The sound of bullets ripped through the air as the sight of smoke rose in the distance. The crowd finally noticed it wasn’t part of the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. With blood-stained shirts and wide-eyed faces, horrified people ran screaming to find safety. Ambulance lights whirled and police sirens roared as people raced to help. By the end of all the commotion, fifty-eight country music fans lay dead and over 500 others were injured.

On October 1, 2017, the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in modern U.S. history happened when Stephen Paddock, 64, opened fire from his 32nd-floor hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Investigators found twenty-three firearms, including assault rifles with bump fire stocks that helped Paddock fire 90 bullets in ten seconds. Paddock had tons of ammunition and high-capacity magazines that could hold up to 100 rounds each. This leads me to believe that he did have someone who helped him get automatic weapons. Also, he had cameras set up to monitor who came to his hotel door.

Stephen Paddock must have been planning this attack for months as it was too well planned. Even though the motive for the shooting hasn’t been discovered, I wonder if the shooting was an act of hatred. He had no criminal record, so what led Paddock to create such a well thought out plan? He was a millionaire who loved to gamble. Maybe Paddock was mentally unstable, but no one ever noticed that there was something abnormal with him. Even his own brother had no idea.

“There’s absolutely no way I could conceive that my brother would shoot a bunch of people that he didn’t know,” Eric Paddock said. “He was my brother, and it’s like an asteroid fell out of the sky. We’re still just completely dumbstruck.”

After the shooting, Paddock took his own life.