Content Of Note On Vegas Shooter's Table Revealed

(Photo courtesy of the Associated Press)

When police entered the room of the 64-year-old male who opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, they found numerous guns and the body of the assailant. They also reportedly found a note on a table.

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When photographs of the room were released, many people noticed a piece of paper with a pen sitting on top of it. Almost immediately, speculation because that the motive for the shooting would be found on that piece of paper.

The contents of that note have been revealed, but there are few conclusions to draw from it.

A note found in the hotel room of the man who shot into a crowd from his perch in a Las Vegas high-rise included hand-written calculations about where he needed to aim to maximize his accuracy and kill as many people as possible.

In an interview airing Sunday on “60 Minutes,” three police officers who stormed [the killer’s] hotel room in the Mandalay Bay hotel tell correspondent Bill Whitaker new details about the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The officers were the first to see [his] body and the arsenal of weapons and ammunition he had stockpiled.

Officer David Newton from the Las Vegas Police Department’s K-9 unit said he noticed a note on the shooter’s nightstand once officers breached the room. He said the note was located near one of the windows that Paddock had smashed with a hammer to fire onto the crowd below with high-powered semi-automatic rifles outfitted to increase their rate of fire.

“I could see on it he had written the distance, the elevation he was on, the drop of what his bullet was gonna be for the crowd,” Newton said. “So he had that written down and figured out so he would know where to shoot to hit his targets from there.”

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Now that we know the contents of that paper, there are still no answers in why this individual opened fire on a country music festival, killing 58 people and injuring over 500 others. So far, all we have is conjecture and speculation based on grainy photographs, questionable video, and nothing from any law enforcement.

This “note” sounds an awful lot like a sniper’s range card where he’ll keep notes of known ranges so he can adjust to targets based on their proximity to these stationary objects.

It’s a shame that it wasn’t a note explaining all of this. While it wouldn’t bring 58 people back to life, nor erase the injuries from over 500 others, it would at least help us come to terms with this kind of evil. The not knowing means our minds can’t process it, that this kind of act can just happen without any apparent motivation, and people aren’t good with that.

Even an unreasonable and psychotic motivation such as being the greatest mass killer in history is preferable to not knowing the motivation. We can process psychotic better than the unknown.

As it stands, we have no answers and the note so many of us were hoping would illuminate us turned out to merely add another layer to this act of pure, unadulterated evil.

 

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