Guest Post by Mark Steyn
On Friday morning I started the day on the curvy couch with “Fox & Friends” to discuss the latest developments in the Las Vegas attack and the Democrats’ push for “gun control”. The perpetrator of the deadliest single-shooter massacre in US history is so unlike his predecessors that it seems to me that nothing in his history is coincidental: there is a reason for everything, even if we will never know it – all the way down to, for example, such peripheral details as the fact that he owned property in both Mesquite, Nevada and Mesquite, Texas.
It is also interesting to note that Stephen Paddock apparently cased the “Life is Beautiful” concert in Las Vegas, headlined by the rapper Chance. The victims at that event would have been very different from those at the country music festival, and the press coverage would have been, too: Democrats would have stampeded down the “white supremacy” track rather than “gun control”. One senses that the killer, in his cold calculations, was aware, for whatever reason, of all these factors.
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Click below to watch me with Steve, Abby and Brian:
Among the many emails I’ve received is this one, from a gentleman at a London think tank whose job is to focus on “the analysis of economic and political issues and outcomes”. Make of this what you will, but he writes:
Today we turned our collective minds to the the shooting in Las Vegas as a test case since the event is extraordinary in that thus far no one appears to have identified a cause behind the carnage. This is our reasoning:
The fact pattern in this event is striking for not fitting any known profile. In particular:
The gentleman concerned had no known political or religious affiliations.
The level of premeditation is unusual and crystal clear from his mass buying of guns and the cautious systematic smuggling operation to ferry them to his room together with the illegal modifications and the position of the room he chose and occupied for several days beforehand.
This denotes a deeply serious commitment to his act. And one which leaves no doubt that act was conceived to generate the maximum possible publicity.
The question then is: ‘publicity’ for what exactly?
And the answer would appear to be ‘nothing that can be identified’.
But consider the moral behind the following joke (I assure you it has a point beyond humour):
A known smuggler crosses the border every day at a particular crossing. Every day his suitcase is searched and nothing is found. After 20 years he crosses for a last time and confides to the policeman who has been searching him all that while that he is retiring.
The policeman asks him ‘Ok – since you’re clean today and will never cross the border again tell me this – you’ve been smuggling – right?’
The man says ‘Right.’.The policeman says ‘Smuggling what?’
The man says ‘Suitcases.’
Hold that ‘hiding in plain sight’ concept as we return to the shooting. This man amassed (rough figures) 24 guns in the hotel and another 19 at his home – 42 guns in total. He spent some $100,000 on buying them. The guns at his home are one thing but he also spent days filling his hotel room with more weapons and ammunition than he could ever conceivably use along with an array of advanced modifications and accessories.
Everything brand new. And very expensive. And mostly entirely redundant. Representing in effect an enormous waste of money and time and risk.
Except that is in the realm of generating massive publicity. Guaranteed massive publicity.
Yet despite having gone to enormous lengths to achieve that goal we are asked to believe this same man never troubled – never took the most elementary steps – to speak to that publicity. Indeed left behind no trace of anything that might demonstrate indicate or even hint at his motive or motives.
That would appear to make very little sense.
We would argue the opposite – that it makes absolute sense.
Because this gentleman did not simply fail to leave behind a motive; He took substantial trouble to ensure that no motive could be found – or attributed to him. All of which can lead us to only one conclusion:
It has been said that ‘the medium is the message’.
In this case that is the literal truth. There is only one plausible motive for what this man did. And here it is:
This man wished to telegraph to America in graphic form the hard irrefutable evidence that guns and gun ownership and the ease of gun purchase in America are an evil and must be controlled. On that hypothesis everything now makes sense. And it must be said his concept has a certain demented genius.
Because even if the public learns and believes that his motive was all about ‘guns’ the horror of the act itself – an act to protest such acts –
is in some ways even worse for being plain evidence that there is no limit to the insanity to which guns can be put.Here then is our argument:
1. His long planned and carefully executed purchase of a virtual armoury of unprecedented scope and scale guaranteed that very armoury would inevitably become the central focus of the media.
2. His assiduous removal of evidence of any tangible motive also removed the possibility that the news cycle might move on from guns – simply the means of the killing – to considering the more interesting issues of motive and message – be it political or economic or environmental or anything else.
3. This man was a highly methodical and systematic thinker. Nothing in the scenario that unfolded was left to chance – even down to positioning cameras to surveil the corridor. It is therefore inconceivable that this was all done in this precise manner for no reason. That there is no message.
But of course there is indeed a message. It only happens to be implicit instead of explicit. That message is ‘guns’. And that message is being trawled over every minute of every day on every network in America. Given the nature of the man and the facts this is not a chance outcome. On the contrary given the known facts it is indeed the only possible outcome. An outcome so obvious that anyone given the full story beforehand would have predicted as inevitable.
