Alternate headline: “Dianne Feinstein joins NRA.”

How does a gun-grabbing Democrat get so far off-message as to admit on a national television show that more regulations wouldn’t have stopped a mass shooting? Mass shootings are when most other Dems are pounding the table as hard as they can to regulate something, anything. She makes the point, correctly, that there was nothing in Paddock’s past that we know of that should have stopped him from buying a gun. No *background check* law could have stopped him. Most liberals would use that as proof that guns need to be regulated more aggressively, though: You can’t know which seemingly stable, law-abiding gun buyers are going to go loco later so the weapons themselves need to be made unavailable. Even weirder, DiFi herself had proposed a bill banning bump stocks several years ago. If nothing else, she could have used the question about laws that might have stopped the shooter to note that her bill might have at least reduced the death toll if it had passed when she proposed it. Instead she ends up inadvertently making the case that gun-control regulations are, in the case of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, essentially pointless. She’s not wrong — anything short of total confiscation will be a minor inconvenience for a determined murderer — but this is as far off-script as a Democrat can get on the subject of guns.

Then again, she’s 84.

As for the shooter himself, cops are so desperate for evidence of a motive that they’ve now resorted to an obvious catch-all explanation — Paddock was really, really mentally ill, albeit undiagnosed.

The picture that is emerging of Steven Paddock, who has been identified as the gunman in Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, is of a man that some law enforcement officials increasingly believe had severe mental illness that was likely undiagnosed, sources tell ABC News. The portrait, gleaned from interviews with hundreds of people interviewed over the past week, is that while Paddock might have been financially successful, he had real difficulty interacting with people. He is described as standoff-ish, disconnected, a man who had difficulty establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships… The 64-year-old was known for playing gambling games in casinos for hours at a time with little or no human contact. One source told ABC News that Paddock was exhibiting many antisocial traits that are typical of past mass shooters.

“For hours at a time” is putting it mildly. One pro gambler remembers Paddock playing a video poker machine for 24 hours straight 10 years ago. Meanwhile, a local prostitute told the Sun that Paddock hired her for “really aggressive and violent sex” and would fantasize about tying her up “as you scream for help.” The massacre seems to reflect both sides of that personality: He lived out an unimaginably brutal fantasy but he did so with methodical diligence, calculating the trajectory of shots fired from his room so that he’d know where to aim. Per the LA Times, he was also a heavy drinker, which may have been his way of “self-medicating” for whatever mental illness he suffered from. Still all guesswork for now, though, eight days removed from the slaughter.