leave it somewhere and have it ring without you interacting at all with it?
I think with all of that you're taking a risk. A lot of police are of fairly middling intelligence and lazy, so all of this evidence has to actually get examined by someone who cares... however, it seems like there is more risk than there was, say, in the 1980s.
With mass murdering OTOH, as long as you can kill enough people, that's mission accomplished for most. These days with better technology for killing and researching, it's only going to get easier I think. It doesn't matter if you get caught, indeed for 90% of them that's the plan.
I’m not (just) trying to be a smart aleck, but I keep my phone turned off most of the time. Is this going to make the police suspect I’m out committing crimes?
American Rifleman had an article after the Texas Tower incident describing how a civilian with a DCM M-1 carbine almost had the chance to pick Charles Whitman off.
A mixed bag of fools, as far as I can tell. Why are their videos always so bad? Seemingly designed to not convey information in a clear, straightforward way?
Of course, your point about the legacy media is spot on. They are also, for the most part, pretty bad. And indeed, a lot of them are fools too.
For all the hullabaloo, the bottom line is it's still a .22 caliber rifle. There is a reason most states won't let you hunt deer with them.
Yes. When the 55 grain bullets were used, barrel twist rates were typically 1:12 to 1:9. Heavier bullets require higher rates to stabilize the bullet more effectively, around 1:8 to 1:7.
1:7 barrel twist can utilize bullets up to 80 grain well, and is typically found in latest military rifles and carbines chambering 5.56mm.
1. People aren’t deer.
2. Some states allow handgun hunting of deer and require a minimum of 357 magnum out of a 6″ barrel. That does A LOT less damage than a 55 grain 5.56mm. Hunting laws are not directly relevant to the question of anti-personnel ballistics.
3. The 55 grain bullet does crazy damage to an unarmored human body within 150 meters or so while having low barrier penetration (i.e. less likely to over-penetrate walls). It makes for a very good (and relatively safe) CQB ammo. I switched from oo buck out of a 12 gauge to 55 grain out of a 5.56mm for home defense long gun years ago. I even like the 42 grain frangible ammo for that role, but found its supply expensive and inconsistent, so stuck with the massively more popular, available, and less costly 55 grain.
Not nearly as gentle as we were.
There are reports that Stephen Paddock was on Valium, the anti-depressant drug that can cause aggressive behaviors.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/the-strip/las-vegas-strip-shooter-prescribed-anti-anxiety-drug-in-june/
There is evidence that Dylann Roof, the Charleston shooter was a "pill popper". Friends relate he used Suboxone, which is even more hardcore than Xanax ... a benzodiazepines that is more potent than Valium.
http://www.wnd.com/2015/06/was-charleston-shooter-on-powerful-mind-altering-drug/
There are also references that relate that up to 20% of the female population are on anti-anxiety or anti-depressant drugs of one kind or another ... Valium, Xanax, and other reality-altering drugs. "Mother's little helpers" they are called.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2289311/Valium-Its-addictive-heroin-horrifying-effects-given-millions.html
There are also repeated references in the media that Islamic jihadists and terrorists are avid drug users.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/24/islamist-terrorists-drug-taking-jihadist
Wouldn't it be something if future generations did their due diligence and concluded that the social rot associated with feminism and many of the massacres and terrorist attacks of our era could be explained as nothing more than people zonking out on mind-altering drugs, most of which were prescribed by their doctors?
And here we thought the perps had something serious to say.
I grew up in an era when it was common for boys as young as 6th Grade to have 410 shotguns and/or 22 rifles in their closets. No one was shot, no one was injured, and no one died. We didn't have "pussy" marches either. Of course, we didn't have Valium, Xanax, or Suboxone, etc.
For social peace, perhaps drug control is more important than gun control.
It’s always been interesting to me that drugs designed to alleviate depression and anxiety can be the cause of aggression and suicide.
As to the women of today all being on Prozac, well, modern life is stressful and elongated. Your life may be awful and you know that it’ll be awful for the next 40 years.
Agreed, though sales are already surging due to the increased awareness of bump stocks.
Similarly, Paul Ryan announced that the legislative action to make suppressors easier to obtain (I guess by removing them from Title I NFA) is now on hold because, um, well, whatever. . .
In related news, the San Francisco Chronicle has a typical passive-voice “raises new questions” article: “In the wake of Sunday’s mass slaughter. . . many Nevadans are searching their souls.” It went on with the usual visits to gun shops, but didn’t identify one person who was “searching his soul” about tightening gun laws in the state. Typical editorializing as news.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/nation/article/Las-Vegas-massacre-reverberates-in-gun-loving-12250848.php?cmpid=gsa-sfgate-result
You must be ancient.
Guy was 65. Use your brain.
More false flags and hoaxes.
Sure …
It seems to me that these mass killings are usually done by high functioning autistic folks, either diagnosed Asperger’s or undiagnosed.
Fortunately, most people don’t seem to notice this.
An article in the NYT pretty much confirmed it for me with several awkward social tells, and then just the fact that he was a really good video poker player.
https://nyti.ms/2xVSHjE
It's a myth, I tell you!
https://nyti.ms/1jqcdMf
Fortunately, most people don't seem to notice this.
An article in the NYT pretty much confirmed it for me with several awkward social tells, and then just the fact that he was a really good video poker player.https://nyti.ms/2xVSHjE
Well, since the Sandy Hook guy was so obviously Asperger’s, and autism qualifies for victim status, the NYT is working actively for people not to notice.
It’s a myth, I tell you!
https://nyti.ms/1jqcdMf