The NY Times is reporting that among the 20 guns police found in Seven Paddock’s Mandalay Bay hotel room were “two rifles with scopes on tripods.” According to reports, the attacker used a hammer to smash the hotel window and then used one or both of the weapons to fire on the crowd across the street.

Along with “hundreds of rounds of ammunition” were rifles described as “AR-15 type.” However this same description was also originally used to describe the Cold War era SKS rifle used in Virginia to injure Rep. Steve Scalise at a baseball game. So take that with a large grain of salt.

Machine guns and other automatic weapons are typically used in conjunction with a tripod or a bipod of some sort. Automatic gunfire is wildly inaccurate, and the addition of a stabilizer such as a tripod improves the accuracy. Tripods are also used in this same manner by police snipers during sporting events, and by military snipers firing from hidden positions.

Again, reports are still sketchy and New York Times reports rarely have more experience with firearms than what they’ve seen in ‘The Matrix.’ More details as they become available.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

55 COMMENTS

  1. Why would a shooter need that many rifles for a singular task?
    I thought floors above a certain height were mandatory to have shatter proof windows to prevent suicides?

    Just some questions.

    • Hey, everything about this shooting is extremely suspicious. Right before a SHARE act hearing/vote, rich, retired, White guy with all that money just throwing it away to murder conservative country folk at a concert in Vegas.

      Who knows if the guy was even the shooter. He could have been murdered by ISIS terrorists who broke in the room with a fake hooker, killed him, did the shooting, and left with a guy who looked like he killed himself.

      At this point I don’t trust anything the government says because too many of those in the government are Clinton, Bush, and Obama hires.

      • Truthtellers I agree, however, I suspect it’s a black flag event perpetrated by the CIA to push the idea that law abiding gun owners are dangerous; or to attack the gun owning community to try to get them to rise up, or to claim that ISIS (who the CIA created) are atacking the homeland so we will nuke Damascus. The guy is innocent. My $.02 worth.

    • for some reason, these nutjobs love to pack a pile of guns with them when they go out to do their shooting. it’s illogical, but it’s common.

  3. “Machine guns and other automatic weapons are typically used in conjunction with a tripod or a bipod of some sort. Automatic gunfire is wildly inaccurate, and the addition of a stabilizer such as a tripod improves the accuracy. Tripods are also used in this same manner by police snipers during sporting events, and by military snipers firing from hidden positions.”

    And used by hunters in general

    • Accuracy is not an issue when you have 22,000 targets 300-500 yards away who do not know they are being shot at and have nowhere to hide anyway.

  5. Well one thing is obvious. The guy put a lot of time and thought and money into this massacre. Such a hideous crime.

    • “Well one thing is obvious. The guy put a lot of time and thought and money into this massacre.”

      First clue is that rooms in Vegas are not rented spontaneously, especially one as large as used. Must be a suite of some sort to have that many windows. The shooter planned this way in advanced. It will be interesting to see if he had rented Mandalay or other hotel nearby sometime prior. The interesting thing is why he picked that concert.

  7. False flag! Fake news! God hates us! It was Antifa! ISIS! LIBRULS! AHHHHHHHH! *

    *A mocking recreation of comments on TTAG by whackadoo commenters so far.

  8. I have never seen a machine gun with a scope. The repeated reviol would make it worthless in FA fire.

    I bave listened to the video. Not FA fire in my opinion. Too slow a rate of fire and not perfectly spaced during each string.

    • Weird how there’s a bunch of audio out there and none of them sound the same. Hannity just had a clean audio segment that sounded like a single weapon and a LOT slower rate of fire.

    • I had an Elcan C79 on my M249 SAW overseas. Depends on the machine gun, and tbh if I were a depraved asshole wanting to shoot people like this, that combo would be about my weapon/optic combo of choice.

    • The M240 and M249 would like to have a word with you. Optics designed for area fires are quite common.

    • That’s because you’re old (no offense). Almost every single legitimate machine gun fielded by the military in the last decade has a scope on it.

      • ” Almost every single legitimate light machine gun fielded by the military in the last decade has a scope on it.”

        FIFY

    • I agree, it sounds like bump-fire to me. Scope’s were probably red dots, newscasters wouldn’t know the difference.

        • “How the hell can you tell the difference between real automatic fire and bumpfire?”

          The lack of evenness in the rate-of-fire. You can hear the rate of fire speed up and slow down in places.

