Say What is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we treat listeners to some of the most wacky, astonishing and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class. Here is the latest episode:
Tim Donner: The mind and motive of a mass murderer, that's the mystery nobody has yet been able to unravel about Stephen Paddock, the perpetrator of the Las Vegas massacre that left 59 people dead and hundreds of others injured. We may never know the answer, but the closest we might ever get to understanding why a relatively ordinary person like Paddock - with no history of mental illness, no criminal record, no known political or religious views or involvement, can descend into a psychotic break with no evident explanation - came late this week in a bizarre interview with the gunman's brother, Eric Paddock. He was rambling, often incoherent, and displayed an almost dismissive attitude about what's been said about his brother, Stephen Paddock. Eric Paddock talked about how he and his brother were raised.
Eric Paddock: My mom was born in the depression. She's had a tough life. Her husband was a as…le, a total as…le. He ran off, left her with four kids. She raised four kids on a secretary's salary in the '60s and '70s, and some of us weren't real good kids, I mean, you guys are probably gonna investigate me. I wasn't a wonderful human being when I was a kid. We were bad kids.
Tim Donner: Well, as is so often the case, the mass murderer we know is, according to friends and family, "a swell guy who looked after his own."
Eric Paddock: Steve took care of the people he loved. He helped make me and my family wealthy, I mean, he's the reason I was able to retire. I mean, this is the Steve we know, we knew, he was a private guy. That's why you can't find out anything about him, that's why there's no pictures. Is he such a weirdo because he didn't have a Facebook page and posted 50,000 damn pictures of himself every day? Who's weird?
Tim Donner: Well, I would say he, Eric Paddock, is weird. And to the issue of whether his brother involved others in his mass murder scheme, he said…no way.
Eric Paddock: People are saying "oh, he must have had help." Steve had no help. Steve didn't take help. It did not take a village for Steve. Steve was a standalone guy.
Tim Donner: Which begs the question, how could Eric Paddock be so certain his brother had no help. He said it like he knows. You can read into that what you want, but he also seemed certain about the timeframe of his brother's psychotic break.
Eric Paddock: This happened to my brother, whatever caused him to do this happened in a very ... once again I don't know what a very short time period is to you, but this happened over the course of months. It happened over the course of months.
Tim Donner: So why did Stephen Paddock transfer $100,000 right before the massacre to his girlfriend, Marilou, who was traveling in the Far East?
Eric Paddock: If you want to think Steve's an evil genius, how can you not think it was easy enough for him to come up with a scheme to take the money and have it available for Marilou in a place where she would be safer to be. He wanted her, and I mean this is today's thing I might be wrong about, he manipulated her to be completely as far away from this and safe when he did this. As he was descending into hell, he wanted to try to take care of her.
Tim Donner: Again there was some certainty in what Eric Paddock said there, just like about having no help and that his brother's psychotic break happened over a period of months, all the while claiming he knows nothing about why his brother murdered all those people. Strange, very strange. And Eric Paddock also had a ready answer for his brother being able to tote 23 weapons into the Mandalay Bay Resort.
Eric Paddock: You know, this nonsense about how did he get the guns into the ... you take a $100 bill and you hand ... oh, I'm sorry ... you take a $100 bill and you hand it to the bell cap and they go "oh, Mr. Paddock, oh, hi, you got a couple bags today? Okay, we'll take those up." I mean, there's no magic there.
Tim Donner: Again that almost dismissive act cut like a knife through the friends and families of the victims. The same attitude he displayed when he was asked about whether his brother had an anger issue.
Eric Paddock: If we were gonna call him crazy because he's an angry person, then you had better call everybody on the news from 4:00 to 12:00 at night a crazy person. Okay? That's the end of the day. Was he an angel? Of course, he wasn't an angel. Did he [beep 00:05:07] about people who annoyed the crap out of him? Of course he did.
Tim Donner: Wow. Eric Paddock then summed up the whole situation thusly.
Eric Paddock: This is what everybody's so scared about right now. When Steve can do this, we are in deep [beep 00:05:28] because there's just nothing there. You find me where someone who's like Steve does this, I hope the hell they find, when they do the autopsy, that there's a tumor in his head or something, because if they don't, we're all in trouble.
Tim Donner: Indeed we are. Now perhaps, just perhaps, we will discover that Steven Paddock experienced a psychotic break something like Charles Whitman, who committed a mass murder at the University of Texas in 1966, and who we later learned had sought professional help for overwhelming violent impulses, including fantasies about shooting people from the very tower he turned into a sniper's lair. Perhaps there will be a physical or physiological explanation, but we don't have one yet.
But the larger issue is the infamy that's so readily available to people who do this. They know their names will forever be etched in the history books and are apparently willing to die in return for forging a legacy of evil that will be attached to them for all eternity. It's true with jihadists, as it is with anyone else willing to die in return for getting their names in the history books or in the good graces of whatever god they worship if any god at all.
Unlike those on the left who advance the preposterous notion that we have to "do something," that more gun laws will stop a guy like Stephen Paddock, that outlawing bump stocks will stop a mass murderer, in the end, the sad reality is that there's really nothing we can do about it.
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