Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 128, No. 30, Ed. 1 Wednesday, October 11, 2017 Page: 4 of 10
This newspaper is part of the collection entitled: Gainesville Register and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the Cooke County Library.
Extracted Text
The following text was automatically extracted from the image on this page using optical character recognition software:
4 - WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11,2017
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
After Las Vegas, no one
know what's to come
The nation's first responders
David Shribman
25?
OFFl
Got an opinion?
Share it
Donald Lambro has been covering Washington politics for more than 50
years as a reporter, editor and commentator.
YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS
President
Donald Trump
The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania
Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500
www.whitehouse.gov/contact
U.S. Senator
John Cornyn
517 Hart Senate Office Bldg.,
Send your letter to the editor to editor@
gainesvilleregister.com. All letters are
subject to editing for clarity and length.
FIRST AMENDMENT: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Fax: 202-225-3486 http://thornberry.
house.gov
Texas Governor
Greg Abbott
P.O. Box 12428, Austin, TX 78711
512-463-2000, http://gov.texas.gov
State Representative
Drew Springer
A- A
A *
David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Post-Gazette (dshribman@post-
gazette.com, 412 263-1890). Follow him on Twitter at ShribmanPG.
Gainesville Mayor
Jim Goldsworthy
Gainesville City Hall, 200 S. Rusk,
Gainesville, TX 76240, 940-665-7777
Vice President
Mike Pence
Executive Office Building, Washington,
D.C. 20501
vice_president@whitehouse.gov
Washington, D.C. 20510,
Main: 202-224-2934
Fax: 202-228-2856
www.cornyn.senate.gov
U.S. Senator
Ted Cruz
404 Russell, Washington,
D.C. 20510, Main: 202-224-5922
Fax: 202-228-3398 www.cruz.senate.gov
U.S. Representative
Mac M. Thornberry
2525 Kell Blvd., Wichita Falls, TX, 76308
Main: 202-225-3706
State Senator
Craig Estes
P.O. Box 12068, Capitol Station
Austin, TX 78711, (512) 463-0130
Cooke County Judge
Jason Brinkley
Cooke County Courthouse, Gainesville,
TX, 76240, 940-668-5435,
jason.brinkley@co.cooke.tx.us
P.O. Box 2910, Austin, TX 78769
512-463-0526,
Gainesville: 940-580-1770
www.house.state.tx.us/ members/
< 7
i 7*7
Donald Lambro
Ronald Reagan after the Challenger disaster. Bill Clinton
after the Oklahoma City bombing. George W. Bush after the
terror attacks in Washington and New York. Barack Obama
after the church shootings in Charleston.
And now this. Donald Trump after Las Vegas.
In some ways — not in the American Constitution, but
surely in the American tradition — the president is the
nation’s First Responder.
And almost all of them, even those known for being
divisive, are prompted by these occasions to speak to
American unity — as Trump did when he said, in his formal
remarks in the Diplomatic Room of the White House,
that Americans’ “unity cannot be shattered by evil,
our bonds cannot be broken by violence.”
These are sober moments of condolence and
compassion, the sort that chief executives neither
expect nor are prepared for, the kind that call upon
presidential presence.
For Trump — whose responses to the
confrontation in Charlottesville, Virginia, and even
the London Bridge attack, stirred rather than cooled
passions — this was an important challenge, especially so for
a president who has stretched the boundaries of presidential
comportment and yet has struggled to appear presidential.
And amid the flash of news reports and the reckoning
of body counts growing out of the worst mass shooting in
the country’s history, Trump — still under criticism for his
response to the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster and for his
attacks on the mayor of San Juan — responded to both the
news and the moment.
For his critics — who have assailed him in the past several
days for stoking controversy over the national anthem at
NFL games, for undercutting his own secretary of state over
North Korean negotiations and for producing a tax overhaul
that would favor business and the wealthy — there was little
to criticize, although advocates of gun control surely wish he
had used this occasion to embrace their cause.
He produced a spare statement, expressing the nation’s
grief, and pledged to visit the scene. Simple, perhaps, but
significant in Trump’s presidential passage, which so often
has been marked by excess — his own, and his critics’.
It was a minute waltz of woe: He did not say anything he
did not know. He did not stumble over awkward wording. His
suit jacket was buttoned, his tie was somber.
He did not use the occasion to campaign for specific
legislation or political gain. And when he used the pronoun
“I,” it was in service of conveying his thanks, as in “I want to
thank the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and all
of the first responders for their courageous efforts.”
There is no playbook for a presidential response to tragedy,
and yet, whether inadvertently, instinctively or intentionally,
Trump hit many of the appropriate touchstones.
Like Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Trump employed
the word “evil” to describe the acts that brought horror to
America’s door.
Like Obama after the Charleston church shootings, Trump
WASHINGTON — The investigation into the Las Vegas
mass murderer who killed at least 58 people and wounded
nearly 500 in a hail of gunfire is still searching for a motive
for the massacre.
Whether they will ever find one remains to be seen.
It is now clear that Stephen Paddock, who brought 23
firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition into his
suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, possessed all
of the signs of a deeply psychotic, angry, gun-crazed killer
who needed no motive other than becoming the man who
carried out the worst mass shooting in modern American
history.
He methodically carried out his cold-blooded plan that
was long in the making, modifying firearms to
turn them into automatic weapons, buying
rifles with high-capacity magazines to
pump out round after round of firepower
in seconds, and selecting scopes to
magnify his victims at an open-air,
country music concert below his 32nd
floor suite of rooms.
