New documents suggest Las Vegas shooter was conspiracy theorist - what we know

[IronLionZion]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/19/stephen-paddock-las-vegas-shooter-conspiracy-theories-documents-explained

In the documents, those who encountered gunman Stephen Paddock say he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs characteristic of the far right

What’s the latest development in the Stephen Paddock story?
Stephen Paddock was the gunman who killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more last October, when he opened fire from the window of his room at the Mandalay hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.

Yesterday, following legal action from news organizations, the Las Vegas police department released a trove of documents on the investigation, including statements from witnesses and victims.

What did the document release tell us?
Mostly the documents contain harrowing accounts from victims of Stephen Paddock’s shooting spree. There is also an interview with Paddock’s wife. As police said in the press conference announcing the release, there is nothing definitive in the material about Paddock’s motives for the massacre.

In a handwritten statement, one woman says she sat near Paddock in a diner just a few days before the shooting, while out with her son. She said she heard him and a companion discussing the 25th anniversary of the Ruby Ridge standoff and the Waco siege. (Each of these incidents became touchstones for a rising anti-government militia movement in the 1990s.)

She says she heard him and his companion saying that courtroom flags with golden fringes are not real flags. The belief that gold-fringed flags are those of a foreign jurisdiction, or “admiralty flags”, is characteristic of so-called “sovereign citizens”, who believe, among other things, that the current US government, and its laws, are illegitimate.

Right after the shooting, Freepers were claiming he was a pussy hat wearing liberal gun control activist. The evidence says different.

[GusBob]

1. Sounds like hearsay to me

Some lady overhears in a diner and some guy in a parking lot who is now in jail

Surely there is better evidence than this

[Stallion]

5. If She Overheard and Witnessed the Statements Made it is clearly not Hearsay

[lunasun]

3. Gubermint coming for guns, FEMA camps this guy was in RW CT deep

According to the Associated Press, one man told investigators that Paddock believed in the conspiracy theory that the government camps set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency after Hurricane Katrina 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. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made,” Paddock allegedly told the man.

[gratuitous]

4. "Nothing definitive"

If only he'd been wearing a trench coat or on ritalin, then we'd know for sure!

[canetoad]

6. I've read this elsewhere

But can't find the source. I did find this on Wiki:

"According to the Las Vegas Police Department's investigation, Paddock reportedly espoused right wing anti-government and conspiratorial viewpoints, including FEMA conspiracies and a need to arm the people to fight gun control, in the weeks before the shooting.[59]"

Here's where the footnote on that quote leads:

Witnesses: Stephen Paddock Ranted About a Government Plot to Seize Guns Prior to Las Vegas Shooting
Less than a month before he killed 58 people and injured hundreds more at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock ranted to a new friend about a supposed government plot to confiscate guns from the American public. The man, whose statement is among many released by investigators this week, told authorities that he met Paddock just weeks before the massacre after the 58-year-old answered an online ad for “schematics to convert semi-automatic guns to fire automatically,” the AP reports.

The man, whose identity is redacted, spoke to authorities in a jailhouse interview after getting arrested on a “possession charge.” He told police during the interview that he was an unemployed chef who’d become desperate for cash after his trust fund ran dry.

The man said in their conversations Paddock ranted about a popular right-wing conspiracy theory that claims FEMA’s actions after Hurricane Katrina 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,” Paddock said, according to the man. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/witnesses-vegas-shooter-ranted-about-govt-gun-grabbing-plot.html

[IronLionZion]

7. It's because we took God out of schools, and there are too many doors

and everyone is so politically correct these days, and kids have no discipline and need to be beaten more, oh wait....