Las Vegas Active Shooter – Active Killer Motive Unknown

Last October in Las Vegas, Steven Paddock, a 64-year-old retiree, fired more than 1,000 rounds into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. He killed 58 people and injured some 800 more. Months later, investigators still don’t know what Paddock’s motive for the shooting was.

In a press conference, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, when announcing his department’s release of its final criminal investigative report, said, “By all accounts Stephen Paddock was an unremarkable man.”

Lombardo said there were signs that Paddock had a troubled mind prior to the shooting, but those were not enough to concern law enforcement. And that is a major problem with trying to stop these incidents before they happen. Often it is just too difficult to know which people will actually commit crimes, and which won’t. Because of the freedoms we have in this country, freedoms I don’t want to lose, we can’t just lock people up because of what they “might” do, not without overwhelming evidence that they will anyway.

Paddock killed himself in the Mandalay Bay hotel room that he fired from, and therefore law enforcement were never able to actually interview him to determine why he did what he did. So when it comes to motive, Lombardo said investigators had to make their best educated guess based on available evidence. This was difficult because Paddock didn’t leave any political or social manifesto to explain himself like other mass killers have done. Nor were any ties to extremist groups found.

The sheriff said he believes Paddock was driven by a number of factors, including recent gambling loses. The FBI’s behavioral analysis unit is expected to release a report on Paddock’s psychopathology by the end of the year.

Studying these events, we find that there is no single profile for someone who goes on an active killer rampage. There is no real common active shooter. It does vary from incident to incident. And studying them does help us prepare for, and to possibly prevent or react faster to, future events. And sadly, there will be future incidents. This is why I think it is so important for people to read Survive a Shooting and have a plan, or to go further and attend a course to better prepare. You want a plan before the incident occurs, because in the chaos of terror, it’s too late to ponder and think about what you should do.

Near the end of Lombardo’s press conference, he said that Las Vegas was a safe tourist community, but he also said that a similar incident could happen again. That is why it is important for all of us to have a simple plan of what we would do. This plan can increase our odds of surviving such a event. That is why I wrote Survive A Shooting, and why I teach the classes I teach, and speak on the topic to any group that wants to bring me in.

Stay safe!

The 187-page report: LVMPD Criminal Investigative Report on the 1 October Mass Casualty Shooting