Almost certainly by now you’ve heard about the shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday evening, when 64 year old Stephen Paddock allegedly opened fire from his hotel room on to a crowd attending a concert , resulting in (at the time of this writing) 59 deaths and around 500 injuries.
This article will limit itself to the astrological factors involved. If you want to get into an argument about the politics of the matter, there are other places on the internet for that. This blog is about astrology. Far be it from me to inject my own opinions about what happens when you put a country under ever-increasing pressure and make its people feel threatened all the time and give them lots of lots of semiautomatic weapons.
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We only have a date of birth for Stephen Paddock — not a time or even place. Thus we can only say so much of the astrological factors involved. We can’t know the House placements or rulerships, or the exact position of the Moon. You might be surprised to know that there are no really obvious signs that this would happen in his birth chart. Sure, there was a Sun in Aries-Neptune in Libra opposition, both squared by Chiron… but that’s not enough to trigger a killing rampage. There’s a Mars-Pluto square here too, and that may be another factor — but lots of people who have that don’t go on dangerous homicidal rampages.
But there was obviously something very different that day for Stephen Paddock than there was for the approximately 200,000 or so other human beings born on that day and year. For more information, we need to look at the transits.
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Pop Quiz: what generated more American deaths and injuries: the shooting in Las Vegas, or the Second Battle of Fallujah? Go ahead. Look it up. I’ll wait.
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The birth chart may be your blueprint, but the transits are what show the stresses and strains you’ll face at any given time, and Stephen Paddock had a bumper crop of stressful transits going on.
-transiting Mars was trine natal Mars. Trines to natal Mars, as we have seen before, can enable violence.
-transiting Jupiter was conjunct his Saturn and opposite his Venus. Transiting Uranus was opposite this point, contributing to the tension.
-transiting Saturn was square his Mercury — bringing a lot of stress to his state of mind. Saturn was also trine his Pluto: again, enabling violence.
-transiting Pluto was conjunct his natal Chiron, activating the Sun-Neptune-Chiron T-square.
Furthermore, at the time of the shooting, the local Descendant was conjunct Paddock’s South Node… thus (if you like thinking of it this way), he “established a karmic connection with others.”
So, there you go. No need to blame a society where social connections are breaking down, people are under more economic stress than before, and it’s easier than ever to buy lots of guns and ammo. Hey, this isn’t a political blog, right? So go ahead and blame just the astrology.
UPDATE: The original chart for this post showed and incorrect time for the beginning of the shooting. I admit it: I pulled that from the first thing I clicked on after Googling for “Paddock Las Vegas shooting timeline,” and it was probably a typo on that site. I admit it. Google has made all of us lazy, and I’m not immune.
We can now see that transiting Pluto has been bouncing around his Descendant for the last couple of years, which would certainly explain the apparent break-up with his girlfriend. That may not be motive enough to go on a shooting rampage, but it certainly didn’t help. Transiting Pluto was also Within a couple of degrees of the opposition to his Uranus. That would have lent itself to emotional outbursts, especially given that Uranus is the ruler of his Moon.
We now see that his moon was in the 8th house, and he was having his Lunar Return that evening — the 8th house often being associated with death.
Finally: the local ascendant was trying both his natal Moon and his Saturn Neptune conjunction — giving him an outlet for all of those planet’s energies, if you will. Not that, you know, having a lot of guns with bump stocks has anything to do with it…
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