Recent comments in /f/nottheonion

Numerous_Vegetable_3 t1_jegh64m wrote

Absolutely no idea but the lack of apparent motive & constant changing of the story + restricted access to the people who were involved doesn't help.

Coming out with this absolute bullshit motive doesn't help. The shooter was researching rooms above large concerts for months before Vegas, he even booked a room above lolapalooza in Chicago and didn't check in. He was planning this for a while and researching sites that had nothing to do with casinos or gambling.

This shooting is one of the strangest ones. I don't think anybody has a good idea of the truth, but I think we can all agree that we don't have it yet.

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Numerous_Vegetable_3 t1_jegg8ab wrote

This one gets to me. I do not support conspiratorial thinking, but this one irks me after all this time.

From the Wikipedia article "He had researched large-scale venues in cities such as Boston since at least May 2017,[10] and had reserved a room overlooking the August 2017 Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, but did not use it.[11]"

So... he was researching large concerts months before the shooting, in places that have nothing to do with casinos...

Whatever the real story is with this shooting, we don't have it.

"A report published by the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit in January 2019 said that "there was no single or clear motivating factor" for the shooting.[77]"

The Behavioral Analysis Unit is serious business and if anyone could find a motive it would be them.

Some background (from the little we have) on the shooter is strange "He was a son of Benjamin Paddock, a bank robber who was on the FBI's most-wanted list between 1969 and 1977.[92]"

And the weirdest thing to me: "Investigators found hidden surveillance cameras that were placed inside and outside the hotel room, presumably so Paddock could monitor the arrival of others.[67] The cameras were not in record mode.[68] Police said a handwritten note found in the room indicated Paddock had been calculating the distance, wind, and trajectory from his 32nd floor hotel suite to the concertgoers he was targeting on the festival lot.

So some dude, who was pictured at a womens march in a vagina hat, is setting up monitoring devices, calculating wind & trajectory to perpetrate this... for what? If he had a manifesto, we haven't seen it. We've seen more footage from the shooting 2 days ago.

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Slampumpthejam t1_jegd2tm wrote

Nah doesn't line up. What makes a lot more sense is be was a right wing nutjob.

>>Did the FBI Downplay the Far-Right Politics of Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock?

>Paddock appeared fixated on three pillars of right-wing extremism: anti-government conspiracy theories, threats to Second Amendment rights, and overly burdensome taxes. For instance, one witness told Las Vegas police that Paddock was “kind of fanatical” about his anti-government conspiracies and that he believed someone had to “wake up the American public” and get them to arm themselves in response to looming threats. Family members and associates of Paddock painted a picture of a man who loathed restrictions on gun ownership and believed that the Second Amendment was under siege, according to our review of their statements to investigators after the shooting and other documents compiled by the authorities.

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/22/stephen-paddock-las-vegas-shooting-far-right/

>But tantalizingly, people who encountered Paddock before his shooting say that he expressed conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs, which are characteristic of the far right.

>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.

>“At the time,” her statement says, “I thought, ‘Strange guys’ and wanted to leave.”

>Another man, himself currently in jail, says he met Paddock three weeks before the shooting for an abortive firearms transaction, in the carpark of a Bass Pro Shop. The man was selling schematic diagrams for an auto sear, a device that would convert semi-automatic weapons to full automatic fire. Paddock asked him to make the device for him, and the man refused.

>At this point Paddock launched into a rant about “anti-government stuff … Fema camps”. Paddock said that the evacuation of people by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) after Hurricane Katrina was a 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,” the man says Paddock told him. “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.

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

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DUMP_LOG_DAVE t1_jegantk wrote

Indeed. There’s the glaring issue of police culture. Tribalism is so deeply entrenched in American society that it’s no fucking wonder why law and order built around “us versus them” has done nothing but generate hostility. Good intentions aside, the fact most cops are absolute morons means this culture is going absolutely nowhere without really upending policing in America. It fucking SUCKS how corrupt and racist these power wielding assholes are. Same goes for politicians. It makes me so damn sad.

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neotericnewt t1_jega9mc wrote

I don't think I am minimizing the situation, I think I'm treating the situation as it is. Some kids put a plastic bucket over someone's head. That's it. That's all they did. That's what people are frothing at the mouth about.

I mean seriously, what do you actually think should happen? You think the kids should get charged with assault? Like the other commenters you think they should get beat to a pulp and sent to the hospital?

I think an apology to the woman is all that should happen. They shouldn't have done it, but it was largely a harmless joke. They didn't know that the person had an anxiety disorder and would freak out over it. It was a dumb thing to do, but hey, kids do stupid shit all the time, and this was a pretty minor thing all in all.

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