This is an optional reading for the students in my CSC 301 Computers and Society class.

Las Vegas Massacre

by Dr. Marek A. Suchenek

October 4, 2015

Copyright and all rights reserved.

This article is posted here for in-class educational use only. No other use or uses is/are allowed.

On October 1, 2017, night a 64-year-old psychopath, Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, through a broken window of his hotel room on 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino at the Las Vegas Strip sprayed hundreds of bullets from his machine gun(s) over on the unsuspecting attendants of the Route 91 Harvest country music open-air festival. The shootout lasted for about 10 minutes and resulted in a massacre in which 58 innocent people killed and some 530 injured. Our thoughts and prayers are with the injured and the grieving families of the deceased.

Warning: The video below is graphic; viewers' discretion is adviced.

Looking at the picture of the killer, it is difficult to recognize any signs of psychopathological evil that must have resided inside of the sick mind (reportedly, he videotaped himself while shooting at the festival crowd) of this despicable criminal. He might have been living among us and we would never suspect how horrible individual was he. Reportedly, he had no criminal record and was considered by many just a regular guy. An oddity here and there, like being a loner and a gambler, but these hardly added to a profile of a mass murderer. Reportedly, he graduated from Cal State Northridge with a degree in business administration in 1977. There were reports that at some point, his net worth was in the order of 2 million dollars.

But then there is something that makes him different from most of us. According to an article [1] in Chicago Tribune, his father, Benjamin Paddock (pictured on the left), was from his early 20's a career criminal (a bank robber, among other "specialties") who was elsewhere characterized by FBI as a "dangerous psychopath with suicidal tendencies." He remained on the FBI Most Wanted list for about 10 years after he escaped prison in 1959. An article in the Chicago Tribune from Jan. 8, 1946, reports (see the photograph on the right) that Ben Paddock, 25, had "confessed stealing 12 automobiles in the last 18 months and selling them for an average of $1,200 each." That was about seven years before Steven, the Las Vegas mass murder was born. Although we may never know how much, it at all, of the criminal mentality did Steven Paddock inherited from his father, one thing that is safe to say is that should "rehabilitated" Benjamin Paddock be sitting in jail in 1953 for his crimes, Steven would have never been born, and the victims of his heinous crime would have been still alive. If we only remembered to make crime a definitely maladaptive behavior ... Benjamin managed to have at least four children; compare it with two kids or less in a typical family of hard-working and productive professionals with advanced degrees.

Warning: The video below is graphic; viewers' discretion is adviced.

This tragic event demonstrates, as many similar tragic events in the past did, that the notion that America is a "proposition nation", and that it really does not matter who the Americans are as long as they support the legal foundations of our Republic, is nonsense that puts innocent people's lives at risk and endangers our Constitutionally-guaranteed liberties. If, indeed, we let wrong people to live with us, prosper, and multiply, and some of these wrong Americans grossly abuse their liberties in order to commit violent crimes, then there will be many politicians who are going to use the said abuses as an excuse to limit or nix our liberties, the categorical provisions of Bill of Rights notwithstanding.

The following is an excerpt from a statement by Firearms Policy Coalition, a 501(c)4 grassroots nonprofit organization:

(You may read the entire statement at https://www.firearmspolicy.org/firearms_policy_coalition_statement_on_las_vegas_shooting .)

The time-proven answer to the atrocities committed by a few wrong members of class the people is to make the criminal conduct a maladaptive behavior. For instance, it does not seem just a coincidence that the Las Vegas massacre happened in the "Sin City" - a community (the killer being a frequent member of which) relatively saturated with wrong individuals that appears very tollerant to unethical, asocial, predatory, and demoralizing behavior. It was a long evolutionary process that has yielded the American society, the most generous, ethical, and peaceful nation that I have ever heard of. Those who call for restricting our rights and freedoms, with some of these calls being clearly motivated by a desire to embrace and accommodate the unethical, the violent, the irresponsible, and the asocial, are exhibiting a hostile attitude towards the idea of armed and free society capable of driving its sub-population of violent criminals to gradual extinction.

Only time will show if the slaughtering of 58 innocent people in Las Vegas by one of those wrong people will be followed by a slaughtering of our Constitutional liberties by our elected officials. If that happens, we may kiss goodbye the real accountability of our government to us.

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