3844 What Pisses Me Off About The Las Vegas Shooting
On October 1st, 2017, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock positioned himself on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino in Las Vegas, Nevada and opened fire into the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. Over 515 people were injured and 58 are dead in what is now the deadliest mass shooting in United States history. Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
An insanely evil shooter has attacked a country music festival in Las Vegas.
He was on the 32nd floor of a strip casino, aiming from two windows going back and forth, showering It is the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
He was found having killed himself after SWAT officers used explosives to storm the gunman's hotel room at Mandalay Bay, and they have identified him as Stephen Craig Paddock, 64, of Mesquite.
It is truly horrifying.
The concert-going area was a gun-free zone, although it seems to me that return fire would have been pretty useless as this guy was very high up and very far away.
There's some strange elements to all of this.
Everything is unconfirmed.
Everything is in flux.
I'm just going to give you some thoughts.
As confirmed facts come in, I will give you a more detailed analysis of what's happened.
There are a few interesting things that have come about.
The Vegas shooter's father was a psychopathic armed robber who was actually for a while on the FBI's most wanted list.
His father was arrested early in 1961 for robbing a bank in Phoenix, which happened in 1960.
He was supposed to have robbed, or allegedly he'd robbed other banks but was not charged publicly.
With those offenses, he was living in Tucson with his four kids, and he was caught trying to escape from jail, the father in Las Vegas, and then was sent to prison, and then he successfully escaped late in 1968.
That's what put him on the most wanted list.
There's an FBI poster you can see online from 1969.
He notes that Paddock the Elder had been, quote, So, the shooter...
The Las Vegas shooter, he was eight when his father was convicted of armed robbery and then sent to prison.
He was 15 when his father escaped and went into hiding, and he was 26 when his father was re-apprehended.
It's hard to imagine what kind of childhood this shooter had.
Now, please understand, I'm not begging for one ounce of sympathy for this psychopathic evil murderer.
But I am saying that horrible childhoods have consequences for some.
And to my way of thinking, and this is something I have been doing very publicly for 10 years, is when people talk to me on the show about their difficult childhoods, I offer sympathy, empathy, understanding, and a condemnation of the immorality of the parents, and that seems to give people some advice.
Relief and identification of the moral forces at work in our formative years seems to be very helpful.
I don't know what this guy's life was like.
I don't know where he traveled, what he did, who he knew.
But if I had to put money on it, I would say that he did not receive the kind of sympathy and moral clarity regarding both his mother and his father.
His father was this psychopath, a dangerous guy, bank robber, on the run, and his mother chose to have four children with him.
This complicity is so often overlooked.
Now, his brother has been contacted and interviewed, and his brother says, well, this guy wasn't a big gun guy.
Where was he supposed to get these automatic weapons?
The brother says that the shooter did not have a military background.
Now, everyone is trying to leverage...
Sorry, not everyone. Let me backtrack on that.
Some people are trying to shoehorn this as yet hazy tragedy into their political...
So you've got people calling for gun control.
And, you know, here's a hint.
I mean, new fully automatic firearms, the sale of those has been banned in 1986.
This is under the Hughes Amendment.
Now, fully automatic firearms registered under the National Firearms Act before 1986.
They're still legal.
They were grandfathered in.
And this restriction, this lack of demand, lack of supply, lack of ability to obtain, has had some effect.
Legally owned, fully automatic weapons have been only used in three crimes since 19.
34. And you can convert these weapons apparently, but there's a huge amount of complexity in going through to get a hold of these weapons.
There's paperwork to be filled out, there's money to be paid, and this guy, the shooter, had apparently no criminal record, and so it's hard to imagine.
Now people say, oh, well you ban the guns and then this won't happen.
Come on. Murder is illegal.
And this guy did it.
Mass murder. Shooting people, picking them off, spraying bullets into a crowd of happy people.
How sick, how evil, how monstrous the idea that he would have respect for gun laws while having no respect for human life.
It's a fantasy.
We cannot, cannot continue.
To play whack-a-mole with the symptoms rather than deal with the root causes.
Now, his brother says he doesn't really have any meaningful political or religious affiliations and...
However, there are reports, who knows if they're true or not, that a woman told a group of concertgoers before the shooting began, you're all going to die tonight.
Who was she? Will she be found?
We don't know. Is it even true?
I mean... This sick son of a bitch had extraordinary firepower firing directly into a packed mass of people.
This is one of the reasons why this casualty count is so extraordinarily high.
Although, of course, he shot from further away than most mass shooters, but he had a packed crowd and time.
As far as motivations go, no clear ones have emerged as yet.
The standard narrative of, oh, well, he's a white supremacist, or he's an anti-Trumper, or he's, I mean, there's this hazy pic, anyway.
I mean, he had a Filipino girlfriend, so the white supremacy thing seems a little bit of a stretch.
But in one odd development, I'm not putting a lot of stock in it, I'm simply telling you, because it's out there, ISIS has claimed that they were behind the attack.
And I quote, the Las Vegas attack was carried out by a soldier of the Islamic State, and he carried it out in response to calls to target states of the coalition.
This is ISIS's news agency, AMAC, and by coalition they're talking about the U.S.-led coalition that is fighting ISIS and others in the Middle East.
Amak added, the news agency added from ISIS, the Las Vegas attacker converted to Islam a few months ago.
Now, according to the AP, ISIS, quote, is not known to have claimed any attacks to which it was not at least loosely linked.
So I remain highly skeptical of that development.
