Mandalay Bay shooter Steven Paddock had checked into a 32nd floor corner room on Thursday. The room overlooked the venue for the Route 91 Harvest country music concert that took place last night. He shot out windows on two sides of the building to get better shooting vantage points on the crowd below.

Concert goers reportedly thought the sound of automatic gunfire was fireworks.

According to CNN:

Officers broke into his hotel room and found Paddock dead, police said in a statement. Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said it appears he killed himself. Police don’t think anybody else was involved.

More than 10 rifles were found in the room, Lombardo said.

Law enforcement has no “derogatory information” about Paddock, besides the fact that he received a citation several years ago that was handled in the court system, Lombardo said.

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67 COMMENTS

  1. There’s got to be a backstory here that we’ll eventually learn about. This was obviously a carefully planned attack. I’m starting to doubt that he just ‘snapped’ suddenly.

    • Hijacking top comment:

      Headline is wrong. According to Sheriff Joseph Lombardo in the press conference about an hour ago (1915 ET), Paddock did not “shoot out” the windows, he broke them using a “hammer-like device” that was found in the room.

      • This guy had all his ducks in a row. The concert, the hotel and room, the weapons….. a neighbor says he had a safe the size of a refrigerator in his garage, and I guess we all can imagine what he stashed in it over maybe months. A big and fiery farewell.

    • I have this odd feeling that the ISIS claims of involvement might not be too far fetched. The Philippinna girlfriend intrigues me: ISIS is well known to be heavily involved int the islamist insurgency in the Philippines. They have developed sophisticated brainwash8ng techniques to send young men and women cheerfully to a death as a suicide bomber. Is it not possible that the girlfriend, now interestingly back home, was an ISIS plant, sent out to find a suitable victim, take her time in controlling him, and set this whole strange business in motion? Paddock is a most unlikely mass murderer.

      • Isis also has to give the shooters drugs, some kind of tranquilizer. They need to check Paddocks body for drugs.

    • The guy was several hundred yards away and 30 stories up. What you’re hearing are the bullets hitting the ground before the sound of the shot makes it to the camera.

      • So, previously fired rounds are impacting close-up and perfectly overlapping follow-on shooting with the same sounding ~ up to 400yds away? I doubt it.

        • Yes, that’s exactly what’s happening. Ask anyone who’s been on the receiving end of full auto fire.

          You generally don’t hear the gunshot (that’s localized to the shooter) as much as you hear the bullets passing through the air at super sonic speeds. Those make a cracking / tearing sound.

          Also consider that supersonic bullets impacting pavement (and sadly flesh) is LOUD.

          This whole thing makes me sick to my stomach.

    • I had the same thought Joe. Two windows, two shooters? The reason they know about what’s-his-name is because he was lying did on the floor as they entered the room. What if a 2nd shooter had already departed? It’s certainly a valid question, conspiracy theories aside.

  3. I would have expected an alarm if a window was broken like that. I guess I overestimated expensive hotel buildings.

    • He did set off the smoke detectors and law enforcement knew exactly which room he was in. But it still takes 10 minutes (if you’re really lucky) to assemble a SWAT team and get them to the 32nd floor of a building.

      • Dozens of good people with a “truck” Gun” helped suppress the Texas tower shooter, in the 1960’s. Until a civilian shot the sniper from inside the tower. A broken window and muzzle flash gives you a clear target from the ground. How many people carry around a Truck Gun these days???? Not many.

    • Like many of the hotels in Vegas the exterior of the Mandalay Bay is almost entirely glass. HUNDREDS of windows. And those tempered glass windows are not easy to break and are unlikely to break by accident. I doubt any of the hotels have a system in place to alert them of a broken window unless someone saw the event from outside or noticed falling glass.

    • The media reports a smoke detector trip and that’s how they knew what room he was in but I think it more likely the window breaking was the alarm they received to notify the police which room. I don’t see a rifle producing enough smoke to set off a smoke detector.

      • Dude apparently had 72 minutes of gun time. With at least 10 rifles. Likely thousands of rounds. I can see a smoke detector going off.