          Full auto doesn’t vary. It sounds the same from when you squeeze the trigger until you let it go or run dry on ammo…

    • The cyclic rate of a weapon changes as it heats up, as it does in a long string of shooting (Look at IraqVet8888’s ak/ar meltdown videos), and the initial strings of fire were very consistent (as indicated by that one twitter video, where they sounded almost like a helicopter).

      That said… I think the smart money is on it being some manner of garage-shop modification to the firing pin, firing pin channel, or sear, causing it to dump its magazine uncontrollably.

      • It can’t just be heating though. In several of the bursts the cyclic rate starts below 500, approaches 800 in mid-burst, and then drops back to 500 (and yes, I’m referring to the actual muzzle report from videos not taken on the fairgrounds, not the snaps of the bullet impacts which will vary in timing by trajectory.) That’s way too much variation for heating alone. I just checked the videos you referenced and none of the fire rate changes even approach that, even when they destroy the AR and the VEPR.

        Kludge-auto though, that’s an interesting thought. I had assumed slide fire before, but you can’t operate one from support (whether it’s a bipod or actually a tripod.) Crank fire would have been my next guess, but you would think someone would have noticed the huge crank, at least if they’re going to talk about the “tripods” and the “scopes” (then again, maybe not — most of the people doing the reporting want people to believe you can go buy a machine gun without ID or a background check at the corner store.) But an open-bolt or hammer-follow kludge could easily produce those huge changes in cyclic rate as the weapon heats up, and would explain why the first burst was so consistent when it shouldn’t be if a crank were used.

        • InRange got a bipodded AR to bumpfire pretty well, but I really doubt he copied them with the weirdness of that setup (a very high bipod and doing it kneeling).

        • “Kludge-auto though, that’s an interesting thought. I had assumed slide fire before, but you can’t operate one from support (whether it’s a bipod or actually a tripod.)”

          Nobody said the rifles on tri/bipods were used in the shooting, only that they were there in the room.
          I say “nobody,” of course I mean nobody actually reporting on the (very slim) data actually available.

    • I ran a waveform analysis on eight videos and found that over the course of individual bursts the cyclic rate varied from as low as 500 to nearly 800. Slide fire would be an obvious explanation, but you can’t use a slide stock from support. They don’t work that way. They’re probably crank fire then, though why that bit of info didn’t get reported with the “scopes” and “tripods” I don’t know. Seems like the big crank attached to the trigger would be the first thing you’d notice, even if you don’t know guns.

      As far as the “scopes” go, they’re probably talking about a low power or no magnification red dot. 2x, 3x and 4x illuminated scopes (with a large area of eye relief and a low parallax) are common on machine guns fired exclusively while supported.

    • Carlos Hatchcock used a scope on a 50 cal M2 in Vietnam, if you believe the photos showing him doing it.

      • Read considerable about Hathcock. Since none of his spotters ever disputed anything he claimed, I just accepted things as they were.

        One thing I found interesting is that the Army and Marines had diametrically opposed ideas about snipers. Army wanted them primarily as long range scouts. Marines wanted them primarily as tools to wreak havoc among the enemy.

  10. Nick,

    Do you think that the length of time it’s taken for authorities to ID the firearms indicates whether or not these were legally aquired (or even legal in the US) weapons? I would assume if they were semi-autos bought at a store by the perp, that info would come up quick.

  11. Speculation versus the facts, and it appears there are many speculated facts. It boils down IMO to a “nut job” with a gun. Any blame belongs on him, not the government, or guns, gambling, airplanes, girlfriends, whatever.

    • Joetast – “a nutjob with a gun” … You mean a supposed nutjob with 30+ guns, two “tripods”, wifi enabled security cameras, machining skills to modify the rifles and millions of dollars to pull it all off.

      Something doesn’t fit.

  13. I was just wondering about what ammo he used . The most common in AR 15 is .223Rem or 5.56. He shot from 500 yards away where that kind of ammo has almost no more terminal performance.
    Is there any mention of how many empty casings they found? he must have done a spray and pray using hundreds and hundreds of bullets. There is very little accurate information , maybe intentional?

  14. Auf https://de.casinority.com/be/ finden Sie eine übersichtliche Karte der Online-Glücksspielwelt. Nutzen Sie praktische Filter und entscheiden Sie sich für die profitabelsten Glücksspiele in Ihrem Land, mit den sichersten Anbietern und den schnellsten Zahlungsabwicklungssystemen.

Comments are closed.