How about this article from People.  It says Paddock had a no good, bank robbing, psychopathic father, and psycho tends to pass from father to son.  The article also says that Paddock also had a very bad childhood.

None of this explains the very real phenomenon that lone gunmen don't have jobs and girlfriends. 

Why have 24 guns at the crime scene?  Pull up a couch.  

The guns were Paddock's babies.  They were his trophies, his friends, and an extension of his id.  Paddock felt about his guns the way Floyd Mayweather feels about money.    Why didn't Paddock travel light and take his best two guns with a thousand rounds?  He wanted his whole arsenal to be there with him.  Why did he do it?  One does not collect 24 assault weapons without thinking about killing people now and again.

I think there is also a thrill motive for Paddock.  You don't gamble for 20 hours per day without having a bit of an obsessive thrill seeking personality.  Also, gambling probably didn't push his buttons as much as it did at first.  

How then does he have a girlfriend?

Beats me.  Never heard of such a thing.  

It is quite possible for a person to hide the severity of the problem for a long time and fool a romantic partner

"It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery,  inside an enigma."  Winston Churchill

OK, Winnie wasn't really writing about this subject, but the line fits.  This one we may never figure out.

I have a great article, one I share with my psychology students, about the thread binding most terrorists and shooters.  The author labels that thread "TNT."

Testosterone.  Narrative.  Theatre.

The narrative may not make sense to you and I, but almost always there is a statement, manefesto or video that explains the real or perceived insult that the perpetrator (or someone whom they stand proxy for) received.  In this case there is almost a huge effort by Paddock to avoid just that. 

So I think we're stuck with conjecture and assumption.  I don't like that in this case.  So I'm willing to say that we will likley never know what went haywire in his brain or life.  Our natural tendency is to attempt to make sense of such events, or at least a sense that we can sort of grasp.  Perhaps a story of mental illness or mistreatment.  Maybe jihad, maybe jealousy.  But in this case, I'm good with describing this as an unknowable evil act.  Doc, I tend to think it was the "some guy who had a wire snap," deal,  or a slow stretching to the snapping point.

Guns?  I am sure I have friends with 20+ guns.  I'm a deer and elk hunter with 4 rifles of my own.  Three are of the high powered variety, one is a .22 (that has had less than 50 shells through it in 20 years.  Hasn't been out of it's box in 10).  I happen to have three other guns in the house right now, guns left to my nephew by his (maternal) grandfather.  My brother won't have them in the house, so they reside with me until my nephew (now 20) finishes college.  So that makes 7 guns in my house.  And I'm not a gun nut by any means.  I enjoy them, handload for my hunting rifles, belong to a gun range, shoot seasonally and well, and treat them with respect and care.

But I have friends who do that with 20 guns.  BTW, I'm pretty sure that almost all of them do not own the AK variety of firearms. As it is, I am not alarmed by 10, 15 or 20 guns in a gun safe or closet.

But Paddock's guns were so chosen and adapted for such massive firepower that my friends and I offer nothing of real comparison.  There was an intimacy to his planning this tradegy.  It was almost delicately planned.  In that, find the long slow stretch to the actual snapping act.

This is my 37th year in the classroom, 35 years with high school kids. I've always felt that a huge part of my job was to help events make some sense to kids.  Planes flying into buildings, elections, tsunamies, planes disappearing into the Indian Ocean, shootings, you name it, I want kids to have a sense of the event and the reasons for it.

But I can find no reason to assign to this one that I can trust in.  Occasionally that happens.  The best I can do here, without a narrative that makes sense, is still fall back on testosterone and theater.  Could any city more well fit those two variables than Las Vegas?  Hadn't thought about that until right now.  Hmmmmm?

Something "obviously" weird going on here, Doc?  I don't know.   I just see a terrible act, terrible and intimately planned.  But I am not convinced that any "something" weird, a quirky ripple in the universe, could have been identified ahead of time.  Well, minus his moving a tremendous amount of material through a motel and into a room.  Prior to that, radar wasn't going to pick this guy up, unfortunately. 

This mook can't explain it.  I am not sure we ever really will.

My two cents.  You guys probably deserve a refund.

Somebody was asleep at the wheel, in the sense that he moved an arsenal into that room, in just one day, and did it under folks noses.  On the other hand, if you see the same guy bringing in 10 different suitcases (don't know the actual number) do you get alarmed?  And if he moved stuff in over the course of an evening, night and morning, then would any single security guy catch anything amiss?  I don't know.

Didn't see the Adams video, so no comment.  The money transfer?  A guy taking care of his gal seems to be a description that fits the act.  Her willingess to return seems to indicate she had no prior knowledge.

Twice before he checked into Vegas digs adjacent to outdorr music festivals.  It is easy to wonder if he was waiting for just the right one, I have no problem there.  those may have been dry runs, which lends itself to the intimacy and detail in his planning.  It would be interesting to see the surveillance tapes from those motels for those dates.

to everyone else on the internet.  I'll stick with some head scratching facts.  The CEO of MGM, James Murren, sold roughly 80% of his shares in the company about two weeks before the attack, and he wasn't alone.  There were multiple officers, directors, board members,  the largest shareholder Trucinda (of the estate of Kirk Kirkorian, which is being managed by a former director of the company), and an affiliated company that combined sold about 1/2 billion dollars worth of MGM stock weeks before Paddock went off.  Some of the sells were processed on September 11th.  What's more head scratching is that MGM had just announced a 1 billion dollar stock buyback program September 5th.  This information is easily verifiable through the EDGAR database on the SEC website.  I'm in the financial profession and I have pulled up the company 144 filings, and have seen them for myself.  

Another thing I thought was odd, was that the death toll did not rise precipitously from the 500+ people that were injured.  Anyone that has ever gone to a concert, football game, baseball game, knows it can take forever just to get to your car when you're not injured.

Anyone that has undiagnosed mental illness usually self medicates with alcohol and drugs.  Yes, I know Paddock was on anti anxiety medication, but Steve Wynn gave an interview and said Paddock had been coming to his casinos since 2006, at least twice a month and said that any employee of his who had ever come in contact with him never once saw he or his girlfriend ever have a sip of alcohol.....ever.  In Vegas.  From someone who's a thrill seeker?

The security guard resurfaces after skipping out on many interviews, and then shows up on the Ellen show, which just happens to be owned by MGM.

This whole thing is so bizarre. 

The shooting was a terrible and tragic event.  And while I know this isn't really in-keeping with the tone/tempo of the article, all I can say is that any society which can lay legitimate claim to being a 'free' one has to permit its citizens sufficient freedom to behave badly--even terribly and tragically.

But there were definitely failure points along the way here which might have been addressed, primarily by the hotel staff.  Not saying they *should have been* addressed, just that the *might have been*.  Would fostering a culture of greater individual responsibility contribute to those failure points being addressed?  Possibly.  I honestly don't know if there's a remedy to this type of tragedy that doesn't unacceptably curtail freedoms.

My thoughts are with the victims and their families.

It just came to me why the casino might be quiet, or waylay a security guard, or lose a few security tapes. 

Suppose there was a tape showing Paddock packing a cannon or a gun case into the casino. 

and suppose that tape was date stamped to several hours before the murder spree. 

 Guess who is on the hook for a Chapter 7 level string of lawsuits?  The Mandalay Bay casino is worried about being sued for 800 or so counts of negligence, each in the millions of dollars, for allowing a guy to pack 25 guns through the lobby.  This probably explains much of the wierdness of the case.