What do you think Paddock's motive was?

We will never know, but we can have a good guess, my belief is that he wanted to capture the world's attention by killing as many as possible then committing suicide to escape the consequences.

My money's also on fame seeker. There's no way that you could think of a situation where you fire upon a large crowd of people like that and think that's not what the motive was.

The fact that there hasn't been that much info released even after all this time doesn't help finding out why Paddock did it and makes it rather difficult to pinpoint.

Well, if his motive was found out, that would ruin a plan for infamy, as you know, the media doesn't like giving attention to obvious attention seekers, That being one of the reasons why Robert Hawkins' massacre wasn't covered for long, or remembered at all.

I also believe this to be the motivation of many mass killers, from the Columbine Kids, to Cho Seung Hui to Martin Bryant.
NOT all.
But most. Especially after Columbine.
AND ESPECIALLY after Sandy Hook.
At this point Mass shooters are Celebrities.

holeamong wrote:

My money's also on fame seeker. There's no way that you could think of a situation where you fire upon a large crowd of people like that and think that's not what the motive was. 

He could've been a closet sadist, but I admit that he would've had to keep those feelings bottled up for decades, so it's unlikely.

QuestionMark wrote:

He could've been a closet sadist, but I admit that he would've had to keep those feelings bottled up for decades, so it's unlikely.

If he was a sadist, he would have committed his attack up close and personal, where he could see the blood and guts and pain on his victims faces. Paddock didn't do that though; unlike other shooters, he committed a sniper attack, firing wildly on a crowd of people some distance away.

I think a traumatic event in Paddock's life could of caused him to snap.

Tommy QTR wrote:

I think a traumatic event in Paddock's life could of caused him to snap.

He was perfectly normal until the days leading up to the attack, so I have my doubts that this was trauma based.

QuestionMark wrote:

He was perfectly normal until the days leading up to the attack, so I have my doubts that this was trauma based.

It's not clear that this is true. Hopefully, more information on the alleged "mental health symptoms" will be revealed in the official report but even the few pieces of information from this article suggest that there may have been something wrong.
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sscc wrote:

QuestionMark wrote:

He was perfectly normal until the days leading up to the attack, so I have my doubts that this was trauma based.

It's not clear that this is true. Hopefully, more information on the alleged "mental health symptoms" will be revealed in the official report but even the few pieces of information from this article suggest that there may have been something wrong.
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Well shit, maybe we will be able to piece together his motive (or at least state of mind) if given enough time.

Has any security camera footage been released/leaked of Paddock inside the hotel?

It's been pretty easy to find info on other true crimes, terror attacks, and mass shootings, but this one is still dominated by conspiracy theories three months later.  Can someone please point to where a good summary/synopses of events and perhaps a coherent motive?

runreilly wrote:

It's been pretty easy to find info on other true crimes, terror attacks, and mass shootings, but this one is still dominated by conspiracy theories three months later.  Can someone please point to where a good summary/synopses of events and perhaps a coherent motive?

As of yet there is no motive. Just a lot of speculation on possible motives.

Possession from a ember ghost squad lmao

Smiggles94 wrote:

Possession from a ember ghost squad lmao

May ember rest his soul, and give him his ghost vagina in heaven. May his penis be removed and be replaced with Casper's ghost flaps.
R.I.P.

Lolwut?

awsomehq wrote:

Smiggles94 wrote:

Possession from a ember ghost squad lmao

May ember rest his soul, and give him his ghost vagina in heaven. May his penis be removed and be replaced with Casper's ghost flaps.
R.I.P.

Lolwut?

InsaneIntruder wrote:

Smiggles94 wrote:

Possession from a ember ghost squad lmao

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I'm not sure whether to be amused or not.

Jesus Christ.

I find his age in relation to other mass shooters of the past few decades something to consider. Is it possible he was beginning to develop (somewhat early-onset) dementia?

Massoccur wrote:

Jesus Christ.

I find his age in relation to other mass shooters of the past few decades something to consider. Is it possible he was beginning to develop (somewhat early-onset) dementia?

Well considering no logical motive has been found, or hell any motive for that matter. Dementia is just as likely as anything else.

Massoccur wrote:

Jesus Christ.