4. The people he chose to kill supports the hypothesis on ‘guns’. Country and Western fans are virtually guaranteed to own or at least to defend the ownership of guns. By a certain logic this provides the gunman with two sound moral positions (because it is not beyond possibility he has a conscience):
First – While killing a very large number of innocent people is an horrendous crime it is nonetheless entirely justifiable – in moral terms – if it causes a restriction on guns. Because such a restriction would – it is widely held – save innumerable lives in the long run. There is no evidence for this but it is still a widely and passionately held belief.
Second – Since the people he is shooting are actively or passively defenders of guns and an obstacle to gun control they are by definition responsible in part for all the people who have been and continue to be killed by guns.
So our London analyst is arguing that this was an act of mass murder to protest the ease with which Americans can commit mass murder. I’m reminded of the entirely idiotic Liam Neeson movie from a year or two back, Non-Stop, in which he battles terrorists who’ve hijacked a plane to protest the ease with which terrorists can hijack a plane. At the key moment in the bad-guy monologue, my kids and I burst out laughing. But presumably Universal Pictures found it credible enough to greenlight the project – and, as I recall, most people in the movie theater seemed to be taking it seriously.
At one level, it’s a ludicrous explanation – and yet it has the ruthless logic of a psychopath, of a man who, like a good screenwriter, subordinates all other considerations to the internal logic of an absurd proposition. It’s also a rare explanation that explains everything: the guns in the hotel, the explosive material in the car, the guns in his house, and in his other house, and doubtless in his other other house. To reprise my reader’s joke: He was smuggling suitcases.
And, as our analyst notes, in the void of any motive, the Democrats and media are now talking about the armory – should we restrict the number of guns? the types of guns? the modifications to guns?
Mark Steyn is a clever fellow as I suppose are his London friends. That they can come up with no reason better than this just shows how unfathomable Stephen Paddocks act was.
I watched a YOUTUBE video the other day of two young men climbing and dangling atop the Golden Gate Bridge at night. No money in it for them just the satisfaction of doing something that would terrify others. Kicks!
Could it just be that Paddock bored with high stakes gambling needed something even stronger to get his adrenaline flowing and to show the world he wasn’t afraid to do the unimaginable?
…it makes a lot of sense! You beat the shit out of your kids to protest child abuse. You get roaring drunk and sideswipe an entire parking lot of cars to protest the liquor industry.
And you go out and contract AIDS to protest homosexuality. Impeccable logic if you are a academician or otherwise invested in idiotic/magical thinking..
Stephen Paddock is a patsy. Period. The evidence is overwhelming and it is beyond shocking to hear ANYONE who has examined all the evidence actually believe that he had anything to do with it. O just feel plain sorry for you folks who can’t see it. You just refuse to believe your eyes and ears and testimony from those who knew him and instead latch on to whatever the MSM tells you like good little shills. Sad.
Stephen Paddock is a patsy. Period.
Yup. At this point, the most charitable possible assessment for any notion of Paddock as lone evil mastermind is: Catastrophically naive – a polite way of saying fucking retarded.
An absurd proposition, singularly focused, mental illness- yep, he was a liberal.
We need to skip the speculation. We already know all we’re allowed to know and all we need to know. When a party has a monopoly of violence, it has control of the information flow, or lack thereof. No matter how screwed up the operation may have been, once the desired effect has been attained, shut off the spigot, ignore the doubters (especially grieving family members) and call the rest conspiracy theorists. Don’t despair though, in 3 more years you can have another vote.
I’m not gonna buy into this speculation.
Yes grasshopper…you already have.
ISIS still insists he’d converted to Islam 6 months earlier. His behavior would seem to confirm that.
Unlike many terrorist groups,ISIS usually only takes credit for attacks that are really perpetuated by their people.
He had also been to the mideast within the last few years while on a cruise.
None of us are ever likely to know the real reason he committed this massacre but I’d bet he was so full of rage against America that he decided to take out as many people as possible.
ISIS is USeses.
If that ,condemning guns, was his motive he would have let us know. And we may find that he eventually did so.
Out on a limb…
If Seinfeld can make a hit show about nothing, why cant a shooter make a massacre with the same intent?
Key Witness in Las Vegas Shooting Kills Self and Daughter Following FBI Raid
A key witness in the Las Vegas shooting massacre has killed himself and his disabled daughter in a horrific murder-suicide shortly after the FBI raided his home. John Beilman was wanted for questioning by federal agents in connection with a communications device discovered in suspected shooter Stephen Paddock’s hotel room.
Investigators searched Beilman’s Fairport home the day before he shot his severely disabled daughter and himself, according to sources close to the investigation. Agents executed a search warrant and raided Beilman’s Williamsburg Drive home the day before he took his daughter, Nicole, into the backyard and shot her and then himself in the back of the head with a 12-gauge shotgun. John Beilman’s 27-year-old daughter, Nicole, had Rett Syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. Nicole Beilman relied upon a wheelchair and was dependent on her parents for care.
