This might have happened at Lollapalooza at Grant Park instead.
So, maybe Paddock was genuinely and innocently interested in visiting Chicago and attending that music festival. Or maybe he rented some pretty good sniper’s nests overlooking most of the entry/exit gates and a huge swath of the festival grounds.
Was he planning this crazy plan as early as August?
That story has been retracted. They confused her with someone else with a similar name.
Reports are now that he started buying the majority of his guns over the past year so yes, he was probably planning the “crazy” as far back as August, and probably further back than that.
They really need to leave that poor woman alone. I can only imagine all the bullshit she’s getting now over something she had nothing to do with.
From day one this has been a fascinating and intriguing, albeit tragic, story unfolding. A 64-year old accountant with a huge arsenal of weapons and he’s a multi-millionaire, own plane-flying, multiple house-owning, respected gambler in Vegas, gifted mathematician. There are many questions still to be answered but I wondered, from the start, who his clients were?
He investigated Fenway Park…Las Vegas Gunman Scouted Locations in Boston and Chicago, Officials Say
Maybe a new Ted Kaczynski.
The modern media standard seems to be they feel free to completely, including falsely*, trash people who are associated with notorious figures whether or not, and anyway before, any complicity in the bad acts is established.
*rushing out a story based on mistakenly confusing or conflating different people is still false, and it isn’t the first time (like the guy with same name as the Colorado shooter a few years back).
As the article said, there’s not really any hotels with a good line of sight into Fenway. But there are many hotels in the immediate area with a great view of the Boston Marathon route.
Some similarities there, but Paddock chose to commit his atrocities from on high, in a vantage point well above the victims listening to Country music, in a golden ‘palace’, with expensive weapons, after gambling tens of thousands of dollars, ending without any trial or recourse. The contrast to his life where he drove average rentals and lived in several plain homes, but lorded it up in executive gambling suites is something that, as well as leaving no messages, clues or hints to his motivation, will keep people guessing his motives for a long time.
It’s been going on for a long time - see Richard Jewelland the coverage of the Atlanta Olympics bombing in 1996, for example.
Apparently he made his money in real estate investments. Then he gave it all to the casinos at reported rates of $10,000 a day.
His house in Mesquite is hardly a plain home. Though apparently neighbors said he didn’t go in for decorations, it was plain walls on the inside.
The shooter used math to calculate the best shooting angles. As Maxwell Smart would have said…‘…if he had only used his genius for good.’
With the lack of any clear motive conspiracy theories are filling in the gaps in the story. But from what little information has been released the emerging picture is of someone with severe mental illness and not an evil genius mastermind with an agenda.
You are pretty easily impressed if scribbling some formulas about bullet trajectory before unloading thousands of rounds on a random crowd of innocent strangers from a hotel window is a sign of genius.
That makes everyone who shoots a rifle a genius. Or you can look it up on the internet.
Like here.
The human mind is amazingly malleable, and nearly anyone can be fair,y quickly converted into a person capable of doing horrendous things. German farm boys were quickly persuaded to execute the Holocaust, as easily as American farm boys were persuaded to napalm Vietnamese children and watch them burn alive. Pilots commanded to firebomb Dresden had few second thoughts.
Persuasion can come from within or without. Once a fire is lit, a pretext deployed, it is easy to send the human mind down a new path with a new set objectives. That can be done in isolation, without anyone’s external prodding. We have learned in war after war that very few people possess the moral resolve to resist. It does not require an insane madman as the initial building material.
Using napalm or firebombing Dresden didn’t require the human behind the act to witness the result of their action. Shooting 50 people from a hotel window turns you into an instant witness to your actions. Different in my mind.
What, he killed’em with mathematics; what else could it have been?
I don’t find his use of math to make him Extra Special Evil, I find it consistent with the rest of his methodical, planning personality. He seemed to be someone who carefully planned a lot of things, he was an accountant, the math involved was probably trivial by his standards.