As the motive behind Sunday nightās massacre in Las Vegas remains unclear, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner suggested that gunman Stephen Paddock may have deliberately targeted conservatives and that CNN was partly to blame.
Appearing on Fox and Friends, Welner explained that the massacre was a āstranger mass homicide,ā which means that it was motivated either by a political or personal cause, or because the shooter wanted to gain notoriety, such as with Aurora shooter James Holmes, a case that Welner worked on.
āHereās the thing, shooting for notorietyās sake and nothing more is a young manās crime and this is a 64-year-old with no dramatic mental illness,ā said Welner, equating Paddock with James Hodgkinson, who attempted to massacre Republican lawmakers, which would have mandated special elections to replace them.
āMy point is a spectacle is either designed to cause some derivative impact or to instigate some cause discussion,ā added the psychiatrist, emphasizing, āpeople who commit crimes for notoriety alone are young and heās not.ā
āHis mindset is that they deserve to die,ā said Welner, referring to the shooter, āSo a person who adopts a cause may be otherwise law abiding but he feels righteously justified that the end justifies the means ā so weāre talking now about gun control because he committed an over the top gun crime,ā he added, suggesting that Paddock was āinstigating a means to end with people youāve dehumanized.ā
No motive has yet been uncovered for the shooting, with Paddockās family claiming he didnāt hold any strong religious or political views.