It’s still early but this seems to be detailed enough to be believed:
Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, had an arsenal of 17 weapons in his hotel room, mostly military-style rifles, according to a law enforcement source.
At least one of them had been modified with a legal “bump stock” style device that allows the shooter to rapidly fire off rounds without actually converting it to a fully automatic weapon, the source said.
The devices modify the gun’s stock so that the recoil helps accelerate how quickly the shooter can pull the trigger. The devices are legal in the U.S.
Other weapons may have been converted to fully automatic fire, and were still being examined, the source said.
Paddock had four Daniel Defense DDM4 rifles, three FN-15s and other rifles made by Sig Sauer.
Yeah, bump-fire. That would explain the full-auto sound but cyclic rate way smaller than the AR is capable of. I tweeted that this ayem but called it a “shaker stock”.
Has anyone calculated his ranges to the crowd at the concert venue? Looks like most of his work from the 32d floor was “spray and pray”. I heard one report that he started out by charging thru three casinos and firing, then went up and shot from his rooms. Guy looks like a couch potato, so I doubt that charging report.
pretty pricey, very high quality weapons, for a guy who is not supposed to know very much about shooting.
now, what about optics? night force? swarski? leupold? trijicon?
high dollar ar’s, with high dollar optics, ammo, pretty soon we are starting to flirt with $100,000 in equipment.
a person can be a pretty decent pscho for a hell of a lot less, especially if he is contemplating one use only ….. what, he was gonna dash down the service elevator with all the stuff tucked under an arm? come back and get it later?
you betcha.
john jay
Rivrdog: Washington Post said 1000ft from hotel to venue. Add the height of the 32nd floor, and you get roughly 1075ft ( thanks Pythagorean). Assume further as the venue is big. Even so, well within even aimed range, assuming there was any aiming involved.
Timeline is over an hour from first shot to SWAT breach. That’s long enough to get tired of firing.
I read about the bump fire stocks on another news venue.
The recorded firing is bursts long enough to take 100 round magazines.
Like some others, I wondered early on: With the long pauses between bursts – like he was reloading – why did he bring along so many rifles?
Then when it came to light that the hotel room was a suite, it came to me. He was changing position to the other window.
Anyway
To perform that ‘well’ with a bump fire stock would take quite a bit of practice on a continuing basis. It’s almost a counter-intuitive technique to get ‘right’ and he did it very well.
So, we have another indication that this scumbag went into detailed premeditation and planning.
Other than some curiosity among gun gear-heads, the particular weapons used are irrelevant. Obviously he had self loaders, and apparently they were capable of simulated automatic fire. Beyond that, so what?
There is a pattern that I note, and I find it curious. Several of these murderers over the years have toted along a rather large number of firearms to the scene of the crime. One person can effectively fire only one at a time. Accounting for the issues of fouling and barrel heating, one person intending to fire off a thousand or two thousand rounds as fast as possible could do it with a single rifle, but two or three of the same model and caliber would be plenty. Seventeen of them is just stupid. It’s dead weight. We often see silly, largish collections of disparate weapons. Surely that means something, especially in its repetition.
I own more than seventeen guns, as do lots of shooters and gun collectors, but I would never try to lug them all at once, anywhere, for any reason. It makes no sense no matter how you look at it (ignoring the fact that murdering people makes no sense) and therefore it is a behavior that tells us something significant.
I just don’t quite know what that something is. Clearly the killers are planning ahead, thinking it through, and yet they so often burden themselves with an extra hundred pounds or more of useless hardware. It looks like a pattern, so one would look for a common cause.
It makes perfect sense from a “false flag” perspective. It gives their handlers and the media more to point and shriek at. It likely also makes sense to a deeply disturbed mind who is trying to make “an impression” and “a name for himself” rather than any “practical” implementation of a desired outcome: more guns = bigger story.
What bugs me, now that it’s come to my attention, is:
What they bloody Hell took 72 minutes? Apparently, according to radio scanners listening to the police response, they had people on the 32nd floor in about 10 minutes. Hotel/Casino security is heavily armed. Cops have usable hardware all the time on their hip. Why get to the floor, hear firing coming from behind the door, then twiddle their toes for a frikkin’ hour! That is worse than Columbine. Policy with most departments is: in the case of an active shooter you go in with what you have. Why didn’t they? I’m not hearing any stories of hero cops dying storming the place. OTOH, there is a story saying he had Antifa literature with him…. If true, if he’s a leftie, the media will want this story to die with him as contra-narrative.
I saw a picture that was supposedly him at an anti-Trump rally wearing a pink pussy hat. It’s still too early to be certain of such things.
While cops will rush into dangerous things because they are, in many cases, brave enough people, it seems that official department policy nowadays is that confronting shooters is the job of SWAT, not of ordinary policemen. So I think the answer to your question is “policy”. At least so far as the police are concerned.
Now for casino security, I would suspect the same only more so, and the strong suspicion that any weapons they may carry are only for show.
4 DDM4? Apparently purchased one at a time at different gun stores? Who does that? FNx2, Sigx? These are high dollar items. A gunny would buy one copy of a high dollar model and then go chase the next shiny. Not 4 of the same.
This was obviously planned months ago. He was padding his bunkjunk for the show, going out of his way to smuggle hundreds of pounds of high dollar black guns to the crime scene.
So rule out “he snapped”. He knew what he was doing and wanted the scene set up just so.
Via a good source, he did have at least one scoped DD5V1
Just this minute, network radio news said forty weapons were in the hotel suite. NO ONE believes he can actually use all those weapons.
This was a “made to order” incident. No, don’t freak out. “Made to order” can be as simple as a person being emotionally bonded with the enemy and then acting t on his fantasy of pleasing his chosen alliance.
I want to see security camera footage of this 64 year old guy lugging all those long guns and hundreds of rounds of ammo up to a 32nd floor suite of a busy hotel in Vegas. And don’t try to tell me there is no camera footage. I still find it almost impossible to believe it could be done without detection.
I’m sure there were cameras, but what’s unusual about a hotel guest taking a pair of suitcases up to his room? Sure, he had to do it 5 times, but that wouldn’t be conspicuous without a lot more detailed analysis of security video than is normal.
Stop with all the ” …lugging all those long guns and hundreds of rounds of ammo up to a 32nd floor suite of a busy hotel in Vegas.”, like it’s unusual. Granted, the ammo normally stays in the vehicle.
Strap multiple Pelican cases to the big case with wheels, and roll them into the elevator. What’s the big deal? Generally, you don’t leave guns in your vehicle overnight.
I’ll remind you all that lots of shooting and gunny type stuff is done in the Vegas area. The busiest civilian training school is a 45 minute drive outside of town. I’ve seen over 1k students there at one time. Most are handgun, but some will be doing long gun. Lots of students stay in Vegas, mostly so they and/or their family can do Vegas stuff in the evenings. Otherwise they stay closer to school. LOTS of gun stores/ranges and gunsmiths in/near town. Same in the Reno area.