The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/mass-shootings/)
A new report from the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center says that most mass attacks in public spaces are preceded by behavior that worried other people. “There’s no such thing as an impulsive act,” says one expert.
Noor Salman, the widow of the gunman who killed 49 people at a gay Orlando nightclub, was acquitted Friday on charges of lying to the FBI and helping her husband in the 2016 attack, Her attorneys described her as an easily manipulated woman with a low IQ.
Attorney for victims says the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino should have been tipped off by Stephen Paddock’s luggage weighted down with guns, ammunition and tools. “They had employees who were handling these unusually heavy bags over and over and over,” said the lawyer. “I don’t think that’s normal in Vegas, I don’t think that’s normal anywhere.”
Nikolas Cruz survived the Parkland, Fl., shooting, giving investigators a chance to probe his motive. A forensic psychiatrist tried to do that in the case of Aurora, Co., theater killer James Holmes.
The school officer who didn’t intervene in the Florida high school massacre was called a coward but a police officer who remained outside at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub killing was called courageous. Why wasn’t the Orlando case scrutinized?
“Deeper even than the gun problem is this: boys are broken,” says comedian Michael Ian Black. Of 97 major mass shootings since 1982, only three were committed by women.
An autopsy said Paddock was overweight and had bad teeth but did not explain why he opened fire on a country-music festival, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds more.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says Elliot Rodger, who killed six students in 2014, was the first of a series of 13 “alt-right killers” who have murdered 43 and injured 60 in the last four years. The perpetrators were all men, mostly under 30.
Douglas Haig, the Arizona man who sold bullets to Las Vegas concert gunman Stephen Paddock, was charged with conspiracy to manufacture and sell armor-piercing ammunition without a license. Haig is the first person to be charged in connection with the Las Vegas shooting investigation.
Douglas Haig of Mesa, Az., said he sold more than 700 rounds of ammunition to Stephen Paddock but had no connection to him and had no idea what he was planning. “I couldn’t detect anything wrong with this guy,” he said of Paddock.