I find his age in relation to other mass shooters of the past few decades something to consider. Is it possible he was beginning to develop (somewhat early-onset) dementia?

Dementia is not normally associated with shooters, if it was, we would have grannies riding down the road on mobility scooters shooting people.

I'm grasping for straws, of course. It's only been a few months. It's certain that more evidence involving Paddock and his mental state will emerge in the years to come. (Is it just me, or does the Las Vegas shooting already seem so far away now? Hard for me to see it as only three months ago.)

Massoccur wrote:

I'm grasping for straws, of course. It's only been a few months. It's certain that more evidence involving Paddock and his mental state will emerge in the years to come. (Is it just me, or does the Las Vegas shooting already seem so far away now? Hard for me to see it as only three months ago.)

You are not alone in feeling that. It does seem that Vegas happened a life time ago. Once it was out of the headlines I'm sure most people just put it out of their minds.

Massoccur wrote:

(Is it just me, or does the Las Vegas shooting already seem so far away now? Hard for me to see it as only three months ago.)

Well yeah. Most of us never really had an emotional connection with the Vegas shooting the same way we have a connection with Columbine. Vegas is a shooting that's been kind of on the back of our minds because of that and due to the wait we're getting forced into.

Who knows. He was a crazy old coot though.

This is my theory, if I'm wrong, correct me.
I agree with Stephen's brother Eric, this comes from the final police report "Eric believed Paddock may have conducted the attack because he had done everything in the world he wanted to do and was bored with everything. If so, Paddock would have planned the attack to kill a large amount of people because he would want to be known as having the largest casualty count. Paddock always wanted to be the best and known to everyone."

I would  like to add something new I devised.
SP had 500 CP images, if others found out about this, over 90% of humans would label paddock a "piece of shit". Paddock might've thought "because I am sexually attracted to children and others will call me a piece of shit for it and going on a mass shooting will label me a piece of shit and I wanna do that, then I'm going to do it." This could've help motivate him to go through with it.

I hope I made sense with that.

Maybe he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory instead of getting Alzheimers and ending up in a nursing home.

Ziamber II wrote:

Maybe he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory instead of getting Alzheimers and ending up in a nursing home.

Honestly at this point, that is as likely as anything else motive wise we have on Paddock.

Halcyon666 wrote:

This is my theory, if I'm wrong, correct me.
I agree with Stephen's brother Eric, this comes from the final police report "Eric believed Paddock may have conducted the attack because he had done everything in the world he wanted to do and was bored with everything. If so, Paddock would have planned the attack to kill a large amount of people because he would want to be known as having the largest casualty count. Paddock always wanted to be the best and known to everyone."

I feel like this Stephen Paddock guy wanted to belong, succeed, and be admired. In a sense, that makes him a feminine man, but man nonetheless. He probably cared about jewelry, diamonds, foreign places, etc. I think when he ran out of money in Las Vegas and had to go back to his normal life, he didn't want to. His brother was likely right.
I think Stephen Paddock didn't get bored, but he was running out of power to do what he wanted in life. He still wanted to gamble in Las Vegas. He was about to live a boring life in a house with his Pinoy girlfriend and then die. His mind was fading out, and his body was getting progressively worse.

He didn't want to get swept under with everyone else.
He didn't have anything of absolute value in his possession, and he was becoming incompetent in daily life (64, capacity for more value is going), so he did the shooting.

I can't shake the feeling this is someone that never wanted to retire. He wanted to stay at the top of whatever.
It's like the entire thing was his way of going out with "I MATTER. I'M BETTER THAN YOU. HERE I GO!"

It's kind of funny to me. All of that hell over some guy's ego. I don't think he was mentally ill. The shooting was too calculated, precise, and successful.
I don't think he cared about the CP influencing his reputation as a mass shooter. That's beside the point.
The man, ultimately, wanted to be famous, and he got the fame he died for.

A lack of information doesn't help my imagination at all. The only motive that comes to my mind is that he wanted to kill, maybe due to (appearing?) mental health issues. He had CP so he was not a good person, maybe it was really to hurt people and there is no message. Like James Holmes, "the message is there is no message". He didn't even seem to want to be remembered since he destroyed his computer and we have no material about him, he left nothing for us to understand him. The fact that he was on the tower and couldn't really see his victims makes me think that he wanted destruction, something on a larger scale than the usual shooting. Maybe he didn't care about each victim and only cared about the crowd of victims.