According to this report, upon the FBI searching the Mandalay Bay Hotel room used by CIA gun runner Stephen Paddock, a cell phone charger was discovered that had no accompanying phone—with SVR technology experts noting that this type of charger is used to charge a CP502520 3.0V 600mAh Li-MnO2 Non-rechargeable Thin Cell Battery used in various communication devices by both US Special Forces and CIA forces. The company making this unique lithium battery, this report details, is Ultralife Corporation, based in Newark, New York, that specializes in military communications systems for the Pentagon—and whose lead engineer for this particular communication systems development was John Beilman.
Listing himself as a “product design and manufacturing professional”, this report continues, John Beilman was employed by Ultralife Corporation between 2007-2012 Lwhere he worked on various top-secret communications systems for the US military—thereafter his leaving to become a top engineer at the General Motors research facility located in Rochester New York. Fearing that Ultralife Corporation had been secretly funneling their US military communications systems to the CIA, this report notes, this past Tuesday (3 October), the FBI raided the home of John Beilman under a secret US Federal Court warrant—and that caused Beilman, less than 12 hours later, during the early morning hours of Wednesday (4 October), to wheel out his severely disabled daughter Nicole into his home’s backyard where she was executed, with Beilman then killing himself too—and that was followed 48 hours later (6 October) by the Pentagon awarding Ultralife Corporation new contracts valued at over $49 million.
The CIA, this report further notes, has long been known to eliminate witnesses to their “murder sacrifice” “false flag” operations—and that includes the hundreds of witnesses mysteriously killed following the 9/11 “Tower Sacrifice”, and the, likewise, hundreds of witnesses mysteriously dying following the “King Sacrifice” murder of President John F. Kennedy—and that London’s Sunday Times reported the “the odds against these witnesses being dead by February 1967, were one hundred thousand trillion to one.” The FBI claim they didn’t protect, or at the very least put under 24-hour surveillance, John Beilman following their raid on his home, due to American domestic intelligence experiencing a manpower shortage in their Las Vegas massacre investigation.
Fairport Police Chief Samuel Farina said it appears a father killed his daughter then killed himself. The department is working along with the Monroe County Sheriffs Department. (Oct. 4, 2017) Meghan Finnerty.According to D&C, John Beilman committed the murder-suicide shortly after 5:20 a.m., Fairport police say. Fairport police said Beilman’s wife, Donna Beilman, was inside the home and did not hear the shots that took the life of her husband and daughter. Fairport Police Chief Samuel Farina said John Beilman left behind a “goodbye note” to his wife that indicated the circumstances of the shooting but not a motive. A neighbor of Beilman reported that he saw two police cars near the home the day before the killings.
Farina said this week that police had not responded to any calls at the home. The FBI and federal prosecutors declined to comment. A federal magistrate judge would have approved a search of the home. However, approval of a search does not ensure a crime was committed; instead, it is a search for evidence of a crime. Records of federal searches are often filed under seal, and there was no public record available Friday of the search of the Fairport home.
https://whiskeytangotexas.com/2017/10/09/key-witness-in-las-vegas-shooting-kills-self-and-daughter-following-fbi-raid/
“A key witness in the Las Vegas shooting massacre”
There is no evidence presented to back up this claim. Unfortunately, beginning with such a glaring omission is very common these days.
You’d think if the guy wanted to shoot up a 3-day concert, he wouldn’t wait until the last day near the end of the show at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night after a good number of people had already gone home.
Bah this story is so yesterday. We have a scandal in Hollywood, no not Bill Cosby, it’s Harvey Weinstein. Seems he raped a few women. That surely is more important than a mass shooter story that has so many loose ends that it makes Holocaust deniers seem like serious scholars.
I’m tired of this story, wake me when the records are sealed for fifty years after which the entire truth is revealed just like they did for the JFK assassination; Oswald did it.
Now comes the disinformation caravan: additional stories in the hotel with more windows shot out. When the fuck did they say Paddy shot out his windows? What was the hammer for, was he a fan of Trini Lopez?
Somebody suggested frangible bullets. Is it possible for glass to fly that far? Original witnesses said they got hit by small bits of rocks and not bullets.
Very creative thinking but absurd.
I agree with the FACT that you can’t win that much money from the casinos, especially by playing slots. The Casinos do not work that way.
It is not real, nobody wins that much loot from the casinos, unless they are playing with “free money” as in laundering cash.
This is all starting to come together.
he probably wanted out, and this (shooting spree) is his reaction to the words from his handlers: “you will never get out”
Excellent links and plausible theory.
I am convinced.