NPR reported the other day that the FBI never did find a motive for why Stephen Paddock killed and wounded so many people on October 1, 2017 in Las Vegas.

Not that it would have made much difference if they had. All they were able to determine is that Paddock wanted to commit suicide, had no empathy for other people, and wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. As reported by NPR,

[t]he FBI determined the 64-year-old shooter, who rained a hail of bullets from a window of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino into the crowd below, was not driven by a religious, social or political agenda, nor did he have an accomplice to help him carry out his deranged mission.

The absence of a single motivating factor is not unusual, according to the FBI. And it places Paddock within the typical profile of other mass murder shooters who are prompted to violence by a “complex merging” of various stressors.

Part of what the FBI concluded is that Paddock wanted to “attain a certain degree of infamy via a mass casualty attack.” And that he did.

There’s a tendency to want to know why someone did what they did, as if it would answer some existential question. But it won’t. This guy was just a complete asshole, a total narcissist, who didn’t give a shit about whose lives he shattered as long as he could go out in a blaze of glory.

And let’s face if, the NRA was his accomplice. God forbid we should keep somebody from buying 47 guns and mounds of ammunition because it were to infringe on his 2nd Amendment rights a little bit.