      • The one place I’ve been able to shoot my Echo trigger so far is an i door range. My very first burst I had to stop before finishing the magazine because the smoke was choking me. Smoke detectors are designed to detect the amount of smoke from a single exhalation of a cigarette- I’ve personally intentionally set off a smoke detector with a single exhale of cigarette smoke to demonstrate it works. I promise you, a rifle firing at or near full-cyclic produces plenty of smoke to set off a smoke detector.

  4. Humans are great at devising and implementing deadly ambushes. Its what got us to the top of the food chain. Its what makes war hell. I think it drives more fear if a clear motive is never determined.

  5. Perhaps the shooter developed a medical condition not unlike Charles Whitman, the Texas Clock Tower sniper.

    Autopsy showed he had a Brain tumor.

    What will anti-gun people say if that is the case? I’m sure they’ll come up with something. The fact that the media is not mentioning what political affiliation he is seems strange. If he was a Republican I think it would be all over the news!

    • They will say that if assault rifles were banned he wouldn’t have been able to kill anybody, brain tumor or not.

      • Once again…..”assault rifles” are already banned. The gun used in this attack is illegal for your average American to own. Period. They are full auto and you see the capabilities..On the other hand, semi-auto weapons which happen to also include AR-15 & AK-47 are not assault rifles and are legal to be purchased by people with clean background checks. Not the same capabilities. (Excluding any tampering to make the gun full auto, which of course is still illegal and laws already on books)

        • Someone posting here should be aware of the NFA and what it actually entails rather than just spewing easily debunked crap.

        • What I read from your point is that… The law technically allows you to buy assault rifles if you meet a certain criteria (which is a bad thing). AK-47 which is a highly dangerous gun is not classed as an assault rifle so is even easier to acquire.

          Why it is so crazy to have a rule that any weapon larger than a handgun can be bought but must permanently reside in a firearms/gun range building. I would go as far as even banning guns and large knives but you have your culture of needing to defend yourself…. you don’t need to have that saying going as far as to say you need to defend yourself against an entire platoon.

          • I have seen this debate many times. It leads nowhere, except to digging the trenches a little deeper. You are welcome to your views, and maybe the future will confirm them, but for now I don’t think there is any point in starting an endless and no doubt deteriorating argument. People kill people……

        • Actually Bob, I would ask you try to help me understand. People do kill people yes, but providing them with a tool that can very easily allow them to mass slaughter people is surely a reason worthy of trumping any counter argument.

          The right to defend yourself (Defend from who and why do you need a gun so powerful to defend yourself)

          There are other ways a person can kill someone (not that doesn’t have an every day use… ie like a car or truck and in those instances other measures like road blocks in public areas are looked into).

          I’m not trying to say all people who want these guns are bad people at all but I don’t see how you can fight against it when the risk to others is so bad.

          • “providing them with a tool that can very easily allow them to mass slaughter people is surely a reason worthy of trumping any counter argument” – No, it isn’t. As gun enthusiasts see this issue, it might be stated as asking them to defend themselves and their families with some weapons less effective than those that the police have found to be most useful when confronting dangerous criminals. Why should the average citizen be limited to less effective weapons? If these guns are “weapons of war” “designed to kill as many people as quickly as possible” as claimed, why do we issue them to our law enforcement officers?

        • Really glad you asked that question… Most standard police officers in other countries don’t carry any weapons, they usually have response units for those rear occasions that a weapon is.
          But let’s go back to this argument of the right to protect your family. Do you think you need an arson of 30 rifles to protect your family? Do you think somehow you can magically hold them all at the same time? Do you also think that it’s a common situation for 30 people to invade a house (ie where you would need something more than a fire arm). Firstly, It doesn’t make any rational sense in this day and age where you would need assault rifles or ak47s to protect your home. How many times have you or anyone you known had to wheel off a entire mag to their assault rifle to protect their family?
          Secondly, that point is still a side argument. As I previously asked… Given the fact that these mass shootings are becoming the norm in your country, would you not (for the sake of others), reduce yourself to only being able to own small firearms which may put a slightly bigger risk on your household but greatly reduces the risk of these mass murders.
          And to Bob F who said ask somewhere else…. It’s a sad thing to see someone saying something like that. If you ever want to get an understanding with someone you disagree with, you have to try and see their point of view and allow them to see yours. I’m not here to ridicule anyone, I don’t think bad on anyone here who believes in holding guns. I’m just not seeing how you value the worth of the reasons to keep it more than the reasons to not.

