Expert: Shooters in mold of Paddock ‘real threat’

The gunman who killed 58 people and injured 546 others before killing himself was the epitome of the lone wolf threat, a national security expert tells the Review-journal.

“This guy (Stephen Paddock) is the real threat. The guy that doesn’t know anybody, or at least doesn’t have a big ideological reason for doing this,” said Shawn Vandiver, director of the San Diego Chapter of the Truman National Security Project, a defense think tank.

Since the Oct. 1 shooting, authorities have discovered relatively little about Paddock.

In an interview Oct. 10 with the

Las Vegas Review-journal, Clark

County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said investigators have made contact with Paddock’s entire “family tree,” including the shooter’s two ex-wives. Their conversations have shed new light on the shooter’s upbringing but have yet to answer the most daunting question: Why?

“We may never know,” Lombardo said. “All those things that you would expect to find, we have not found.”

Vandiver said Paddock represents “whole swaths” of people who may be leading double lives.

“We have a whole swatch of people called sovereign citizens, or just lone wolf terrorists who think that the government laws don’t apply to them,” Vandiver said. “They feel like they’re disenfranchised. … They’re white guys who have guns and nobody’s going to tell them what to do ‘because I’m an American.’”

Nicole Raz