OK, he had two.

One – he was a despicable human with zero respect or regard for human life. Imagine making it to the age of 64, sitting pretty with cash and properties and high stakes gambling visits to casinos, and then shooting hundreds of people for what looks like sport?

Maybe that possible note will shed some light, but who knows?

That’s not the thing in common that we’ll focus on, though, because the one identifying factor we have that links him to a number of other mass killers is that he abused women.

It has emerged, via some eyewitnesses that saw him regularly, that he would often berate, belittle and verbally abuse his girlfriend in public.

With the help of QZ, let’s run through how that seems to be a common thread:

Omar Mateen, 29, who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, physically abused his former wife on a regular basis.

Seungh Hui Cho [below], 23, who gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech in April 2007, was accused of harassing two women at the university two years earlier. Virginia police ordered him to stop contacting the second student.

Adam Lanza, 20, shot his mother four times before killing 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

George Hennard, 35, reportedly stalked two young adult sisters and wrote them a letter in which he called women “vipers” a few months before he murdered 14 women and 9 men at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas in 1991. The mass-murder was thought to be driven by his hostility towards women, and witnesses said he passed over men to shoot women.

More on Paddock’s abuse via the LA Times:

Paddock had a nasty habit of berating Danley in public. “It happened a lot,” Esperanza Mendoza, supervisor of [Paddock’s local] Starbucks, said Tuesday…

The abuse would come when she asked to use his casino card to make the purchase, Mendoza said. The card enables gamblers to use credits earned on electronic gambling machines to pay for souvenirs or food in the casino.

“He would glare down at her and say — with a mean attitude — ‘You don’t need my casino card for this. I’m paying for your drink, just like I’m paying for you.’ Then she would softly say, ‘OK’ and step back behind him. He was so rude to her in front of us.”

‘I’m paying for you’ – nice, pal.

Want an idea of just how much detail he went into regarding planning out the attack? We have mentioned before about having booked a room overlooking a concert with Chance the Rapper and Lorde the weekend before the shooting, but now we are talking about months back.

New York Daily News with those details:

How Paddock spent his final weeks is slowly beginning to come together.

Just weeks earlier, he booked two rooms at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel that overlooked the popular Lollapalooza festival…

His reservations started on Aug. 1 and 3, the day the show started, and lasted until it ended on Aug. 6.

But Paddock never showed up, TMZ reported, despite asking for rooms that overlooked Grant Park — where 400,000 concert goers including Malia Obama converged this summer.

The Blackstone directly overlooks Lollapalooza’s mainstage as well as a few others.

Imagine knowing and plotting to kill humans for sport, having all that time to second guess yourself, and still going through with it?

Anyway, more on the link between domestic abuse and these shootings:

According to one study, in more than half of US mass shootings between 2009 and 2016, the killer (almost invariably male) shot a current or former intimate partner or a family member. Yet after a mass shooting, that link between domestic violence and gun violence usually gets overlooked: First there’s a heated debate on gun control. It’s big and angry, and goes nowhere. After that, details arise about the killer’s past history of abuse, and there are one or two laments about the link between domestic violence and mass-murder. And these will be largely ignored.

It happened after UC Santa Barbara. After Orlando. After Fort Lauderdale Airport. And, yes, after House majority whip Steve Scalise and four others were shot in June…

Then? Nothing.

Because nothing happens. Because too soon. Because Second Amendment. Because NRA funding. Because ‘Merica.

[sources:qz&latimes&nydailynews]