The lurking demons inside Stephen Paddock

By all accounts so far from family and neighbours, Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas slaughterer, was just an ordinary American multi-millionaire who gambled a lot and owned several houses, none of them properly decorated. His brother appeared before television cameras to express his astonishment that he could have carried out such an unbelievable atrocity. He had previously shown no interest in guns. Well, there we have it in a nutshell. Nobody who knew Stephen Paddock had a clue about the real him. He seemed quiet and normal but down in the depths of this man's being was a psychopath desperately waiting to get out. But nobody knew it or suspected it. This is so often the case. Whenever there is a mass murder or a terrorist attack, neighbours, family and friends appear before the cameras and declare that this individual or that individual couldn't possibly have been involved because he used to say hello nicely to everyone every morning, never lost his temper, was kind to children and always shopped in the local supermarket. But this supposedly kind, gentle neighbour/brother/son/uncle was actually an extreme, totally radicalised jihadist terrorist or a mass killer who had shot dead his whole family or whatever. So no one really knows what goes on in the minds of people who appear on the surface to be like you and me. Take this Stephen Paddock, now dead from his own hands. The only ingredient that stands out is that his father was a convicted bank robber who was once on the FBI's Most Wanted List and had psychopathic tendencies. That doesn't guarantee that his children will turn out bad but it's definitely a potential pointer to trouble ahead. But why did Stephen Paddock wait 64 years before truly demonstrating the dark side of his character? We don't know much about his childhood so far. Maybe he killed the family cat at the age of five or shouted abuse at his grandmother. But, judging by his brother's bewildered remarks, there can't have been anything so awful in his childhood days that the family was just waiting for an explosion. Yet it seems incredible that after more than six decades on this earth Stephen Paddock should just gather together a whole armoury of weapons and set off to kill as many people as he could before killing himself, without there being something, something in his previous life to indicate such a total breakdown of normality. Isis claims he was one of theirs, a Muslim convert. But he wouldn't have had time in between all his casino toing and froing making and losing thousands of dollars to convert to anything. And wouldn't his brother have suspected there was something going on? So I dismiss that. This wasn't an Islamic thing. This was Stephen Paddock putting into action what had been building up inside him for years but none of those closest to him had any idea about it. It's a lesson but how do you learn from it when someone you have known all your life suddenly steps out of the normal world and enters the darkest of dungeons.