Tag Archives: Stephen Paddock

2019-01-11 · 10:19 am

What makes mass shooters tick?

Upshot, as it were: Help the police do their job in this dangerous world.

There were warning signs about the shooter: Ignored, of course. The Canadians want to think that everyone is nice all the time. How dare we ever even insinuate that someone might not be nice. Everyone is entitled to be thought of as being nice! And then tantrums and hissy fits ensue. Just like in these USA these days.

Image result for hissy fit gif

The upshot of that ignorance: train up not only to see the warning signs but to act on them. It’s called situational awareness. But it’s not as easy as all that. Quick and easy solutions are usually the fast road to death and grieving. Sure, arm the police. Sure, pay attention to the guy who says he wants to kill people. Easy. Do that. But those aren’t the only things.

For instance, what about the Stephen Paddock or whatever his name is, who shot up Las Vegas? To this day “no one knows the motive.” Really? Cowards! How does one get people to face reality? See my rant on the cowardice of some of our intel community:

Stephen Paddock’s motivation and our motivation in not finding his motivation

Humility. Humility. Humility. Start with oneself. Sure, we all have unrepeatable circumstances by which – right now anyway – none of us would do those terrible things. But that’s an occasion for us to congratulate ourselves to the point where we don’t know that by so doing we give ourselves a licence to do those very things. Ah, the irony of it. People are afraid of irony. It’s too hard hitting. It’s offensive. It’s to be dismissed as literary trickery. And because of that arrogance that we are all better than the rest of men, people will die either because we won’t catch out those who are murderous or we ourselves will fall into that violence. Impossible, you say? Just following “orders” you say? Where have we heard that before by people who have congratulated themselves? It happens more quickly than you think.

Solution (in case you missed it): Look at the link about Stephen Paddock above.

No, really! Click.

hilaire bellocAnd if you fail to understand irony. Think of Jesus on the Cross, standing in our place, the Innocent for guilty, He bearing the weight of our evil, becoming like a mirror of our evil. And now, with that in mind, read over this frightening bit on irony from the great Hilaire Belloc:

“To the young, the pure, and the ingenuous, irony must always appear to have a quality of something evil, and so it has, for […] it is a sword to wound. It is so directly the product or reflex of evil that, though it can never be used – nay, can hardly exist – save in the chastisement of evil, yet irony always carries with it some reflections of the bad spirit against which it was directed. […] It suggests most powerfully the evil against which it is directed, and those innocent of evil shun so terrible an instrument. […] The mere truth is vivid with ironical power […] when the mere utterance of a plain truth labouriously concealed by hypocrisy, denied by contemporary falsehood, and forgotten in the moral lethargy of the populace, takes upon itself an ironical quality more powerful than any elaboration of special ironies could have taken in the past. […] No man possessed of irony and using it has lived happily; nor has any man possessing it and using it died without having done great good to his fellows and secured a singular advantage to his own soul.”

[Hilaire Belloc, “On Irony” (pages 124-127; Penguin books 1325. Selected Essays (2/6), edited by J.B. Morton; Harmondsworth – Baltimore – Mitcham 1958).]

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2018-02-27 · 7:56 am

Past FBI cases: not Psych 101, just 99. Doesn’t bode well for present cases.

psychology 101

After editing Father Gordon’s post for tomorrow’s These Stone Walls entry, I busied myself, on this day-off, with writing an article analyzing some FBI analysis. After just finishing, what was written disappeared from the computer and WordPress. Glitches!

The gist of it was that people are more complex than merely reacting to the frustration of being smacked down in life, which was the height of psychological analysis that one agent in charge had to bring to a case. The previous day I had been listening to a YouTube documentary on an FBI case while busied with some other things in the kitchen. The agent comment on crime as mere reaction caught my attention as being one of the more stupid things I’ve heard for a long time, especially since this was about a string of similar crimes committed over years by the same individual.