People in the several states where
he owned homes in retirement
communities, who were his neighbors,
described him as a loner, distant, surly,
unfriendly, standoffish, and quick to anger.
He was the son of a notorious bank robber who was
once on the FBI’s most wanted list and was said to have
numerous mental issues of his own. At the time of his
bank robbing spree, he was described by law enforcement
authorities as a “psychopath” and as “suicidal.”
While Paddock had no past criminal record, he showed
some of the same mentally troubled symptoms of his father
in the last weeks of his life before he committed suicide by
shooting himself in the mouth before a SWAT team broke
into his suite.
At Paddock’s home in Mesquite, Nevada, police found 19
more guns and explosives, and a search of his car found
ammonium nitrate, which can be used to make bombs.
Five more guns were discovered at another property he
owned in Reno, Nevada, along with two shotguns and what
police said was a “plethora” of ammunition.
All told, he had purchased rifles, shotguns and handguns
in Utah, California, Texas and Nevada.
He was divorced twice during the 1970s and ‘80s, but had
a long relationship with a woman from the Philippines,
who is a citizen of Australia.
The live-in girlfriend, Marilou Danley, left the U.S. a
week before the shooting, and police have called her “a
person of interest.”
She returned to the U.S. Wednesday for questioning by
the FBI, but in a statement read by her attorney, she said,
“He never said anything to me or took any action that I was
aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning that
something horrible like this was going to happen.”
But what can we make of all this? What drove this
64-year-old man to plot such a horrific attack on thousands
of concertgoers? What happened in his life that would
trigger this insane act on fellow human beings?
How can a former accountant, postal worker and IRS
agent who made a lot of money in real estate, gambled for
big stakes in the casinos, owned a number of homes, and
shared his wealth with others, descend into insanity?
We may never know the answers to these and other
questions that were buried within a deeply disturbed and
homicidal mind.
“I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath,” said Sheriff
Joseph Lombardo, the Las Vegas police chief who is
leading the investigation.
We’ve experienced many mass shootings in recent years,
with each episode seemingly more deadly than before.
Last year, 49 people were killed by a terrorist in an
Orlando, Florida, nightclub. In 2012, it was a shooting at
Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 28 were gunned
down, including 20 children aged 6 and 7. In 2007,33 were
killed by a deranged college student at Virginia Tech.
There are 12,000 gun homicides a year in the U.S., and
“for every one person killed with guns, two more are
injured,” according to 2015 data from the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
Earlier this week, reporters asked President Trump if
the Las Vegas mass shooting will prompt him to consider
gun control legislation.
“We have a tragedy,” Trump replied. “We’ll be talking
about gun laws as time goes by.”
Asked if it will trigger a new round of debate about the
issue: “At some point, perhaps, that will come. But that’s
not for now; that’s for a later time.”
0::
gW////
/
tt/////
&&///.
dj|
g H
^llf
rr:—i
7’1
sought to find consolation in calamity. In connecting the
Mother Emanuel killings to decades of violence against black
houses of worship, Obama said he was “confident that the
outpouring of unity and strength and fellowship and love
across Charleston today, from all races, from all faiths, from
all places of worship, indicates the degree to which those old
vestiges of hatred can be overcome.” In urging Americans
not to surrender to anguish, Trump said, “Even the most
terrible despair can be illuminated by a single ray of hope.”
Like Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombings, the
president leaned on Scripture. Clinton quoted Romans
12:21, urging Americans “not (to) be overcome by evil, but
feu overcome evil with good.”
It The remarks from Trump — like Reagan, not
, ordinarily known for spiritual introspection — were in
his own words: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close
g <7 > to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed
in spirit. We seek comfort in those words, for we know
' that God lives in the hearts of those who grieve.”
And like Reagan after the Challenger spacecraft
disaster, Trump expressed sober and sincere
thanks. To the engineers, technicians and aerospace
scientists of NASA, the 40th president said, “Your dedication
and professionalism have moved and impressed us for
decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it.”
To the police and rescue squad workers of Las Vegas, the
45th president said, “The speed with which they acted is
miraculous and prevented further loss of life.”
In that Challenger speech, Reagan quoted the Royal
Canadian Air Force aviator and poet John Gillespie Magee
Jr., saying that Americans would not forget the astronauts
who waved goodbye on their way to the space shuttle, and
“slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to “touch the face of God.”
Trump made no such literary allusions, but said during
his brief remarks, “I know we are searching for some kind of
meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness. The
answers do not come easy.”
That, too, is in the American presidential tradition.
In perhaps the greatest American speech ever, Abraham
Lincoln expressed wonder and mystery at the tragedy of the
Civil War. “The Almighty has His own purposes,” Lincoln
said in his second inaugural address, in 1865, a month before
the war would end and he would be assassinated, before
quoting the Book of Matthew: “Woe unto the world because
of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
Unlike the famous passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald —
“There are no second acts in American life” — American
presidents do get second acts. The second act for Trump
came with his twin visits, first to Puerto Rico and then to Las
Vegas.
The passage from Fitzgerald comes from “The Last
Tycoon” — an unfinished novel.
Upcoming Pages
Here’s what’s next.
Search Inside
This issue can be searched. Note: Results may vary based on the legibility of text within the document.
Tools / Downloads
Get a copy of this page or view the extracted text.
Citing and Sharing
Basic information for referencing this web page. We also provide extended guidance on usage rights, references, copying or embedding.
Reference the current page of this Newspaper.
Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 128, No. 30, Ed. 1 Wednesday, October 11, 2017, newspaper, October 11, 2017; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1324078/m1/4/?rotate=90: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Cooke County Library.