        • They are not illegal. Used bumper stock which is easily attainable and the legalized way to make a weapon into an automatic weapon

    • That’s a great point. There’s no speculation on the left of any ISIS or Liberal rage possibility

    • old rich white guy real estate developer who loved guns….yeah, the smart money is on him being a Republican- if anything at all. That it was a country music festival was perhaps not of concern to him. Had that been a U2 or Springsteen concert, I am sure he would not have cared either way, and would have opened up just as harshly.

  6. So he booked two rooms in advance, stashed weapons and ammo in both, and ran between rooms to shoot from different shooting platforms? Sounds super legit.

    Unless there is hotel camera footage of him running down the hallway, I don’t buy it.

  7. Between the cost of the 10 or so rifles, the corner room, ammunition, and practice (to be effective unfortunately), the attacker sunk something like $9,000 into this attack.

      • Huh? $9000 isn’t really a lot of money these days. Especially in Vegas, ppl win that much & more everyday in the casinos. He obviously planned it out well in advance but nothing about what we know at this point makes this a conspiracy by a group.

      • This, supposedly one rifle was select fire. Thats $20,000-$30,000 right there between the rifle and the paperwork. F&F round two? Anyone?

        • Sounded like a “Bump Fire” AR…or an AR with a Binary Trigger. The cadence of shots just didn’t seem consistent and that’s a lot less money than a NFA weapon!

        • Tacbear, did you listen to the audio? https://twitter.com/_/status/914739085717262337

          doesn’t really sound like bump or binary.

          Nearly 60 people KIA, 500 + WIA ? If you say that half of the wounded were struck by a round or pieces of a round and you take half of those because two people were struck by the same round, that’s still 150 rounds. Doable, yeah, but something is still screwy when you listen to it in real time.

        • Nearly 60 people KIA, 500 + WIA ? If you say that half of the wounded were struck by a round or pieces of a round and you take half of those because two people were struck by the same round, that’s still 150 rounds. Doable, yeah, but something is still screwy when you listen to it in real time.

          • 500 *INJURED*…. most of which will be found to have been injured in the stampede to exit the area?

    • I seriously doubt you could find any full auto weapon for $9000. Speculation I’ve been hearing is the weapon was probably an M249. 5.56mm, 900rpm, belt fed. Not getting your hands on one of those (legally) unless you’re wearing your BDUs.

    • It is not difficult to be effective from that vantage point, at that range, with that sort of weapon, when you have 22,000 random targets to choose from, all closely packed together and not expecting trouble.

    • It is not difficult to be effective from that vantage point, at that range, with that sort of weapon, when you have 22,000 random targets to choose from, all closely packed together and not expecting trouble.

    • He had a private pilot license and was landlord for a retirement community.

      sinking 10 or 20k into your blaze of glory is literally nothing to a guy with means.

  8. Why, in a crowded space such as this, movie theaters, etc., does anyone think pop-pop-pop-pop is firecrackers anymore? Safer to assume it’s gun shots and then find out later its fireworks. Sad.

    • How about you be there next time to set the good example?
      GTFO out of here with that victim blaming BS.

      • Questions like that are necessary if people are going to be prepared for the next time. It’s not “victim blaming”, it’s analysis.

        And one answer is obvious: we need to get more people armed and shooting regularly so they’ll be better at knowing the difference. Not that such would overcome the “it could never happen to me” syndrome that the left wallows in (else they wouldn’t think there’s no reason for carrying a gun), but every little bit helps.

  10. Easy enough to buy “auto conversion” kits online. Brother said had couple of guns but no morbid interest. How’d he learn to go fully auto? Had help. May not have been “trained” shooter, but when you shoot fish in fish bowl!

  11. Probably going to turn out to be a weapon with a “Bump Fire” Stock or a “Binary Trigger” …the shot cadence seemed a little erratic!

  12. Stayed at Mandalay Bay many times. There are about 3 to 4 windows per room. There is just way too much room between the two shot out windows for it to be one room or 2 adjoining rooms. I wouldn’t be surprised it there was more than one shooter. Praying for everyone involved.

    • Yep. Not the same hotel but we had a corner suite on the 28th floor of the Cosmopolitan and it was massive. Like an apartment. Had three separate sliding glass doors and many more windows.

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