There are so many questions I wonder about him:

Did Paddock go to an elevated and rather far place so that he didn't see his victim die? So that he was less in danger and had less risk of being overpowered? Because he didn't care about each victim individually?

Is it possible that he did that only to hurt people? He had CP, so even if I am usually skeptical about that phrase, could he really be "pure evil"?

Him against a crowd of people having fun, could it mean it was him against society?

Was he depressed, suicidal, did he have serious mental health issues? Or is it possible that killing people was a fantasy and he decided to fulfill his wish? Especially since he was old.

Neah wrote:

Was he depressed, suicidal, did he have serious mental health issues? Or is it possible that killing people was a fantasy and he decided to fulfill his wish? Especially since he was old.

Only thing that can really be said about this is that if he was severely mentally ill/depressed/suicidal/homicidal then he hid it from friends and family exceptionally well. No-one saw this coming from him.

QuestionMark wrote:

Neah wrote:

Was he depressed, suicidal, did he have serious mental health issues? Or is it possible that killing people was a fantasy and he decided to fulfill his wish? Especially since he was old.

Only thing that can really be said about this is that if he was severely mentally ill/depressed/suicidal/homicidal then he hid it from friends and family exceptionally well. No-one saw this coming from him.

Agreed. Motive wise Paddock is just a blank slate.

One of his photos shows him watching power puff girls with his brother.

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You know who was working on Powerpuff Girls?

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Do you know what she created?

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Yes. This means Paddock was probably a brony.

Since he was a brony he could have stumbled upon Randy Stair's stuff.

Which means the most probable option is that He Did It For The Squad XD .

^^^^ He's right you know
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Maybe it was that comped sushi that Eric Paddock was always on about that drove Stephen to commit the shooting.

UncontinuedProcess wrote:

^^^^ He's right you know
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UncontinuedProcess wrote:

^^^^ He's right you know
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Really? I always thought that was photoshopped or something.

FBI: We don't have a clue *shrugs*

Quote :

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A high-stakes gambler who rained a hail of gunfire down on a crowd of country music fans, killing 58, took any specific motive for the 2017 attack to his grave, the FBI said Tuesday as it concluded the investigation into the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The agency found no “single or clear motivating factor” to explain why Stephen Paddock carried out the attack from his suite in a high-rise casino hotel. The 64-year-old fatally shot himself as police closed in.

“It wasn’t about MGM, Mandalay Bay or a specific casino or venue,” Aaron Rouse, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas office, told The Associated Press. “It was all about doing the maximum amount of damage and him obtaining some form of infamy.”

The finding was contained in a long-awaited report compiled by the FBI’s Behavior Analysis Unit, a group of experts who spent months examining several factors that might have led to the rampage.

“This report comes as close to understanding the why as we’re ever going to get,” Rouse said.

Almost 900 people were hurt during the Oct. 1, 2017, attack on an outdoor concert.

Paddock wanted to die in infamy, inspired in part by his father’s reputation as a bank robber who was once on the FBI most wanted list, the report said. In many ways, he was similar to other active shooters the FBI has studied.

His “decision to murder people while they were being entertained was consistent with his personality,” the report said.

The gunman was not directed or inspired by any group and was not seeking to further any agenda. He did not leave a manifesto or suicide note, and federal agents believe he had planned to fatally shoot himself after the attack, according to the report.

Paddock was a retired postal service worker, accountant and real estate investor who owned rental properties and homes in Reno and in a retirement community more than an hour’s drive from Las Vegas. He also held a private pilot’s license and liked to gamble tens of thousands of dollars at a time playing high-stakes video poker.

His younger brother, Eric Paddock, called him the “king of microaggression” — narcissistic, detail-oriented and maybe bored enough with life to plan an attack that would make him famous. His ex-wife told investigators that he grew up with a single mom in a financially unstable home and he felt a need to be self-reliant.

Police characterized him as a loner with no religious or political affiliations who began stockpiling weapons about a year before the attack. He spent more than $1.5 million in the two years before the shooting and distanced himself from his girlfriend and family.