  • Sometimes perps have an ideology to follow, such as with Islamicist terrorists, who are often otherwise well educated, often professors, successful in their careers, have wonderful families and are totally sociable. It’s about violent power. That will be analyzed in some upcoming chapters in Jackass for the Hour.
  • Sometimes perps have a thing about control, calculation even, as power. See: Stephen Paddock’s motivation and our motivation in not finding his motivation
  • If vengeance was possibly a motivation starting someone in a certain direction, that can morph quite differently into violence as liberation. Was ROTC a paradigm ripped from moral context for Nikolas Cruz and turned upside down? We need an identity in our lives greater than patriotism do we not?
  • Sometimes it’s what’s existential that is taken as power, such as with the KKK, such as with William Aitcheson, or what was that guy’s name, Dylann Roof?
  • Sometimes perps are simply replaying things that have happened to them and are figuring out their own problems by setting up situations. That was case of that documentary, but that’s hardly a simple lashing out. It may be a “reaction” generally speaking, but it has morphed into a power trip where the power has become an answer that has changed the question.

So, a common theme here is power, a power ultimately fulfilled in self, the power of the individual, but therefore an individuality without identity, power that therefore becomes the identity, power without reason.

This is that to which we all tend if we do not have an identity of being creatures loved by their Creator.

This identity in love is what is absent from Islam, which cannot believe in God as One who loves us so much as to stand in our place to have the right in His own justice to have mercy on us. Jesus took on punishment, death, we deserved for sin. Islam rejects this as that which is impossible for God. God cannot love us so very much they scream, even as they explode into a million bits while killing untold numbers of others. This is not true religion. Islam is not a religion of peace. Islam is not a religion.

This identity in love is what the other perps described above also lack.

This identity in love is what is lacking from the analysis of law enforcement.

But the FBI should remember this: It is not separation of Church and State that the Constitution puts forth as law. No, no. And it is not that the State is to fear the free exercise of religion even, say, when doing one’s job for the State. No, no. That first amendment is about the State not interfering with the free exercise of religion.

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2017-10-12 · 10:32 am

Stephen Paddock’s motivation and our motivation in not finding his motivation

Kryptos 1

It’s really not that hard, not that Kryptic. To whatever degree one is dedicated in all loyalty in all love with God who is love, with Jesus who brings us into that love, that is just how much we become indignant with that which goes out of its way to give ourselves an excuse not to notice that love and truth. To whatever degree I’m dedicated to Jesus, that’s how much I’m disgusted by the claims that no one knows anything about the motivations of a Stephen Paddock: he’s an anomaly, it is said, someone who broke, who is crazy, who is pushed by whatever circumstances to do what he did. The last thing anyone wants to say is that someone can actually choose to embrace the lie of the “power of evil”, i.e., nihilism, sovereignty over vacuousness.

Thus, when we see Jesus on the cross because He was good and kind and unrelenting in merciful truth, we say that this is diabolical, only. But Jesus didn’t die to redeem the devil. He died to redeem us. If He suffered to stand in our place, that means that we ourselves were just that evil in original sin and our own sin. The devil is no excuse.

Here’s the truth about God’s love: He stepped into this world knowing that we, of whatever culture, of whatever country, of whatever epoch in history He entered to be among us, that we would turn on Him and torture Him to death, for we could not possibly tolerate such goodness and kindness and truth, thinking it all to be incriminating of us. We would have to kill him, any and all of us. And we have, by original sin and whatever of our own rubbish. Standing in our place, taking on the punishment for sin, the worst we can give out, death, He had the right in His own justice to have mercy on us, founding His mercy on His justice (Aquinas calling mercy a potential part of the virtue of justice in the Sentences).

In the Apocalypse (1:7) we read that “He is coming amid the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him.” We won’t be able to escape the truth, we won’t be able to escape Jesus at the last judgement. Wouldn’t it be better to realize what the truth of this life is already now?

Being indignant just makes one’s determination to share the greatest love of one’s life, Christ Jesus, with others all the more unstoppable. I’m indignant when I hear that:

  • We’re better than Stephen Paddock; we’re not like the rest of men.
  • We have no need of redemption nor forgiveness because that’s for people who need it, like Stephen Paddock, who, at any rate, is beyond redemption and forgiveness because, you know, what he did was actually bad.

