On Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock And Comfortable Media Narratives

We know a lot about Stephen Paddock, the gunman who killed fifty-eight people at a Las Vegas concert with bump stocks and semiautomatic rifles, but the pattern makes so little sense that we know nothing at all of the man himself. In fact, it seems as if he went out of his way to obfuscate his own life before going on what he surely knew was a suicide mission.

And now, the media narrative emerges in its final form:

A jailed man who gave a statement to authorities in November said he encountered a man he believed was Stephen Paddock and who told him that Federal Emergency Management Agency “camps” setup after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin' down doors and...confiscating guns.”

“Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” the man said Paddock told him less than a month before the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”

These statements come from a man who has been Left-leaning his entire life. The pattern makes no sense: how does a lifelong Leftist suddenly swing right?

We can find some answers in the movie The Life of David Gale (2003). In this film, a foe of the death penalty is convicted of murder and executed. Spoiler: he engineers his own sacrifice so that it will be revealed later that he was innocent, making the death penalty look horrible and vicious.

Leftists think like this. Stephen Paddock never did a conservative thing in his life, pursued multiple women of other races, and championed Leftist causes. Like his father, he seemed to have accelerating mental problems as he aged.

Instead of making a hard case and arguing for it selectively, I offer this conjecture: Stephen Paddock died a Leftist. His goal was to get guns banned; his method was to use guns in a massacre while impersonating a Right-winger. In a Leftist interpretation, he did a good thing, because now guns are closer to being banned, "saving" many more lives.

Knowing media as he did, Paddock knew exactly how to portray himself as a Right-wing fanatic and what to mention when he spoke to witnesses. Having had no interest in guns for a long time, he could suddenly purchase a large number of them, and fit into the media trope of the lone white aggressor.

While the media kicks this one to death and conspiracy theories fly, it makes sense to look at the most obvious answer: a man who knew he wanted to suicide also wanted his suicide to count for something. A senseless murder leading to reduced gun rights would allow him to feel that, in the ends-over-means calculus of Leftism, he died a hero.

In this way, he fits the profile both of school shooters and suicide bombers. School shooters are suicides who want to go down in a blaze of fame and glory; suicide bombers are suicides who want a socially acceptable way to self-destruct. He gained both, since his cryptic acts still fascinate many and the Left is grateful for a new talking point in the war against guns.