Thread by @fishinabarrel1

In 2016, right after moving into his new house in Mesquite, Paddock had a neighbor named Rick. Rick was an ex-Marine, and Rick and his friend Steve would go to the corner bar after work, where Paddock would be sitting at the bar playing bar-top video poker… #LasVegasShooting

Rick and Steve played video poker too, and drank beers with Paddock whilst making small talk. During this small talk, Rick told Paddock that he'd been in the Marine Corps, and they even talked about guns, but strangely, Paddock never mentioned that he owned even a single gun...

Paddock never talked politics with Steve, until one day when Steve came in wearing a Trump shirt. This was before Trump was even the official candidate, months before the election. During small talk about the t-shirt, Paddock said he was a Trump fan too...

Around that same time, Paddock had an Australian man named Adam Le Fevre visit his new house. Adam's girlfriend was Marilou's sister, and they came to Las Vegas on holiday. During the visit, Paddock showed them with the high-roller treatment he gets, then they went to his house..

Being an Aussie, Adam was averse to guns, so Paddock showed him his gun collection (this was pre-ARs and bump stocks, which he didn't start buying until months later), and gave him a clichéd speech about gun ownership in America...

Notice how Paddock didn't tell a US Marine who wanted to talk about guns that he owned any, but did subject a gun-averse Aussie to that which would probably make him uncomfortable. This tells me a thing or two about Paddock...

In an interview on 10/3, a reporter asked Eric Paddock, “You never knew him to be an angry person?” And Eric replied, “If you’re gonna call him crazy because he’s an angry person, then you had better call everybody on the news from 4 o’clock to 12 o’clock at night a crazy person”

Maybe it's just me, but that sounded like he was comparing Stephen's level of sanity to the sanity level of the nightly news. Hmm...

He went on to say, "Did he bitch about people who annoyed the crap out of him? Of course he did." But apparently not to their face. To their face, he lied and said he was a Trump fan. Starts at 16:21…

Then there was that nonsense about Fema camps, which I already dealt with here:

https://twitter.com/fishinabarrel1/status/1000216243410907142

This is one of those decide for yourself threads. So whaddya think? Was Paddock a Trump-supporting, right-wing gun-nut who suddenly decided to shoot up a Country Music festival full of Trump-supporting, right-wing gun-nuts? Or was he a sick, lying, manipulator of anyone near him?

The end.

@ThreadReaderAp_ unroll