The Las Vegas Killer: Why?

Yes, I’m back to posting, after a week of multiple things due at work, and trying keep up with the news out of Las Vegas, and you have likely, as I have, read multiple theories on the killer’s motivation by now, even though officially there is no known motivation.  Officially, from all reports, Paddock has gone to great lengths to ensure that there is no explanation — nothing in e-mail, nothing in the home, nothing in his girlfriend’s account — that provides any information.

But this is what I’m seeing:

ISIS convert.

ISIS claims he converted 6 months ago.  Reports are that ISIS very rarely claims credit for attacks it wasn’t genuinely connected with.

Is this possible?

Well, sure, anything’s possible.  This has been paired up with the fact that his girlfriend is from the Philippines, which has a significant Muslim minority, a portion of which are militants and ISIS-connected, but their relationship dates from 2013, and there’s nothing that suggests that she’s Muslim, and Marilou, Liza, and Amelia (the names of her sisters, according to the Washington Post) are hardly Muslim names.  Maybe it’s just the fact that my parish has a sizeable Filipino community that causes me to believe that, however many Muslims there may be in The Philippines, there are considerably fewer among immigrants to the West.

So “ISIS convert” isn’t really an explanation, because you’d have to go back further and explain, “why would Paddock convert?”  So, yes, sure, you can then say, “ISIS provided the logistical support, fellow radical Muslims kept his arsenal out of sight of his girlfriend” etc., but how do you get from here to there?  This sort of “he was brainwashed” really provides no explanation at all.  Even among young men who convert to radical Islam, there’s a path, in which they are groomed, encouraged to believe that the religion they profess gives them superiority and a reason to dominate others.  There are reports of changes in behavior, because these people don’t simultaneously convert to Islam/Islamic extremism and simultaneously decide to embark on a path of terror that requires keeping their activities secret.

If you have watched a sufficient number of Star Trek TNG reruns, I’ll point you to the episode in which Riker brings back from vacation a game that’s played by putting on Google-Glass-like frames, and using your eyes to track the images.  It releases a shot of a mood-enhancing drug, but also brainwashes the player into nefariously taking over the Enterprise.  When I read the claims that he suddenly converted, it feels like they’re imagining this sort of instant brainwashing occurring.

Brain tumor or injury.

This comes from CNN:

Some readers will remember the University of Texas Tower Sniper, Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people in Austin just over half a century ago. At autopsy, Whitman was discovered to have a tumor pressing against a part of his brain called the amygdala, which is involved in fear and aggression. Is it possible that a similar pathology was happening in Paddock’s brain? Although the likelihood of tumors is low in general, the hypothesis cannot be ruled out until autopsy.

It is important to note that a tumor isn’t the only thing that can cause such changes in behavior: strokes or a traumatic brain injury can do the same. And one disorder in particular deserves mention: frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD). Although the name is long, this simply refers to a deterioration of two lobes of the brain, the frontal and the temporal: two regions that underpin much of the decision-making and emotion that makes us social creatures.

As these brain areas degrade, people develop frontotemporal dementia (FTD) — and this often comes hand-in-hand with violent, asocial behavior. When I heard Paddock’s age, I immediately began to wonder about this, as the onset of the disease is typically in a person’s late 50s.

Drug side effects.

This is a theory offed on Facebook, by John Ringo.  He describes his wife’s descent into madness and her creation of an elaborate plan to serially kill men on the sexual predators list, as a side effect of the anti-depressant Cymbalta — a plan which she did not follow through on but which, Ringo says, demonstrates to him that drugs can have these side effects for a small number of people, and that people who become homicidal don’t just “snap” and go on a spontaneous rampage, but can make these plans secretively, while appearing perfectly normal.

Antifa killer.

This seems rather unlikely, but Zerohedge.com, with a link from Drudge, suggests this, after a set of “unanswered questions” which suggest that Paddock didn’t do this alone, and with a subsequent link to a site called “The Economic Collapse.”  The primary rationale for this claim is that Paddock chose a country music concert, where the audience was white, and disproportionately likely to be Trump supporters and self-identified “patriots.”  This further link itself claims that Antifa literature was found in the hotel room, sourced from Infowars, which cites an anonymous source.

This is one of the more conspiratorial theories, especially because Antifa groups are known for being chaotic and disorganized.  They are not the Red Army Faction, or Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground, and there’s no reason to believe that Antifa has metastasized into some such group.

Something something Dad was a bank robber.

Yes, Dad was indeed a bank robber, but there’s no evidence that points to that having to do with anything.

“Go out with a bang” suicide.

Paddock had allergies, and wasn’t able to maintain his pilot’s license due to high blood pressure, and was reported to scream in bed at night.  He was also at the age when men are most likely to commit suicide (no, it’s not teens or twenty-somethings).  He may have had gambling debts that were going to catch up to him.  To be sure, it doesn’t really explain why he killed 59 people, and would have killed more had he apparently not been startled by the security guard.  But it would at least explain not caring about surviving.

Mental illness.

“Mental illness” isn’t some sort of catch-all that stands on its own.  The movie-theater killer was not just generically mentally-ill.  He had schizophrenia.  But CNN, in the above article, rules this out:

Paddock was almost certainly not schizophrenic. As far as we can tell he had no history of schizophrenia, and besides that, he was 64 years old. Schizophrenia is a young person’s disorder, usually surfacing during the late teens or early twenties.

Adam Lanza’s autism is given as the reason for his own murdering, but there are skeptical voices which report that the symptoms described do not actually fit in with autism at all, but, potentially, again schizophrenia.

Just evil.

The last explanation is the weakest.  Maybe that’s all that’s left, I don’t know.  “He was just an evil man.  He wanted the thrill of shooting at people, and wanted the fame of being the ‘greatest mass killer’ and that was so important to him that he was willing to expend a lot of money and time, and eventually his own life.”

Will we learn?

Here’s the frustrating thing:  I fear that the government investigation will happen so slowly, with so little information released, that we might really never know.

Image:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AMandalayBay2010.JPG; By Kris1123 (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons