More odd things about Las Vegas shooting
I hope the investigators make their findings public quickly, and not wait months for a final report.
Yesterday I expressed how strange I found it that Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas mass murderer, left such a small footprint, Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was a Nowhere Man.
I didn’t say he left no footprint, but given how quickly information has become available about prior shooters and bombers, it was very strange. And it still is.
As of this writing, there’s no public information reported that sheds much light on what in his background would have enabled him to pull off such a sophisticated operation, or why.
It’s the sophistication of the operation that also troubles me. The quantity of weapons, the use of a room that had a perfect vantage point, and the use of so-called “bump stocks” all demonstrate that this was not your typical mass shooting.
Based on police statements, it appears the shooting itself lasted about 10 minutes.
Understandably it took police much longer (over an hour) to storm the room, since they had to locate the room and could not have known how many shooters there were or if they were being ambushed.
That Paddock had set up cameras in the hallway and peep hole to be alerted to approaching police demonstrated extreme preparation, and the anticipation of a siege.
I’ve seen some pretty elaborate theories on social media, but we don’t need to go there now (or repeat them without evidence). But that doesn’t mean there aren’t legitimate questions about this odd scenario.
So here are some questions I have specific to the shooting itself (as opposed to Paddock’s background and motivation), that hopefully will be answered soon and publicly:
1. Do the forensics confirm Paddock as a shooter? Presumably there would be residue on his hands and body and his fingerprints and DNA on the weapons.
2. Was his fatal gun shot to the head consistent with suicide? It seems strange to me that Paddock would commit suicide so quickly if his intent was maximize death and he was monitoring people approaching in the hallway. And if he didn’t commit suicide quickly, why did he stop firing? We don’t know what the time lapse was between the shooting from the window and the shooting of the approaching security guard in the hallway.
The police didn’t approach until some point after that. The video cameras he set up, as well as hotel surveillance cameras, might help resolve that.
3. Is there any indication of a second or multiple shooters? Presumably the audio can be analyzed to determine if there is an indication of multiple guns firing at the same time or in such close succession it’s unlikely one person could have done it alone. There were two broken windows, but if Paddock’s intent was to maximize fire, why take the time to switch from one window to another? What happened in that time period (about an hour) between the shooting stopping and the police approaching the room, and is there any evidence of one or more persons leaving?
4. ISIS has doubled and tripled down on its claim that Paddock was one of its soldiers, either under direction or inspiration. Putting aside investigation into Paddock’s computers and so on, is there any forensic evidence that the weapons were of a type or character (including modification) that ISIS has used in the past in Europe or elsewhere, or that ISIS was promoting online (as some groups promoted the use of pressure cookers used in the Boston Marathon bombing)?
I’m confident that investigators are asking these same questions, and probably many I’m not thinking of.
The most likely answer to all this is the simplest answer, that Paddock acted alone and took the time to plan it out alone. But it’s all too strange to accept that as a foregone conclusion.
I hope the investigators make their findings public quickly, and not wait months for a final report.
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The sooner we start getting some solid information the sooner the wild rumor mill will be shut down. The two big questions I have are 1) Why?! and 2) was he alone?
I am sure someone will come on here and declare how we don’t know anything yet but I don’t care. It’s called the first amendment to share your views with others. The simple explanation for how he acquired such knowledge about choosing a shooting platform, changing a weapon to be full automatic, choosing weapons and buying them in a certain fashion to go undetected would point to someone giving advice that was familiar with these topics.
His almost invisible footprint is consistent with someone giving him advice on how to leave no digital footprint of his politics or religion and fly under the radar of America’s counter-terrorism NSA/FBI dragnets.
The easy answer how all this happened is that ISIS was guiding him the whole way.
Trump made a comment that they will be making an announcement about “what they have found”. He is letting the left go and I think he is going to put the hammer down because he already knows how this guy with no interest in guns and no digital footprint suddenly appeared and shot or killed over 500 people
It basically takes a screwdriver and I believe less than $200 to purchase and convert a standard stock to a slide fire stock. It’s super easy to do and in legal terms is not considered automatic fire and thus not illegal in most states. I imagine that will change soon in the near future.
My guess as to why he took so many guns up there is that slide fire stocks have a tendency to jam up a cheap gun fairly easily and are unreliable on accuracy (even less so than an automatic) because they vibrate the gun and move laterally during fire.
Also, if you have the guns and have more guns than mags and you are planning some big long shooting trip it might make sense in deranged rampage mind to bring the guns up there already loaded and just switch guns rather than mags when you run out of loaded mags.
Interesting idea about the bump device, but seems more likely the guns were for many shooters, who maybe didn’t show up. Why did he break 2 windows? And he had a companion, according to the room-service bill (probably).
I say this because the set up of cameras indicate a will to beat the police and get out of there alive. What good is it to know there is a cop at the door, or down the hall? Three extra shots? So, maybe the camera was to distinguish accomplices.
The second broken window was to shoot at airplane fuel tanks next to the concert grounds. This article even has a nice graphic explaining the shooting angles.
https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/the-strip/las-vegas-strip-shooter-targeted-aviation-fuel-tanks-source-says/
At the range, firing into a densely packed crowd, he probably wasn’t aiming at individuals anyway, because he figured every bullet would hit someone.
You can’t pick your nose in one of those big casino hotels without it being recorded by security cameras. I hope they release some of that footage – soon – in the interests of transparency and tamping down some of the wilder of the rumors. Several basic questions could be answered – including the process of getting all those guns up to his room and whether he was alone the whole time during his stay – quite handily.
Also, presumably either people below, or a CCTV on the grounds, would have noticed two windows breaking and glass falling down from the hotel?
I agree with you that there a lot of odd questions which would seem fairly easily answered, and with rabidfox that it’s better that they’re answered sooner rather than later if they don’t want all these wild conspiracy theories taking root.
Anyone else curious how mad the Vegas Casino guys are going to be if their “propaganda” about being the most heavily surveillanced city gets exposed as a myth?
It’s a well-known fact among “gunnie” circles, but most people don’t realize: “Security camera” is a misnomer. Cameras don’t provide security, and they don’t prevent crime.
AT BEST, they provide video evidence that could be used to identify and convict the perpetrator, but that’s after-the-fact.
Case in point: Las Vegas may — may — be the most surveilled city, but London is close behind. Cameras on most buildings, cameras on every street corner. This has not prevented or stopped the violence from their newest arrivals/refugees.
If cameras prevent crime, then Las Vegas and London should be two of the safest cities on the planet. They’re not. Q.E.D.
Okay. “Surveillance camera” then.
Does anyone honestly believe that we will get an accurate accounting of this event from the LVMPD, the FBI, and BATFE? I would merely remind you of the killing of Erik Scott by the LVMPD and their coverup of same. Contact his father Bill Scott for the REST of that story. BATFE, of course, ran Fast and Furious out of their Phoenix Field Division, as well as other similar operations out of their other 24 Field Divisions across the country. Our local was Castaway from their Tampa Field Division. But then surely the FBI has been a paragon of virtue and honor for at least the past year. Or not…
The first ISIS attack on America was in Garland, TX, and the FBI was on the side of ISIS with “Go tear up Texas”. He parked and watch the shooting start. Then he fled. He never told anyone, and he didn’t offer to defend the people in Garland. If the FBI was still helping them, then they get to investigate their own crime.
I am sure that the FBI has already determined that the guy did not intend to commit a crime and have destroyed all evidence.
More questions: is the report that he was prescribed anti-anxiety medication diazepam true and if so, was he on it at the time of the shooting? I’m guessing an autopsy report would give a good answer to this.
The report: https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/the-strip/las-vegas-strip-shooter-prescribed-anti-anxiety-drug-in-june/
Lots of people are prescribed anti-anxiety meds.
Sure. As the article points out, “Diazepam is a sedative-hypnotic drug in the class of drugs known as benzodiazepines, which studies have shown can trigger aggressive behavior. Chronic use or abuse of sedatives such as diazepam can also trigger psychotic experiences, according to drugabuse.com.”
Could this have had anything to do with it? Why did his doctor prescribe them? All this on the assumption that the report is true.
This crime seems too well planned to be a psychotic break so maybe this is nothing.
“aggression” is usually on account of impulse and not an extended period of planning and plotting. Perhaps these meds might contribute to a sudden outburst of aggression but certainly doesn’t seem likely in this situation. I want to know what the letter said and I want to see a copy.
I have prescribed valium for 40 years and never seen any issue with the drug.
“Could this have had anything to do with it? Why did his doctor prescribe them? All this on the assumption that the report is true.
This crime seems too well planned to be a psychotic break so maybe this is nothing.”
I recently read an article by a man whose wife had a homocidal psychotic break in 2007 (he wrote the article with her permission). She had been prescribed either this drug or another drug within the same family and within 9 months she had gone insane. And her husband, who wrote the article, didn’t notice.
The way he describes her she was extremely well organized, a meticulous planner, and always in control of herself. That didn’t change.
This guy Paddock sounds much the same. According to the casino he fit the pattern of a “responsible gambler.” He used algorithms to plan his gambling, he always set his limits, he never lost too big, he never won to big, and even if he was winning he never let it change his plan. He always stuck to his plan, and would walk away with his winnings.
He was the kind of gambler the casinos hate as he never let his emotions get the better of him.
Getting back to the guy’s wife, he noticed a few things she had done that seemed out of character but nothing too alarming. They were in the car listening to a news report about some guy armed with a couple of handguns and several magazines who had killed a couple of people of people while shooting up a shopping mall. She said, “He had that many guns and all those magazines and he only killed a couple of people? He should have practiced more.” It struck him as a bit odd, but it seemed she was just trying to make a joke as the rest of the conversation was extremely normal.
She was always a meticulous house keeper. He noticed she kept buying bleach even though they already had plenty of bleach. He told her something along the lines of “Hey, you can stop buying bleach now, we’ve got plenty.”
Little did he know how much bleach she had obsessively purchased. Remember, this was in 2007 over the course of 9 months when she was first prescribed the medication until she was committed.
They finally used up all the bleach she had bought last year, 2016.
But that was it. One out of character comment that he thought at the time might have been an attempt at dark humor, and she bought what he thought at the time was a little too much bleach.
I don’t remember the details of how she had gotten herself committed but it wasn’t her husband that put her in the hospital. He got a phone call that she had been admitted to the psyche ward. Confused he went there as fast as he could. If I remember correctly she had come up with a detailed plan to kill sexual predators. One day when he was waiting to visit her a doctor came out for a chat. The doctor had heard he was a free-lance writer who worked from home. The doctor said they could release her into his custody if he would commit to being with her for twenty four hours a day. He actually had to sign a binding agreement that he would be entirely responsible for her behavior and any consequences when she was released into his custody.
That sort of scared him. Then he found out why the hospital was so eager to get rid of her. In group therapy she kept going over her plans, and explaining just how logical they were. Soon she not only had every patient in the therapy session nodding in agreement but some of the staff as well. The rest of the hospital staff was worried she would “infect” many of the patients and even more of the staff.
As he wrote, “I guess they thought I was immune.”
She rapidly got better as they took her off that medication. She simply had the kind of personality type that meant for all intents and purposes she was holding it together when someone else less organized and self-controlled would have been a drooling, quivering mass. She stuck to her normal routine; I believe she worked, at least part time, she got the kids off to school, she cooked, she cleaned, and she was going insane.
It isn’t true that if someone has a homicidal psychological break that they can’t plan and organize. They can, they just use those abilities to achieve new, lunatic goals.
Not for a second am I suggesting that is what happened to this Steve Paddock guy. From what I’ve been reading he was a very unfriendly neighbor who was very domineering and controlling when he was in public with his girlfriend. The staff at the Starbucks noted that he would berate her in public and she’d sort of just shrink in her seat and say, “OK.” And this was before he was on those meds.
I agree with the Prof; there are several things that bother me about this, too. Why did he have those cameras in the room filming his murderous rampage? Who was it supposed to be for? Everything else had a rational purpose. Even if it turns out he had an insane goal, every step he took to achieve that goal was rationally connected to the ends he was trying to achieve.
And why did he shoot at those aviation fuel tanks? You can’t set fire to jet fuel with a few .223 rounds. When I went through flight deck firefighting back in the early ’90s the instructors had one hell of time getting that fuel to burn (sure, as they demonstrated on the Forrestal back in the late ’60s firing a Zuni rocket into a bunch of tightly packed, fueled and armed aircraft about to launch a strike will do it but he wasn’t allowed to use explosives as the training wasn’t supposed to be THAT realistic).
He was a private pilot and owned two planes but because of some of the medication he was on (either the psyche meds or perhaps his blood pressure meds) he couldn’t renew his medical certificate and therefore couldn’t legally fly.
Maybe this particular act provides the hint of a clue at his motivation.
Finally, like the Sheriff of Clark County, I can’t believe for an instant he planned all this without any help.
You cut & pasted almost the entire blog post (instead of just providing the link, as someone else here did earlier), yet you managed to miss the point that the blogger’s wife was on a very different psychotropic drug, and was on it for nine months.
Cymbalta, what the blogger’s wife had been on, is a very different class of drug than Valium. An SSNRI antidepressant versus a simple benzodiazepine tranquilizer. And as I pointed out to the person who posted the link earlier, “He had one prescription for 50 tablets of Valium (a common tranquilizer and muscle relaxant taken by tens of millions of frustrated housewives back in the day), one per day, four months ago. This sounds like a stretch to me.”
SSRIs/SSNRIs and antidepressants in that class, yes, I think it’s right to be wary of. But if one single prescription of Valium was going to turn people psychotic, it would have showed up long before now.
Well I’m happy to hear you think I cut and pasted an entire blog post as I was working entirely from memory.
I would have preferred to provide a link. But other than remembering what I had read, I couldn’t for the life of me remember where I had read it or who had written it.
That’s really weird, since user SDN posted the very link you’re quoting from, on this very comment thread, more than twelve hours before your revelation.
“Lots of people are prescribed anti-anxiety meds.”
Thankfully, now that all our medical records are digitized, it should be no trouble for the authorities to identify those persons on psychotropic medication, and proceed accordingly.
If he was prescribed 50 tablets back in June, to be taken once a day, it’d seem odd that he’d still have them come October. Though you never know.
But diazepam (Valium) doesn’t cause things like this. It was so widely prescribed in the 50s that it was known as “mother’s little helper” – and we certainly had no outbreak of housewives planning and committing intricate mass murder schemes.
For that matter, it’s what I give my 110lb Bloodhound during thunderstorms and fireworks nights. It just makes him mellow 🙂
The list of possible side effects for drugs is usually long and includes the kitchen sink. Vitamin “V” might increase aggression just like alcohol reduces inhibition. We had a patient with a acutely blown disc for an MRI. She was really in pain. I gave here 10 mg IV… I asked her if she still hurt… “yes, but I don’t care” and the scanning went fine. A good friend uses a little valium before going into trials. Considering launching an attack on people and the expected end game, this was probably used to blunt that anxiety.. not create aggression. This was too well planned out to be partially drug induced. Anti-depressants… that is a different issue!!!
It is just too over the top on how many weapons and ammo if this was as well planned as everyone is now thinking. The bump stock isn’t that impressive.The real advantages were height and crowd density. It takes range time to sight in rifles and check out equipment. That being said… if he was in the IRS criminal investigation office he did get some degree of training.
The only thing I’d heard about his IRS job was “A spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Stephen Paddock worked as an agent for the Internal Revenue Service in its auditing department.”
Did the IRS give its auditors weapons training in the late 70s/early 80s?
The IRS? Not routinely. There are armed IRS agents; they’re know as IRS criminal investigation special agents. But I’ve seen nothing to indicate this guy Paddock ever went down to FLETC (the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia) and became one. Run-of-the-mill accountants at the IRS are just accountants.
The FBI, on the other hand, hires a lot of accountants and all of them are law enforcement agents. But then, all the FBI does is investigate criminals. They don’t process tax forms.
Several sources report Paddock acquired most of the weapons in the last year.
In his press conference the sheriff alluded to the possibility Paddock may have been recently ‘radicalized’, and if so they would want to know the source. Why would he say this? He also indicated there is much info he is not disclosing, because of ongoing investigation.
Let’s play connect the dots.
This one doesn’t fit the profile of previous mass shooters in several ways. 1) older shooter 2) affluent 3) much more strategic planning rather than just tactical action, not an impulsive act 4) a clear intention to leave no tracks, rather than the usual social media footprint. If he was planning to end in suicide, why set up cameras to watch for cops? I can imagine why law enforcement would keep many details quiet while trying to locate confederates, collaborators, or suppliers. He bought the guns and gear from somebody.
Maybe the cameras in the hallway were to make sure the “coast was clear” to start firing, not to look for cops coming to get him afterwords. Yes, it’s weird that none of his friends or acquaintances (other than his brother) has surfaced.
They have. Several were interviewed by the press.
Camera would have been there to tell the guy when to commit suicide.
“You can’t pick your nose in one of those big casino hotels without it being recorded by security cameras.” Well, yes, that’s what I was thinking. The gambling (er, “gaming”) floor in any casino will be crammed with overhead cameras (and apparently he did gamble) and I’d expect pretty much all of the pubic areas of the hotel to be surveilled as well.
Of course, Bellagio’s managers might (for whatever reason) not wish to share whatever they have.
I just hope to God the casino didn’t really have all the pubic areas of the hotel under surveillance.
A local discount store set up cameras in the men’s room, without a notice. That was a while back.
No doubt, many hours of hotel security camera footage are now being closely examined. I’m fairly sure we’ll find (in order of your points)
1) Paddock was the shooter.
2) He shot himself rather than be captured (consistent with many murder/suicides)
3) There was no other shooter, nobody else was in the room secretly, and the number of recorded shots will match the number of expended shell casings in the room fairly closely.
4) ISIS is lying. They do that. Frequently.
Oh, and 5) that he put this together without much help or sophisticated planning other than to buy a lot of guns and ammo, knock out the window, and start shooting into the crowd.
In short, another left-leaning nut who wanted to go out famous like the one who shot Congressman Scalise, and more unfortunately, probably not the last one that the left is goading into a murderous rage.
What leads you to the conclusion that he’s a “left-leaning nut who wanted to go out famous like the one who shot Congressman Scalise”? Why do you think he’s left-leaning?
By the way, IS the guy who shot Scalise actually famous? I have to say, I can’t even recall his name or what he looks like.
The factual record reveals that every mass shooter since Columbine was a registered Democrats. There has to be some data there that no one is examining.
Can you provide a link (or links) to that data, thanks?
At least one was Independent. Just something I read. The biggest clue in this case is that the media are not hounding the girlfriend or their associates. The story is off the front page. That always means it’s bad news for democrats.
Or not bad news for Republicans.
Anyway, connected people know. the guy left a note and videos.
The facts are still coming out, so 95% of what we’re discussing is theory. Still, if he were a Republican of any sort, a member of the NRA, or contributed to the Trump campaign, that’s all we would have heard over the last few days. We have not, ergo…
I can’t say anything about his motivations.
I can refer to a post on Pam Geller’s site about his appearance at a Reno anti-Trump rally accompanied by the roommate/girlfriend
https://pamelageller.com/2017/10/evidence-las-vegas-attacker-anti-trump-protest.html/
I wonder about those windows. I don’t know what the building codes require for high rises, but clearly the glass isn’t the usual tempered glass like we have in our sliding glass doors. When tempered class is struck, it shatters into little pieces. The entire window would be missing. These must have been some kind of “safety glass” with a plastic layer as in a motor vehicle. Someone knew how to breach them as well.
It was “said” pretty much at the time, that a hammer was used to smash out the windows.
We also know that he was not conservative or a white national or a member of the KKK. How? Because that is the first thing the news would look for and they did not find it. As little has been said along this line, that means he was a liberal and voted for Hillary.
One question I have is about the small “hispanic-looking” couple telling the birthday girl that “they were all going to die”. It makes instantly clear that others were aware of what was about to transpire and puts to rest a lone-wolf theory. There must be tons of video available to be able to determine exactly who those people were.
Careful, Prof, you’re beginning to sound like a nutter… 😉
Over the past year or so I’ve been reading and watching a lot of information, theories, etc. about the JFK assassination. Some ideas are out there, but others raise legitimate questions which I don’t think have been adequately answered. One thing I think is certain: we are fools if we take the “official” version as 100% gospel, especially in light of all the inconsistencies, disparate facts, and oddities surrounding the event.
Same thing here. I think this Las Vegas shooting is turning out to be yet another in a growing list of incidents where the “official” story doesn’t stand up to honest scrutiny, and those who dare question the “official” narrative are derided and discounted as “conspiracy theorists,” “nutters,” and other ad hominems.
My cynical predictions:
1 – They will find all the dots to connect.
2 – They will end up not connecting the politically motivated correct dots
3 – They will do #2 on purpose.
4 – We will never be told the entire truth – Ever!
Allow me, a retired detective, to posit a theory. Over at Pam Geller’s site there is a photo of someone who looks like him in an anti-Trump rally. Over at PJ Media a criminal psychiatrist outlines in great detail what an older mass killer is all about. You should watch it. All my experience and training agrees.
Also older men do not have the low hanging fruit of social media that we are so used to. He has phone and email records, maybe a fake name social media. But this guy is quiet for a reason. This was planned a long time ago, and in detail.
https://pjmedia.com/video/psychiatrist-cnns-going-answer-twisted-priorities-mass-shootings/
Now to the theory that he and I are in agreement with. Paddock’s motive was the guns. Let me explain. Unless ISIS is right and he went terrorist, or he had a mental breakdown, this may be the reason for the attack.
What are the biggest arguments pro gunners use against the call to outlaw “assault weapons” in America.
1. They are not used in many homicides.
2. There is no proof that allowing people to buy as many as they want leads to crime.
3. High capacity weapons are no more dangerous than regular weapons when it comes to homicide.
What did Paddock accomplish? He now gave the Left the ultimate proof that none of what the pro gun people said was true.
Why that crowd? UK daily mail has an article stating that Paddock tried to rent a room in two separate buildings that faced an event called “Life is Beautiful.” It took place between 9/22 and 9/25 (remember the girlfriend was already sent out of the country by then). The entertainers were rappers and bands like Lorde. The crowd size was estimated to be 45k, black and white and younger. He was thwarted because the rooms he wanted, that faced the fifteen block area, were already booked. So he left.
He went to the Mandalay and got a room facing the next big event- The country music festival. So was he targeting the people or the crowd number? Was it just dumb bad luck that they were targeted and not black and white youth?
Further, according to USA today, he bought 30 guns in a year. (the argument the Left is they want to limit out many you can buy). He bought high end weapons- probably 60k or better in weapons and another several thousand in ammo and accessories.
He fitted “bump fire” units on several guns. This accessory is more a toy than anything. It is hard to master and unreliable. But it does “convert” your semi auto into a burst fire or full auto (if you work it right) weapon. (the argument that semi auto assault weapons can be turned into machine guns)
He bought specialized high capacity mags, up to 90 round stick magazines. (High capacity is bad!) That allowed him to run the gun for long strings into the crowd. However, neither tool is best for actually HITTING a target. Yes, you can spray a large area, but you aren’t hitting anything you are aiming at, especially at the distance he was shooting.
When he was caught, he had 23 guns in his room. Nobody needs 23 guns in a sniper hide. But he displayed them so when the police would take photos there would be 23 “bad guns” in the hands of a mass killer.
Finally, Pamela Geller has a video that shows someone who look a lot like him at an anti Trump rally with a woman who looks like his girlfriend.
Why would an anti-trumper shoot what the MSM considers the core Trump supporters? Well, why did a man drive from Ohio to kill Congressman Scalise and his co-workers?
To make a statement AND effect change. He may very well have been willing to kill anyone, as long as he killed them with the “bad guns” and jump started the anti-gun effort.
If so, then anyone on the Left that calls for a gun law is an accomplice to murder and mayhem.
But that’s just an early theory.
I posted earlier elsewhere.. a personal “Fast and Furious” as an option. Your logic has substance.
Years ago a teacher had her class of elementary school children buy a rifle mail order (pre-1968) to show how easy it was to do and lie on forms required. As the Valentine Day Massacre was leverage for the 1934 NFA, the JFK and 1968 assassinations were used to push the 1968 laws.
It is just a theory now. It is a good one. One which others I have talked to also thought possible.
Archer52 and alaskabob. Concur completely. I just outlined to my ultra-left wing wife what you all posted and her immediate response was “well, if this doesn’t do it, nothing will!!” I.e., outlaw firearms. Her next response was: “makes Australia shooting so many years ago look like a walk in the park.” 😀 😀
Two medical chums mentioned the cyclical rate of fire… one said sounded like a Lewis gun…. too slow for even a bump fire AR-15. Some are directly comparing rate of fire to M240 for reference….
Now the only fly in that ointment is using a tungsten heavy buffer in an AR to slow cyclic rate. Still ripping off nearly 100 rounds with perfection with bump fire hard to do… we shall see.
If he intended to trigger(!) anti-gun laws, he probably shouldn’t have shot up the very people who say they need guns to defend themselves against criminals.
The iconic picture (ten years hence) will be middle finger man, standing up defiantly. Rumor has it he’s a combat veteran, with possibly a few tall beers under his belt.
He’s the EveryTrump of this tragedy.
Good insights and as plausible a theory as the known facts allow at this time.
Stay classy, downvoters.
I knew you couldn’t.
“Why would an anti-trumper shoot what the MSM considers the core Trump supporters? Well, why did a man drive from Ohio to kill Congressman Scalise and his co-workers?…”
Because they are being incited by racist pigs like this:
Michelle Obama: The root of all problems are “All white man” —
https://twitter.com/WiredSources/status/915587083116433410/video/1
1 – am IRS millionaire ???
2 – an avid hunter, just bought weapons in past year ???
3 – girlfriend sent out of country with 100K ???
4 – very careful planning with ‘platforms’, didn’t the daily room cleaning find that this was ‘strange’ ???
5 – will autopsy find brain cancer or something similar ???
6 – as a high roller, why attack patrons and not casinos ???
7 – finally, how can the ‘gaming’, hospitality industry recover ???
I don’t understand (1) or (2). Who’s claiming he’s an “IRS millionaire” (whatever that is), and who’s claiming he was “an avid hunter”?
He had a three day fishing license in Alaska.
He supposedly worked in IRS criminal investigation office, which doesn’t make one a millionaire but then.. ask Lois Lerner.
Yes, I’d seen that he worked as an auditor for the IRS for six years, leaving in 1985, but I don’t understand how that’s morphed into him being “an IRS millionaire.” Likewise, that he got a three-day non-resident fishing permit in Alaska in 2010, but also likewise, I don’t understand how that morphed into him being “an avid hunter.”
Are people just making stuff up? (I admit, I don’t have a TV so I tend to miss a lot of the coverage).
my intent was – how does an auditor for the IRS become a millionaire.
not that he became wealthy working for gov’t.
lots of things just don’t compute.
he owned at least 3 homes, was a high roller,
and somehow got a grandma to live with him and perhaps
be an accomplice.
to the folks complaining about ‘gun control’,
there are so many ways, unfortunately, that a sick, evil person
can maim and kill.
i don’t want to list the wide variety of ways.
this guy was smart and meticulous in his planning.
evil people will do evil things.
“6 – as a high roller, why attack patrons and not casinos ???”
Because in May ISIS publicly called for “lone wolf” attacks on the Vegas strip. The coordinated response was that the LVPD would beef up their presence out on the street and the hotels would beef up their security inside. But the hotels concentrated almost exclusively on the casinos. I suppose they figured the ISIS puritans would strike their at the immoral westerners who do not fear Allah practiced their evil vices of drinking and gambling.
These measures would have been subtle and not apparent to the casual observer. I consider an elderly retired accountant a casual observer; there is nothing in his background that would indicate he had either the training or experience to pick up on the beefed up security. After all the hotels still want to make money, and nobody goes into an armed camp to have some fun. They also didn’t advertise what they were doing. For the sake of the patrons, yes, but also because you don’t announce your new security measures in press releases sent to all the major media outlets so ISIS can read up on them.
Sheriff Lombardo said either yesterday or today that they don’t believe Paddock acted alone. That he had to have help at some point. I agree, and this is one of the reasons why.
“Understandably it took police much longer (over an hour) to storm the room…”
No. There is nothing understandable about this. It’s a disgrace. Vegas is perhaps the best policed city in the country, and if that’s all the better they can do, we are screwed.
Here is the situation. Shots are fired from a tall, multi story building having approximately 500+ rooms facing the target area. The shooting stops after 10 minutes. while this may seem like a long time, it is really a very short time when people are under fire. So, it is likely that the side of the building where the shots were coming from is known. But, this is no longer an active shooter situation. The strategic situation changes from running into a small area and neutralizing an active shooter, to containing a potentially escaping shooter, probably armed. The game changes. So, a contain and capture operation is now under way and it will continue to be run that way, unless the shooter resumes.
According to reports, LVMPD knew that the shots were coming from a high floor in one side of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, within minutes of the initiation of the attack. As the shooting stopped, it took them some additional time to pinpoint the floor and possibly the room. But, at that point they had no idea exactly where the shooter was. It doesn’t do any good to breach the shooter’s room and have him step off an elevator and start gunning people down in the lobby.
No, the LVMPD response was actually quite good, in this case.
A guy two floors up (or down) called 911 and told them where the shooter was. Which brings up another question. The 911 operator(s) must have been simply swamped. That could have contributed to the slow police response.
Pretty sure the hotel security guy who got shot in the leg solved the “which room” riddle for the police.
The response time to get into that room was long, but I don’t think it was unusual. Let’s look at the situation. You have a guy holed up in a room with what may be automatic weapons. He has already fired on and wounded hotel security. Based on drawings of the floor, he has the end room, with a field of fire down the corridor, so you have to figure out how to get to the room without being taken out. Likely they also had no idea how many shooters were in the room. Street cops aren’t trained to deal with a tactical situation like that. So you call on SWAT. But most SWAT teams aren’t sitting around the station waiting for the bell to ring. It’s 10pm on a Sunday night. Some might be on patrol; some are home. They have to get to the scene, gear up, get the tactical overview, talk to the hotel staff. Meanwhile, the shooting has stopped and in all likelihood, the shooter’s floor was contained, so SWAT had some time to sort out a plan. All of that is going to take some time. But again, the shooting has stopped, so the immediate urgency is somewhat less and they can develop an approach that enables them to get some tactical information. They may have tried to get a view inside the room; they may have used a robot. They don’t know if this guy has a bomb inside.
So while you feel that the police response was poor, I think it was correct, given the situation. It probably goes down a lot differently if the shooter was continuing to fire after the first ten minutes or whatever.
I don’t understand all fuss over the sophistication of the attack. It’s not like he infiltrated the White House and assassinated the President.
He had time and money available. He purchased a bunch of guns, none of which appear to have been overwhelmingly expensive. He probably wheeled them up to the room in a golf club bag or some other inconspicuous piece of luggage that nobody would notice.
None of what he did requires any sort of military or para-military training. Just spending some time on the range and familiarizing yourself with your weapons will get you most of the way there. It appears he was not targeting individuals, just mostly spray and pray.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking only the “best of the best of the best” can execute this kind of attack. Think of all the jobs and occupations that people do on a routine basis that require more skill and planning than this attack did.
This was a WELL PLANNED operation. This man began preparations for this event from three months to a year ago. He went from a minimalist firearms battery [shotgun, pistol and 1-2 rifles] to an inventory suitable for an infantry squad and he purchased relatively high-end weapons and outfitted them with accessories to make them fire faster. He acquired multiple firing points. He either ran a practice run in September, with the rap concert, or cancelled his initial plan to attack that concert. Then, when he attacks, his attack is done in a manner which will look good on camera, but was not nearly as effective as it could have been. He was targeting a large crowd in a small area at ranges between 350 yards and 450 yards [within the effective range of the weapon that he was using]. Rapid, aimed fire would have produced better casualty results than indiscriminately spraying the crowd would produce [only 58 dead and an unknown number of people wounded – we do not yet know how many of the injured were the direct result of being hit by rounds and how many are collateral injuries from being knocked down or trampled by the crowd in a crowd estimated to be around 22000 people]. He stops shooting after ~10 minutes, while he still had ammunition left. Police breach his room and find him dead, approximately one hour after he stops firing.
It is a strange dichotomy. Excellent planning and poor execution, if his purpose was to inflict as many casualties as possible. It is almost as if the show was important and the casualty count was secondary, at best. Or he could just have planned the operation from reference sources, both fictional and non-fictional, and simply lacked the training and experience to effectively carry out the assault. Time will provide better answers.
Mac45 – The MOST difficult part of this operation was making sure he booked the room far enough in advance. That’s it. He didn’t have some infantry squad level cache of weapons, he had a modest collection. I know lots of people who are firearms enthusiasts that have way more firearms than this guy.
Yeah, sure he spent some time planning this. But given what little we know about the guy it sounds like that was his personality type.
The few photos of him in the last few years show a physical wreck. Old, fat, debauched, half asleep or drunk I would be surprised if it didn’t take everything he had physically to do what he did for 10 minutes and then was drained both physically and mentally. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was terminally ill with something and being a supreme monster decided to go out with a blaze of glory instead of dying in bed.
A Kamikaze for the cause of liberalism?
Well, the one part nobody has questioned is the practiced application of downward pointing bump fire. Decades ago I was heavily into paintball, and learned to “fan” a trigger. I eventually could get from the upward pointing position I initially learned with (send a hailstorm thataway at the start) to flat or slightly downward pointing (cut through the bush to get a ball through to mark the opposing player)
The slight differences in angle were significant in making the same effort not work in the other angle (not to mention different stances or standing vs kneeling ect)
I grabbed a rifle (unloaded naturally) and tried the rough efforts that I recalled from when my Hellfire trigger was legal and pointing downward is different. before I got to the thirty degree I estimate it would take to shoot up the crowd the ergonomics no longer worked. That means he had somewhere to practice both the slight downward angle to shoot up the av-gas tank(?s) he shot at and down into the ground at the angle he needed to reach the audience. I doubt any commercial range would allow rapid fire down into the ground. So where did that practice happen?
I agree with gantzm … this attack was hardly ‘sophisticated’. Planned, yes; complicated, maybe, but not sophisticated.
If he had holed up for a week with a precision rifle in order to take one shot at a VIP, that’s sophisticated. Ferrying a pile of weapons to a tactically superior vantage in order to indiscriminantly kill as many people as you can? Easy peasy, especially when the security is all about making guests ‘feel’ safe, not make them, you know … actually safe.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we find out a bellhop unknowingly helped out with some of the weapons.
More strangeness: From Fox News, “Soon after her boyfriend carried out the deadliest shooting in modern United States history, Marilou Danley did not appear to be in a panic, reportedly telling a family member she had a “clean conscience.”
“I called her up immediately and she said, ‘Relax, we shouldn’t worry about it. I’ll fix it. Do not panic. I have a clean conscience,’” Danley’s brother, Reynaldo Bustos, told ABC News in Manila on Wednesday. Bustos said he called Danley after he heard about Sunday night’s massacre, which left 58 people dead and more than 530 injured.”
Wat??? “I’ll fix it”?? Fix what??? “I have a clean conscience”??? That’s not the same as saying she had no idea what he was planning on doing. And who were the little “hispanic looking” people who told the birthday girl they were “all going to die”?
Concurring with elle, both the brother and the girlfriend seem surprisingly composed under the circumstances. It’s hard to size that up from a distance, but their reactions seem incongruent to the situation.
Of course, that proves nothing, but it’s curious.
It seems strange to me that Paddock would commit suicide so quickly
If this is the classic shooting atrocity scenario, it’s part of the usual pattern. Shooters are there for the atrocity, not a shootout. Like Luby’s Cafeteria, as the police (or anyone else who might shoot back) approach, the shooter switches from “atrocity” mode to “suicide” mode.
This is perhaps the major practical justification for the idea of allowing crowds to be armed, and one of the major flaws in the notion of a “gun-free zone”—the sooner the shooter can be made to believe that the fun is all over, the sooner he himself will end it all. There’d be no need for any would-be victims to even shoot back.
But … so much of the rest of this one doesn’t fit the pattern that this suicide makes me even more suspicious that someone is trying very hard to make it look like the usual type of shooting atrocity, just a bit more grandiose.
Why anyone would be interested in doing this, I don’t know. If it’s part of the big plan to disarm American civilians, it was badly done, as the heat is going to concentrate on “bump stocks”, whether or not they had anything to do with it, and those are novelty items; hardly the core of the Second Amendment.
Anyway, if the shooter was an ISIS convert, that implies conversion to Islam, which tends to rule out the suicide theory. I think a Muslim suicide is denied his otherwise guaranteed 72 horis.
Working for the postal service for a time by a con would be a good intro into mail fraud and for the IRS as an auditor a good primer on financial fraud or money laundering. Neither is unusual really. And “professional gambler” is a great cover for both types of criminals and has been used for hundreds of years to explain why they have so much cash. He was into some kind of criminal activity just like his father the escaped jailbird psycho. His family of course know nothing because they know not to ask just like with the old man.
regarding his mysterious cash income and his planes – a man with a small plane can make some real nice cash with a few trips across the border. Just a straight shot down the colorado river valley from vegas.
p1cunnin is right. SWAT isn’t sitting around. They are people on patrol or in units that have to assemble, gear up, make a plan and figure out how to assault the target without getting killed or getting another innocent killed.
Had the guy started shooting again the poor patrolmen who tried the first time would be tasked to go at him again.
I’m stuck on a millionaire mass murdering poor people. I mean, that’s how the Democrats classify everything. A millionaire mass murderer. This event violates criminal theory 101. Especially with him as lone gunner.
There reports of a Paddock restaurant receipt for 4 people.
Room service for 2.
Also, reports of the video from Paddock’s camera being stream ‘offshore’.
Post the link(s), Neo
Planes , extra cash, automatic weapons , sounds like a gun runner to me
Interesting point about the money laundering. That would make a lot of sense as to why he had so much money to blow gambling. It takes more than rentals to drop the cash he must have been dropping every night. Selling illegal guns would bring in that kind of cash. Plus it would explain why he had so many guns but did not seem to be a gun enthusiast to those who knew him.
Selling guns would also fit the scenario as to why he had so many guns in a hotel room, (and remaining in his garage) and why he had nitro in the car. Of course it doesn’t explain the shoot out. Did he get mixed up with ISIS through selling guns? It would not explain the shoot out, but makes a lot of sense as to a starting point.
Consider the source, BUT, at PuppetStringNews ( who posts make it onto zerohedge ) has a 4chan theory that this was a gun running sting gone bad… that shooter was working for FBI . Crazy, I know.. But.. Nothing adds up, so we’re in for a LOT of theories and unfortunately the FBI and DOJ have proved to be compromised.
http://www.puppetstringnews.com/blog/paddock-possibly-fast-and-furious-gun-dealer-transaction-infiltrated-by-isis
Sadly, in this day and age, that is a more believable scenario than the one being floated that he went crazy from a few valium tablets. But if it were the case that the shoot out was spontaneous and the perps escaped, then it still does not answer the question of who were those two people who warned the birthday girl that they were “all going to die” before the shooting happened?
The fact that he brought a hammer with him to break out the windows negates this being a spontaneous event.
I’d like to know if police and vets in the crowd said his fire was fast and accurate? Did he pick targets and pin them down? I’ve never used a bump stock but the principle of bumping the entire rifle between a sorta automatic firing smells of wildly in-accurate shooting. Anyone used a bump stock and can speak to the ease of accurate shooting?
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=proof+m240+used
Pure speculation… but cyclic rate of fire different… a friend said is sounded like a pure machine gun and with that many rounds shot so evenly… hum.
“We don’t know what the time lapse was between the shooting from the window and the shooting of the approaching security guard in the hallway.”
Yes, Professor, we do. The shooting stopped at approx 10:20. [Police radio messages suggest that the “automatic” gun fire was still going at 10:24. This is inconsistent with other reports.] The security guard was shot at approx 10:26. The police did not breach the room until 11:20, a delay of 54 minutes from the shooting of the security guard.
Why the police waited so long to breach the room needs to be explained.
I am still waiting for more information on this shooter’s efforts to rent rooms overlooking the main stage at the Life Is Beautiful Festival in downtown Las Vegas the prior week. (At the Ogden and at El Cortez.) This suggests that he did not have a “snap” and go on a rampage. Also, the demographics of the Life Is Beautiful crowd are young and left-wing. Not the ones that an “antifa” shooter would target. But an Islamic terrorist would not care.
Did he at least leave a tip for the maid?
Yes. “Don’t attend country music festivals.”
I realize there could be many reasons for this, but notice the photo at the top, the exterior glass wall of the building has not a single nick in it except for where the panes were broken out. There was no return fire on those positions.
Also I’m sure the autopsies would address this but not a single one of the weapons I saw would have a flat trajectory at the distance and height they were fired. All would have a considerable plunge rate at the distances shown.
Not much of a plunge rate. This will sound odd, but with the high angle of fire from 32 story to ground even 400 yards away the bullet drop is significantly less than if a horizontal shot out that distance. Bullet drop about only 2/3’s at down angle versus horizontal there. I doubt anyone had anything able to hit that area and you have so many people behind many of those mirrored glass windows…return fire not wise.
Trying to hit a 32nd story window from the ground with anything except a sniper rifle wouldn’t have been a good idea, I’m sure any guests on the 30th and 31st floors are glad no one tried.
Alaskabob and Servo,
Oh, I agree with everything you guys say. In their excitement it is surprising that someone wouldn’t have shot back regardless if what they had was not able to get there. In all the noise (screaming, people running etc) it would be difficult if not impossible to see where it was coming from and respond.
The other thing I saw in the pictures of weapons was an AR-15 that was a 22 LR. No way that could have been used for outside shooting.
One last thing, all the inside pictures had that “posed” look. Why it would be like that I don’t know. Also maybe you guys can explain this to me. Why would this guy have weapons with bipods when he was shooting down at such an angle. He would almost have to be standing up, which would be weird with bipods.
Many gun people don’t understand that a firearm shoots high relative to its sight line when the barrel is elevated or depressed. It’s counterintuitive, but easy to see if one takes the time to draw it out on paper. (And if one realizes that a bullet in horizontal flight crosses the line of sight of a properly-zeroed rifle twice – once headed upward in its trajectory and again falling back down through the line of sight farther downrange.)
I didn’t see your comment when I responded to Alaskabob. You are of course correct. The effect gravity has on bullet trajectory is strongest when firing at the horizontal. Which is how practically all range practice takes place. What non-shooters (and surprisingly even some shooters) don’t realize is that when you are sighting in a rifle, say at 200 yards the barrel is actually not parallel to the line of sight (LOS) but is actually pointing upward to “lob” the bullet to the target where the sights are adjusted to coincide with bullet impact as it drops down to the line of sight for the second time. Beyond that point the bullet will drop below the LOS. If you were to align the LOS and the barrel exactly parallel to each other the bullet will never cross the LOS even once. And the fired bullet is dropping at the same speed as an unfired bullet simply dropped from the same height as the muzzle. The difference is that a bullet traveling at 3000 feet per second gets a lot further away from the muzzle before it hits the ground.
If you were to shoot vertically either directly up or down with a properly sighted in rifle the bullet will cross the LOS only once. You could not witness this shooting vertically up into the air, but if you were to shoot through a hole in the floor of elevated platform you could see it easily. In order for the bullet path to be exactly vertical you’d have to aim off to the side; optically it would appear you are aiming “lower” than where you want the bullet to impact. Close to the muzzle of the rifle the bullet will cross the line of sight. And then never cross it again as there is no sideways force equivalent to gravity to pull the bullet back across the LOS for a second time.
The greater the suppression or elevation angle, or the higher or lower you have to move the barrel from the horizontal to hit the target, the closer you approach this effect. The bullet path will cross the LOS for a second time eventually, but it will travel much further from the muzzle of the rifle before it does regardless of whether you’re shooting uphill or down.
It works the same way shooting at a steep elevation angle. Firing from the ground at a target 320 feet in the air (assuming the standard 10ft distance floor to floor between stories) the bullet will impact above the point of aim. How much higher depends on a number of factors. While Pollack was firing into a crowd 4-500 yards distant, some officers may have been closer to the base of the building so the elevation angle would have been even steeper, therefore the bullet impact would have been even higher above the aim point UNLESS the rifleman is aware of this and knows how to compensate for it. That takes practice and this isn’t the kind of practice you can do at the range. It would be an extreme shot beyond the ability of nearly all patrol officers even if they had an AR in their patrol vehicle, and beyond the capability of their equipment as well particularly if their rifles retain the original iron sights.
Naturally I don’t need to mention the officers armed only with pistols. I don’t believe anyone on the ground ever had the thought of returning fire even cross their minds as the danger to the public of spraying the side of the hotel with what would only be inaccurate gunfire was glaringly obvious.
Rags called me a lot of names on the earlier thread about Pollack the “Nowhere Man.” We all know Rags is always right no matter how wrong he is. The wronger he is, the more right he becomes. I pointed out what experienced hunters, marksmen, and ballisticians have known for decades. Apparently Elmer “Rags” Fudd grew up hunting wabbits or something so he’s the expert. So I’m the moron, idiot, arrogant, what have you. It was very amusing. In Genesis God promised Abraham the land of the Canaanites, but Abraham’s descendants couldn’t take possession of it until the Canaanites’ iniquity had reached its full measure.
I waited until Rags’ iniquity had reached its full measure and made this comment.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/10/las-vegas-shooter-stephen-paddock-was-a-nowhere-man/comment-page-1/#comment-788032
“Yeah, I’m the moron and idiot. Me and the US Army marksmanship trainers who authored Field Manual 23-10, “Sniper Training”, Chapter 3, “Marksmanship.”
http://www.biggerhammer.net/manuals/23-10/ch3.htm
“3-11. ANGLE FIRING
Most practice firing conducted by the sniper team involves the use of military range facilities, which are relatively flat. However, as a sniper being deployed to other regions of the world, the chance exists for operating in a mountainous or urban environment. This requires target engagements at HIGHER and LOWER elevations. Unless the sniper takes corrective action, BULLET IMPACT WILL BE ABOVE THE POINT OF AIM. HOW HIGH the bullet hits is determined by the range and angle to the target (Table 3-3). The amount of elevation change applied to the telescope of the rifle for angle firing is known as slope dope. ”
And producers of ballistics software, whose livelihoods depend on producing a product that tells shooters where their point of aim must be AND produce hits or they’re out of business, they’re so stupid and idiotic they actually produce software that tells the user to shoot lower regardless of whether the user is shooting up or downhill.
http://www.exteriorballistics.com/ebexplained/5th/33.cfm
“3.3 Effects of Shooting Uphill or Downhill
When a gun is sighted in on a level or nearly level range and then is fired EITHER uphill or downhill, THE GUN WILL ALWAYS SHOOT HIGH. This effect is well known among shooters, particularly hunters, but how high the gun will shoot is a subject of considerable controversy in the shooting literature. In fact, at the present time some literature has information that is simply erroneous. In this subsection, we will try to explain the physical situation carefully so that it can be understood clearly, and then provide some examples using Infinity to perform precise calculations… ”
No, on second thought you have it exactly backward. You’re the idiot and moron. Where did you “ace” college physics, you pompous, arrogant ignorant no-nothing dolt? Wally “Buck” Cooter’s College of Tire Retreading, Pro Bowling Tour Prep, Advanced Physics, and Hair Weaving?
But you keep telling yourself how right you always are, wanker. Wally “Buck” Cooter wouldn’t have it any other way. He was so proud when he presented you with your certificate in physics and your custom bowling shirt, I’m sure.”
Always aim lower when shooting at either a steep elevation or suppression angle. And always know what is behind or around your target. I’m not a police officer or a sniper but a hunter. If this had been a Bighorn Sheep on a sheer rock face I would have taken the shot (especially if there was another mountain opposite that I could have climbed to reduce the elevation angle). But at a guy in one hotel room window in a large hotel sounded by hundreds of other hotel room windows that for all I knew had members of the public behind each one? A reading from the book of obvious: Helllzz No! Which is why none of the cops there even thought about it.
I should add that Paddock apparently knew exactly what the police response was going to be and that did NOT include any return fire from police on the ground or even from any nearby buildings toward his window. Too reckless. He knew which direction the “threat” was going to come at him. Hence the cameras hidden in his tray on the room service cart outside his door.
So I immediately discounted the notion he had broken that second window so he could “shoot and scoot” should anyone return fire. Besides, it made no sense as there was no way he could shoot from the second window and hit anyone in the crowd at the concert venue. He had rented a corner suite (or two adjoining rooms, still not quite clear on that). The second window faced 90 degrees off to the side. So I figured he did it to get some cross ventilation.
It was not at all apparent that the second window faced McCarran Airport and those AVGAS storage tanks until someone published a map, not just a drawing of the interior of the room, showing Mandalay Bay’s relative position to both targets.
Does the “mini explosion” that occurs when firing a round burn off the DNA left on the cartridge by the person who loaded it into the weapon?
The just ejected case from AR or similar rifle is hot enough to cause 2nd degree burns (I know!) which can denature proteins. There will be soot contamination around the case and some gas blown back around the case as it is ejected from the chamber. Unlikely anything left on rifle case.
I think this thread really emphasizes Prof. Jacobson’s point. Theories of all kinds are going to keep swirling until solid information is made public.
Due to the long delay in releasing the note and video that the shooter took, even if “solid info” is released, many of us will be claiming “cover-up.”
One theory I’ve read that seems intriguing is he was actually in cia, nsa or some other spy org maybe in clandestine ops of some sort. This would be a reason for such a small digital footprint.
Weird and probably not real but just another angle to look at.
RobM, the Left is calling out that “white people are dangerous” which is how they are going to handle that.
Remember, this is all about “the ends justify the means” as one of the posters wife seems to think is okay.
Here’s the problem with that. Anyone who back gun control after realizing the guy DID IT to effect the change is actually supporting and excusing murder and mayhem as a solution.
They become accessories to murder after the fact if you will.
Shame on them.
Well, that, and they’ll try to resume what Obama was pulling in his second term: anyone with “mental issues” (needs help managing finances at Social Security, any veteran) or ever prescribed psychotropics, or anyone in their house, should have all their guns confiscated. They’ll also return to their studies showing “conservatives” are crazy.
Straight out of Stalin’s playbook.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x96Kem0ZYag&feature=youtu.be
Shooter exchanges one gun shot with guard at 3:25….final gunshot at 3:36 is the suicide shot.
Currently, I don’t know anyone military or ex-military, including me, who believes he was a solo shooter. Too many casualties for the number of rounds fired. That and today it was reported he was also shooting at aviation fuel tanks nearby. If he spent any time on that, that was time he wasn’t shooting where people were. And rounds that weren’t expended where people were.
I’ve seen a few pictures of the floor his corpse was on. I counted less then 50 brass casings total in the shots I saw. Of course, I didn’t see the whole floor. But the floor should be littered with casings. Hundreds of them. Where he was shooting. So the rest should be right around where I counted those.
Several hundred of the rounds he fired were utilizing flash-paper casings, which immediately self-destruct leaving no brass casings behind. That explains any discrepancies.
I don’t know what happened to all of the expended primers though.
Can you please specifically show me where one gets caseless ammo for 223 that can fit arn AR and its 60,000 pounds per square inch chamber pressure. One would expect that to be a hot seller and it is nowhere to be found.
I don’t know anyone, military or ex-military, who would believe that you could blow up a tank of jet fuel by shooting at it.
The Las Vegas police chief isn’t the best at giving press conferences. However, he indicated that he thinks there must have been some kind of “help” with collecting all of the materials found in the room, in the car, and in the various homes. FWIW.
Instapundit has a link up to something on psychotropic drugs that would be good to read.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/277475/
He had one prescription for 50 tablets of Valium (a common tranquilizer and muscle relaxant taken by tens of millions of frustrated housewives back in the day), one per day, four months ago.
This sounds like a stretch to me.
***Clark County, Nev., Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said Wednesday that it was only logical to “make the assumption” that Stephen Paddock had “some help at some point” in pulling off Sunday’s massacre.***
Sounds like the sheriff should hold his tongue and do less assuming.
Also, the “explosives” found in the murderer’s car are now reported to be Tannerite. No big deal.
Considering all the hot buttons … all that is missing is a life membership with NRA to ice the cake. If someone wanted to be a poster boy for gun control… he had quite the laundry list in such short time.
Two windows create airflow. The first clip would have filled the room with smoke. There probably is some video somewhere showing when the second window was blown out.
That smoke would have set off the smoke detector. The hotel would have known within seconds which room to check. Why did it take so long to get there and why do they continue to claim that it took a while to locate the room? There had to be other people on the floor or even next door blowing up the phones too. Above and below, too. I contend that they knew within two minutes which room.
In these deals, you always hear that after the search of houses and property, they found phones and computers. They reported more guns and fertilizer but no mention of computers. Why? If there were none why didn’t they report that none were found?
Why did he stop after ten minutes? I saw a video of the bump stock in action. It literally burns up the gun. He only had standard clips on the guns I saw in some pictures so he may have used up all his weapons very quickly. The action of the bump stock also looks brutal to hold the weapon even in the hands of a strong person. He also didn’t have shooting gloves on for some reason, only gardening gloves. The heat of the weapon had to have caused extreme burning of his hands. He may have had trouble reloading.
The planning, I admit, was extreme and had to have happened over many months. The guy seems to have had a lot of time on his hands but to maintain that level of rage over a long period is hard to imagine but he must be crazy so it could happen.
Now reports he booked a similar scenario in Chicago overlooking an open air concert…or at least someone with his name did it. If so…. not some local dude going bad.
He killed himself right after he shot the security guard through the door. The last two shots were single shots. One for the security guard. Then about 7 seconds later the suicide bullet was fired. How do we know? From the sounds of the gun fire, and the timeline of the shooting. According to the police, he still had ammo and guns, the security guard probably saved some lives.
This sentence had me blowing coffee on my monitor…
“Paddock led such a low-key, private life that no one seemed to know him well, and those who did had no sense he was capable of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.”
Nobody knew him well, but those who did…
There’s been a lot of talk recently about suppressors, machine-guns, bump stocks, etc. Most of the talk concerns how Republicans want to make it easier to buy suppressors and how that will frustrate police responses, or how bump stocks turn rifles into the functional equivalent of automatic firearms.
I’d like to reiterate a few points:
A. Paddock, based on what we know so far, had no criminal history which would have prevented him from purchasing NFA items like suppressors and machine-guns through the existing process. He also clearly had the financial means to afford such items. His access to such items was not curtailed by existing laws. He had the money and, based on what we know, a clean enough record to pass the background checks.
B. “Silencers would have prevented police from locating and stopping Paddock”
1. Police didn’t stop Paddock. Based on current reports, he stopped himself, and that’s why police took about an hour before breaching his room.
2. Gunfire locators like ShotSpotter state that they can detect and locate suppressed gunfire. ShotSpotter should be deployed in all major cities so that police have real-time data allowing them to respond to detected gunfire.
C. “Who needs a bumpfire stock.”
I don’t need one, but anyone who wants to experience automatic gunfire will find them much more affordable than a machine-gun. The problem I have with current law isn’t that machine-guns require going through the NFA process. The problem I have with current law is that the government refuses to accept new registrations!
Civilians cannot purchase or possess machine-guns manufactured after mid-1986. We all know what happens when demand increases but supply is fixed – massive price inflation. Purchasing a M16-style machine-gun costs between $30,000 to $40,000. Paddock could afford it. I can’t.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/10/02/actual-federal-laws-regulating-machine-guns-u-s/
There’s a very well established drive in human nature to understand stuff…especially bad stuff.
It has often led to scientific discovery. It has also led to witch trials and the like.
I first noted this back in the days when many American farmers were losing their farms and/or going into bankruptcy. The reasons were obvious, and they were simply basic economics. Too many farmers had gone WAY too far into debt, and market-distortions like the Carter grain embargo had thrown a hand-grenade into their calculations.
So, what a lot of them concluded in their drive to understand what had happened led many of them to blame “the Jewish bankers”. It was all over the place.
The point being here that we all have this human drive to understand what happened and WHY. This is sometimes very dangerous, and it leads to conclusions that are not simply wrong, but can lead to evil.
This is especially true when we have…as we DO…people who have an agenda which is based on their notoriety and use of conspiracy theory. They HAVE to feed their audience.
Simple facts and leaving the inexplicable unexplained are not their forte. Don’t be made fools.
So after reading all of this, this is what I see:
1. He could not have done this alone – even sheriff admits it.
2. There were enough people who knew that this was going to go down (birthday girl told in advance that they were all going to die) that it was not a spontaneous, lone-wolf, “snap” event.
3. It wasn’t about Trump or Republicans because he looked at other rooms and dates that seem to indicate that in picking the venue, the goal was just large numbers of people to shoot up. So it wasn’t politics.
4. The event planner(s) thought you could blow up those tanks by shooting at them, which indicates ignorance of something that most military people would know.
5. There are are some interesting OFFICIAL facts here https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-shooting-timeline-stephen-paddock-mandalay-bay/
According to the sheriff, the first shot was at 10:05. He shot for 10 minutes and stopped shooting at approx 10:15 The Sheriff said he could have kept firing, but for some reason he did not.
Most likely for the reason that InEssence wrote above: “ He killed himself right after he shot the security guard through the door. The last two shots were single shots. One for the security guard. Then about 7 seconds later the suicide bullet was fired. How do we know? From the sounds of the gun fire, and the timeline of the shooting.
From CBS, we are told the sheriff thought it “phenomenal” that officers (plural) got up to the room in 12 minutes (10:17) and one minute later ( 10:18) the security officer was shot and the room was identified.
Poster geologist notes above, “The shooting stopped at approx 10:20. [Police radio messages suggest that the “automatic” gun fire was still going at 10:24. This is inconsistent with other reports.] The security guard was shot at approx 10:26”.
In the CBS news article, the sheriff said, “200 rounds were fired into the hallway”. What happened in that hallway? Based on what geologist noted, it would make sense if the automatic gunfire heard until 10:24 could have been those 200 rounds were fired into the hallway. But who fired them? If the gunman was dead seven seconds after 10:18, then who was responsible for the automatic fire? Sooo many questions about those hallway moments that could shed so much light. Oh…and about that suicide note…fuggedabowtit
FWIW, my take on this is that the Paddock was there to sell guns. Its fits his profile of big money gambler with an airplane. He had to know something bad was going down, because he sent his girlfriend away. Maybe he got in too deep with the cartels/ ISIS. He knows they don’t play nice. Others have suggested he was an FBI agent or informant, and thus the cover up. Who knows? Whatever it was, it was something that his girlfriend told her brother not to worry about, because it could be fixed
1. He could not have done this alone – even sheriff admits it.
That’s false. The sheriff said he “assumed”. That was then expanded and has become a meme, and the “right press” is just as guilty as anyone. Likewise his mumbling about “radicalized”. You can find the actualities.
4. The event planner(s) thought you could blow up those tanks by shooting at them, which indicates ignorance of something that most military people would know.
Nonsense. Anyone who knows anything about jet fuel knows you don’t explode it by making it leak out of a tank.
You’re working WAY too hard to make this something you have no support for.
“Birthday girl” could as easily have been looking for her 15 minutes of fame. When we have more, you let us know.
Nuts.
I was surprised the cops didn’t have an officer/sniper available, especially one they could put in a chopper. Some video shows a chopper coming into the scene above the hotel. But then again, he was only shooting for about ten minutes if I remember correctly. But perhaps its just another scenario LVPD (Or any other city with high rise hotels) needs to be prepared for.
There was* a video on YouTube taken by a cabby who was at the Mandalay Bay. As the video starts, echoes of gunfire are heard that were apparently from a volley fired before the cabby started videoing. At 4 seconds into the video, a loud, sharp series of gunshots are heard, very apparently from very close range. Within a second and a half, echoes of that volley can be heard. A long period of silence follows. At about 45 seconds, after a moving car passes the parked cab, another echo of a volley of shots is heard. This “echo” was not preceded by a volley of shots from the Mandalay Bay. The cabby even comments that the volley “came from farther away.” Within a few more seconds, another volley is heard, and this one is again very plainly close by, from the Mandalay.
This video makes it clear – another firearm was firing volleys from a site distant from the Mandalay Bay.
*The video has since disappeared from YouTube, replaced by page that says “video not available.” Not “removed because of content” or “at the request” of someone or some authority – just “not available.” Other videos have clips from the video (purporting to show gunfire coming from the 4th floor of the Mandalay – and one of those videos also has audio of a police dispatcher saying a shooter is on the 4th floor), but none of those other videos have the beginning of the cabby video with its “echoes” with no sound to produce them. I downloaded the video and would send a copy to the this blog if there’s an interest in seeing/hearing it. (I did watch this video two nights ago but was not able to see it last night. Tonight, I tried three different browsers and got the same results with each, but a friend of mine was able access the video – through the link I had supplied to her in an email, and I am now using that link myself. So I’m not sure what’s going on here. Was the content cached by her mobile phone provider? I’m not sure. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNiRr763gJA. Maybe it will work for some of you.)
Another interesting thing about the video is that the cabby is told by her dispatcher to leave the area of the Mandalay because the shooting is coming from the building. But the dispatcher does not tell her where to go, and she ends up driving right through the shit, where several hysterical people pile into her cab and tell “JUST GO!”