If his girlfriend is from the Philippines, she is from the Well, there are over 10 million Muslims in the Philippines, but again, I consider this extraordinarily dubious.
What's remarkable to me, though, is that the FBI has announced that this guy has no apparent ties to ISIS within 12 hours of the shooting.
Within 12 hours, they say the Vegas shooter has no identified ties to ISIS. However, After a year, they're still not sure about Trump and his ties to Russia.
Apparently, that is really hard to establish.
It is just horrifying beyond words.
And I just want to give a couple of...
Thoughts. We need to improve people's childhoods.
This is no excuse. This is no cry for sympathy or anything like that.
But as a matter of cause and effect, we need to start improving people's childhoods.
We need to have moms and dads there.
We need to have stable family structures.
We need to stop dumping our kids in daycare.
We need to improve schools.
We need to give parents and children choices about how education occurs and We need to stop hitting our children.
We need to stop yelling at our children.
We need to reason with them.
We need to be peaceful with them.
That is going to do a lot.
It's not like everybody who had an abusive childhood grows up to be violent.
But the vast majority of people who are violent had abusive childhoods.
And that is the causality we really, really need to focus on.
We cannot magically go in, of course, and change everyone's childhood for the better as it is occurring.
But we can inquire of and give sympathy to those who've been ruined by the dark shadows of parental evil in their early years.
Ask the people around you.
How was your childhood? Tell me about it.
Don't give off. Well, the parents are doing the best they could, but the knowledge they had...
Forget all of that.
We need moral clarity.
We need sympathy. We need to bring healing rain to the parched deserts of exploded histories.
We need to give sympathy to those who've been harmed.
Not to those who've committed acts of evil such as this.
After that, they are past the shadows.
They are in the land of the devil and they cannot be recovered.
This guy in particular, his brains roll over a hotel wall for God's sakes.
But prevention, prevention, prevention.
Give sympathy. Ask questions.
Forget about the weather. Forget about sports.
Forget about all the nonsense that passes for conversation these days.
Only connect, as he enforced the road.
Connect, connect, connect.
Ask people important questions about their history.
Have moral clarity in the suffering that they have experienced.
Identify the immorality of those who harm children, who destroy children, who attack children, who beat children, who indoctrinate children.
Reach out with words.
Capture the connection and provide the healing of genuine visibility and sympathy for the wrongs and the evils that people have suffered through no fault of their own as children.
That is my prescription for the world as a whole.
Because every time we distract ourselves from the necessary conversations about our early origins, every time we do that, Our world shrinks.
Don't you feel it? You feel it, right?
You feel the world.
It is shrinking. It is getting smaller.
Well, you can't go to this concert.
You can't go to this festival.
You can't go in Sweden here.
You can't go in England there.
There's this acid attack.
There's this bomb. There's this explosion.
There's this shooting. There's this nightclub.
Terrorism. And this is the common thing you see.
This is the common thing you see.
Wherever people are gathered and having fun and enjoying themselves, where they are dancing and singing and carousing in carefree abandon, that is where the darker devils of the species gather and sharpen their claws and load their bullets.
If you want to have fun in this world, we must give more thought to those harmed by this world.
It is not an excuse.
I really want to be clear on this.
I'm talking about causality and prevention, not sympathy for the evil.
These people attack where people are having fun.
The question is why? Well, there is a hatred of the good for being the good.
There is a hatred of fun for being fun.
But there is also when you are desperately damaged by a brutalized history.
And I can't imagine what the psychopath did to his children those many decades ago.
But when you have been so brutally scarred, harmed and broken...
By insistent and infesting evil in the house which should be your sanctuary and your castle in the world, the house of your childhood, when you are brutalized in this manner and you see people dancing carefree past the little bars of your underground dungeon.
You see people while you are locked in a dark cage in a deep well.
You see people dancing carefree and you wonder, why can they not see me?
Why can they not see the pain?
Why... Are they so indifferent?
Why do they not care? Why do they not ask?
And you begin to hate.
I think some people do begin to hate.
And the laws of the world around you, not just the laws on the books, the laws of the courts, the moral laws, the laws of humanity, the golden rule, the law of reciprocity, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Well, we steal.
Because we were stolen from.
We kill because our souls were murdered early, often.
That is the case.
There may be inexplicable evil.
In a sense, the genetic or soulful possession by unholy forces.
I don't know any... Philosophy can't address any of that.
Philosophy can address the cancers caused by smoking.
Metaphorically, it cannot address the genetic ones.
But where we have a choice, if you dance and skip and sing in a world full of the broken zombies eaten by the predators of early histories, it is a dangerous path.
In some ways, childhood is getting worse.
Empathy has significantly declined.
If kids are in daycare for more than 20 hours a week, they experience exactly the same symptoms as maternal abandonment.
In other words, kids who are put in daycare for 20 hours or more a week react the same as if their mothers were dead or gone.
That is not healthy. That is not productive.
That is not good. That is not positive.
We have rampant pornographic use.
We have video games.
Chilling and cooling our capacity to connect with other human beings.
The vast majority of human communication is non-verbal.
You don't get it on text. You don't get it on the phone.
You don't get it face-to-face.
Body language, eye contact, gestures.
Communication is fundamentally Italian, not robotic.
What are we losing in our separation from each other?
One of our souls, our virtues, our challenges, our future is draining away in the well of alienation and isolation and mere dopamine grabbing pixel stimulation.
How can we solve all of this?
We talk. We listen.
We judge. We connect.
We provide sympathy and clarity to those who are harmed.
