TOLERANCE | OCTOBER 4, 2017

We STAND with the Victims and Families of the Las Vegas Mass Shooting

After the worst mass shooting in American history on Sunday, October 1, America needs to know: Why?

Why did a 64-year-old man open fire on a country music venue filled with people he didn’t know?

Why would this man—according to the latest press reports, a well-off but reclusive figure—commit such a psychopathic act of mass murder of innocent people? What on earth could cause him to do that?

Two weeks earlier, this man, Stephen Paddock, bought a walker for his 90-year-old mother to help her move around. This is a man whose brother said, “there’s absolutely no way I could conceive that my brother would shoot a bunch of people that he didn’t know… something just incredibly wrong happened to my brother.”

Kirstie Alley raised the question of whether psychiatric drugs lie at the base of this tragedy. The Las Vegas Review-Journal and other press reported that Paddock had been prescribed 50 10-milligram tablets of diazepam in June 2017.

No bona fide terrorist connection has been found. Similarly, no connections have turned up to any group that might have a violent agenda.

So, what on God’s green earth happened?

An old guy, just tired of life and people? Unlikely.

Yet, there must be an answer.

Kirstie Alley raised the question of whether psychiatric drugs lie at the base of this tragedy. The Las Vegas Review-Journal and other press reported that Paddock had been prescribed 50 10-milligram tablets of diazepam in June 2017.

Diazepam, sold under such brand names as Valium, falls in a class of psychiatric drugs known as benzodiazepines. For many years, the link between benzodiazepines and violence has been known. The authors of a study published in the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology in 2011, for example, noted that “our study confirms the risk of violence associated with benzodiazepines and related drugs.”