He sent his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, to visit her family in the Philippines two weeks before the attack and wired her $150,000 while she was there. Danley, a former casino worker in Reno, returned to the U.S. after the shooting and told authorities that Paddock had complained that he was sick and that doctors told him he had a “chemical imbalance” and could not cure him.

Danley, who is Catholic, told investigators that Paddock often told her, “Your God doesn’t love me.”

A Reno car salesman told police that in the months before the shooting Paddock told him he was depressed and had relationship troubles, and his doctor offered him antidepressants. Paddock would only accept a prescription for anxiety medication, the salesman said.

Paddock’s gambling habits made him a sought-after casino patron. Mandalay Bay employees readily let him use a service elevator to take multiple suitcases to the $590-per-night suite he had been provided for free. Authorities said he asked for the room, which had a commanding view of the Strip and the Route 91 Harvest Festival concert grounds across the street.

The night of the massacre, Paddock used assault-style rifles to fire more than 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes into the crowd of 22,000 music fans. Most of the rifles were fitted with rapid-fire “bump stock” devices and high-capacity magazines. Some had bipod braces and scopes. Authorities said Paddock’s guns had been legally purchased.

Las Vegas police closed their investigation last August, and Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo declared the police work complete after hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of investigative work. Lombardo vowed never to speak Paddock’s name again in public.

A separate report made public in August involving the Federal Emergency Management Agency found that communications were snarled during and after the shooting. It said police, fire and medical responders were overwhelmed by 911 calls, false reports of other shootings at Las Vegas casinos and the number of victims.

Hotel security video and police body camera recordings made public in a public-records lawsuit filed by media organizations including the AP showed police using explosives to blast through the door of the 32nd-floor hotel suite where Paddock was found dead.

He left behind nothing that offered an explanation.

“He acted alone. He committed a heinous act. He died by his own hand,” Rouse said. “If he wanted to leave a message, he would have left a message. Bottom line is he didn’t want people to know.”

I think Stephen's brother has thought of the best motive for him:

He was a hebephile who thought that the FIB could v& him (actually happened to Bruce Paddock), not to mention how he was probably just a dick towards everyone but his family and wanted far more infamy than his father. He was 64 years old, so he might've thought to himself that he already lived long enough and that it was time for him to 'go out in style' or something like that.

If he had a genuinely deep motive, I think he would've bothered to leave a writing or even just some internet presence behind signifying it like with Adam Lanza.

I know this is a repost, but I decided to put this wall of text in a much more appropriate topic.
I honestly think the motive could be that Paddock felt bored or dissatisfied about his life, or he felt insignificant. The boredom theory can be related to how much licenses this guy had, yet he never really did anything related to them. He might have believed that doing a mass shooting can bring some sort of satisfaction in his degrading life. After all, there were multiple factors that probably made Paddock do the shooting. One example can be the spinal condition he got at an old age. The condition, according to an interview with Bruce Paddock, makes you lose your ability to walk. Stephen Paddock was described by the FBI as a controlling man who used people, and losing the ability to walk would be a great slap to the face to his pride and feeling of control in his life. This would lead to the second theory about Paddock feeling like he was insignificant to the people he wants to feel superior over. This might explain why he did the shooting.

The shooting can be the last moment where he finally have the control he used to possess when he maintained his money through unethical means (According to the lvmpd report, an interview with Eric Paddock implied that Stephen Paddock cheated and completed his family’s taxes. Eric believed that the missing hard drives would contain the evidence of tax evasion). I believe Stephen Paddock didn’t leave a suicide note because he wouldn’t care about leaving a motive about the shooting, if anything he just want people to pay attention or investigate him. He just wants to assert the last of his power on the crowds of people below him, the people that wants to hear about his motive, and himself when he put the revolver in his mouth. This area he was shooting from would be symbolic to this whole scenario. As a man with a room to himself, a shit ton of ammunition, an oblivious crowd below him, and cameras surrounding the hallways, he would relive his more fortunate youth for a last time, through different means. This shooting would be the last thing he would excel at as a controlling child prodigy (Apparently the guy’s story was a rags to riches story, according to his brother).

Personally, my current mindset is stuck in the second theory. But when it comes to choosing his shooting location, I believe he either didn’t feel like shooting up “life is beautiful” or some complications happened during the middle of planning and he had to resort to a different concert.