Think about it. That attitude, so incredibly common, gives one a licence to kill. There is no humility. None. And absolutely zero chance of finding a motivation with Stephen Paddock. Why? We fail to look in ourselves. We’re too much like him. We’re afraid to admit it; there’s no admitting: “There but for the grace of God go I.” Jesus didn’t really die for the forgiveness of sin. We didn’t actually kill Jesus off with our sin. Jesus was actually a fool for allowing Himself to be tortured to death, a damn fool.

I remember a local paper covering the Good Friday ecumenical service at the Methodist Church here in town which I had been invited to preach at. Our own Good Friday service (the Mass of the pre-Sanctified as it is called) was later in the day. Anyway, I had mentioned that Jesus had died because of our sins, and what was printed in the paper was that I said that I accused everyone present of being a murderer, with no other nuance, no context. Really?

Stephen Paddock mathematically figured out how to control the god of gaming the system of distraction; killing that god would be the ultimate in attainment of nihilistic power, the only thing left, which is nothing. If we could admit we could be that evil, then of a sudden a thousand other indicators come to light for profiling similar individuals who have made choices in their own unrepeatable but ever so similar histories and circumstances in life. The question is, do we have the humility to recognize the evil, which, by the way, is to admit that know something of it. No one wants to do that, unless one has already done that before the wounds of the Divine Son of God.

If one does not feel the weight (כבוד) of the glory (כבוד) of God manifested with the self-sacrificial love of the Son of God taking our place on the Cross, and so much so that what Stephen Paddock did pales in comparison, one is more like Stephen Paddock than one thinks. The difference is that admission of original sin and our own rubbish and the reception of the grace and forgiveness and friendship of the Son of God does separate us from the likes of a Stephen Paddock more than anything in our own unrepeatable histories. It is only with the introduction of reality provided by the Son of God, only with the introduction of the love and truth of God in our hearts and minds and souls which cuts through the self-congratulatory mind-games by which a Stephen Paddock could do what he did.

Perfect love casts out fear.

Be fearless.

Be full of God’s love and truth.

Rejoice.

Let being indignant help you to share the greatest love of your life, your Creator, your Redeemer.

And then profile with success all the other Stephen Paddocks out there, and stop them, for love of God and love of neighbor.

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2017-10-08 · 3:01 pm

Homily 2017 10 08 – Stephen Paddock: analysis of analysts & motivation profile

las vegas shootings aftermath

I hope I don’t get sued. It’s just my opinion. Free speech don’t you know.

Look, I know someone who was the head of security for a casino under the umbrella of Caesars, that is, number two to the owner. That one had been a special operator for the Department of Defense and in intelligence for that person’s branch of military service. A nice person, but even with that resume, simply not capable of the kind of analysis that needs to be done to prevent such attacks.

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2017-10-03 · 7:54 am

Las Vegas shooter’s motive

“What’s it like to be that unfeeling, that evil? Complete disregard for innocent lives. I’ll have to ask a Muslim someday.“

That’s the ignorant comment of someone on a news story about the shooting.

If we cannot admit that we ourselves could commit any sin, any crime, then we cannot admit that we are guilty through original sin and our own sin of the torturing to death of the Son of the Living God, who stood in our place, the Innocent for the guilty, taking in the death we deserve, the worst we can give out, death, so that He might have the right in His own justice to have mercy on us. Creating us with free will and then, when we messed up, redeeming us with mercy founded on justice makes the forgiveness credible, majestic. Humility dissipates cynicism, bitterness.

If we do not accept that, we give ourselves a licence to kill. Anyone who says that he’s better than someone else is giving himself a licence to kill. Do you think you’re better than Stephen Paddock? You would never do what he did? Given the life circumstances and being without the grace of God you would. So would we all. There but for the grace of God…

The shooter’s motive? Look in yourself. Look at the wounds on the Son of the Living God who will come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire. Amen.

Analysts should look at this.

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