The media frenzy to try to determine what was wrong with Stephen Paddock's brain is focusing on the wrong thing, what they should be asking is what is wrong with the soul and mind of a country which allows someone like him to amass the kind of murderous potential, in de facto machine guns (based on legal fiction based in quibbling about words and not in reality) and modern explosives that could be combined to produce enormous and murderous explosions.
Paddock's brain could have been in a dangerous state (which is assuming that's where the problem lies) and he could have had access to no more than the kind of gun that the idiot founders knew or a knife and he couldn't have killed and maimed the number of people he did with legally obtained guns legally modified into de facto machine guns - you want to bet that the idiots in the Congress don't pass an effective ban on bump stocks or, if they do, that the Republican Supreme Court won't overturn it? Or that gun nuts like the one who invented the bump stock won't come up with something that will, in lawyer-ville but no where in real life, not make a "semi-automatic" into an automatic rifle?
And that's not to mention the kind of explosive he bought in large enough quantities to produce a huge or even smaller but equally murderous bombs? The stuff, like the bump stock, is advertised as being for thrill seeking hobbyists but its potential for killing people, either by terrorist intention or idiots getting their kicks is well known.
The United States through a media driven libertarian denial of reality has gone insane, the what I hope is a majority of sane people not able to cut through to sane, rational government facing the present libertarian interpretation of the Constitution, the modern manipulation of marginal people, gerrymandering congressional districts, corporate "personhood" and a myriad of other means of people rigging the system to produce The United States of Insanity.
I've been studying the life and career of Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. because I've come to the conclusion that he, as much as anyone, embodies some of the most damaging of trends in thought and, more so, legal pretense that have produced this kind of depravity. His second most famous declaration that the life of the law wasn't reason but experience combined with his ideological materialism, his Darwinist belief that a struggle in which the strong would crush the weak would produce salubrious results, and his pathological attachments to a concept of hyper masculinity (I wonder if it isn't all an expression of his daddy issues, a result of his revolt against his poet daddy). I've come to the conclusion that he, perhaps, did as much as anyone to create the phenomenon of the one place in life that the post-modernist mode of thinking has gained purchase, the law, legal scholarship, judicial scribbling and the such. The frequent complaint that the Supreme Court and other courts and judges often issue rulings based on clear insanity, often for the benefit of the powerful and those with influence, often clearly harmful to those whose right to justice is violated in their decisions could be explained in terms of Holmes.
The fact is that even lawyers and judges and justices and legal scholars who spout this kind of Holmesian neo-modernist drivel would never put up with anyone treating them in the same way. I recently listened to a lecture that William Lane Craig gave where he made that point, that no one lives their own life as if they believed that post-modernist anti-logic, anti-meaning, etc. were true. It's only when it comes to people with law licenses and judicial appointments and people with appointments to Supreme Courts, state and federal, want to use that to do bad things that that pretense is upheld. I believe the only reason we have put up with it is because they have managed to make the law some kind of mystery cult, the dicta of which, handed down by the priesthood, based on the scripture of the founders, which is to be taken as final truth. In that we see even they don't believe in their de facto post-modernism even as they practice it. In that they could be doing one thing that Holmes loved to pretend he was doing, imposing scientific methods to the law. Only he and his fellow lawyers and judges took the worst thing that scientists do, issue such dicta that is to be taken as true on their say so, to be accepted by an ignorant and naive public as settled truth.
I will admit that reading the words of Madison, of Holmes, of the other gods of that cult has brought me to a state of profoundly pessimistic disrespect for those idols of civic, secular, neo-paganism. It's the paganism of atheist materialist modernism. Another thing that Craig said in pointing out that even the post-modernists didn't live according to their declarations (I'll bet especially when seeking tenure, negotiating salary and benefits and conducting their business affairs) that the whole thing was just a shell game to avoid dealing with the crises brought about by the depravity of modernism.
While they're looking for a lesion pressing against Paddock's amygdala, they'll ignore how he did what he did in looking for a why which that won't provide. As I said, he chose to kill people in a deliberate act, look at what he was also choosing to watch and listen to, it might give you some idea as to how he came to figure he should do what he did, why he wanted to do it. And you should look at what's wrong with this country that has done nothing with an annual body count in which 58 dead is a drop in the ocean of blood. It's also why we have Donald Trump and a country that can watch him provoke nuclear war and not remove him from office. It's the Donald Trump margin of pathology, international Stephen Paddocks among them, by the million, who can contemplate reigning down on Koreans what Paddock did in Las Vegas, only with millions dead. And it's not a physiological problem.
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