More Poking Around Vegas

NBC News pic above embiggens. The Mandalay Bay has 43 floors. The top three are penthouse suites. Douchebag's can be located by counting down the right edge of the Mandalay Bay tower from 40 to get to 32, which was Douchebag's suite. (To help you out, the same Vista suites on 37-36-35 directly over his are all lit up). Note that it's blacked out above, not lit up. It took LVMPD 1 hour and 12 minutes from first 911 call until they kicked in his door, and found him dead after eating his gun. 
He's in a 32d floor Vista suite, for three nights, which goes for about $700/night. (If he also had the adjoining room to the left side of the below plan, add another $200-500/night).

His suite "just happens" to be one at the tip of the North leg, the only one (of three possible) that gives him the best unobstructed views to the music festival, but also puts the main Hotel driveway on the Strip, where police would arrive, right under his nose the entire time. So he can see everything: the entire Strip, McCarran Airport, the festival, the main freeway, the whole ball of wax.

Then there's the weapons (reportedly 35 so far, including 10 rifles, with a guesstimated cost to him of somewhere around $22K). Rather a lot for a non gun-guy "who hangs out, and eats burritos." Then modifications to the ones used in the attack to give him near full-auto rates of fire. Plus the ammunition.

And he apparently went back and forth between the two windows, which among other things, would make it harder to pin him down, or return effective fire, and if he swapped weapons at each one, they could cool off between magazine dumps from each one. So we've got a pretty well-thought-out plan of action for a mass murder, and we're already at somewhere around a $25K investment or more he made in this "random senseless act".
As if.

Further reports indicated that shooting platforms for each window were constructed, to elevate him and give him a better view of the target.

He was also a private pilot with two airplanes and an instrument rating, and his most recent physical indicated he needed reading glasses.

This was meticulously planned and executed.
And this is still one helluva lot of secret squirrel and sniper tradecraft for a non-military retired 64-year-old aerospace accountant, who needed reading glasses, wasn't a "gun guy", and had no notably strong political/religious preferences whatsoever.

 

 

Lifted from comments:

here's a vid link courtesy of Feral Irishman (Irish, in comments)

 

And his thoughts:

I found this at another site. Does it sound like multiple guns? Especially at the 2 min mark.

FWIW

There is a lot of stuff floating around the internet and we will have to wait for it to filter out but none of this is making sense.

One such point earlier this morning the daily mail reported 2 officers were hurt confronting the gunman. Then we are told suicide.

Who knows.

My response:

1) No, the video doesn't sound like two guns. The problem is, the shooter's window(s) have the SW tower wing at a 120-degree angle, which reflects the original gunshot sounds out of sync with direct-line sounds, and it's a wall of glass.
using walls and buildings to misdirect the report is something I read about as early as the early '80s in the stories about Carlos Hathcock, something he did specifically when sniping, whenever possible. Maybe just happenstance in this case, but physics is still physics, and sound does what it does.

2) The Mail is in London, and I expect they did their reporting from in front of the TV, unless they happened to have someone in Vegas covering OJ's release, but they wouldn't likely be that plugged in to the local PD. I suspect their reports from early on are just so much noise, rather than light.

3) The video was good in one respect: I knew where the shooter was in those shots, and I couldn't see anything identifiable as muzzle flash (crappy camera quality? + shaky cam), even when pointed right at the correct spot. Notably, they were pointing cell cams mostly at the wrong spot, which underlines what I said in (1), above, about picking gunfire out with all those echoes.

4) That initial burst from the first video sounded like a serious mag dump. Audio analysts will be counting and isolating the shots, but somebody sounds like they had way more than a 30-shot banana mag. I heard 45+ one a quick count, and the vid picks up partway through the first mag. Maybe a drum, Beta-mag, or one of the 60-round Surefire's?

Time will tell. But the more I dig, just asking basic questions, the more this smells like a meticulously planned op, and not some "just snapped" whackjob deciding to fire up a crowd for the helluvit, on a whim.

5) Douchebag's daddy was a psychopathic gunman and bank robber, who died in prison after being on FBI's Most Wanted List when Hoover was Director. I have zero problem concluding the apple didn't fall far from the tree here.

Add this to the puzzle, this time from  100% F'ed Up:

Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters Monday that ammonium nitrate, a chemical compound used to make homemade bombs was found in the Las Vegas shooter’s car.

We are learning more about the background of the shooter including his gambling habit and ownership of several properties that police are now scouring for evidence. Paddock moved 27 times! He lived in Texas and Florida before ending up in Nevada. 

He owned two planes and a $400,000 house in a retirement community. His brother claims he was a multi-millionaire: 

The brother of alleged Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock said Monday he was a multimillionaire who worked in real estate. 

The Associated Press reports that Eric Paddock said his brother also worked as an accountant and that he was unaware of him having any money problems.

So...how many multi-millionaires develop a sudden interest in machineguns, bomb-making, and mass murder out of the blue at age 64, and how may aerospace accountants gamble and make millions in real estate?

And this from NBC, demonstrates federal leakage from a three-letter agency:

“The suspected gunman behind the Las Vegas massacre made several large gambling transactions in recent weeks, according to multiple senior law enforcement officials and a casino executive.
On several occasions, Stephen Paddock gambled more than $10,000 per day — and in some cases more than than $20,000 and $30,000 a day — at Las Vegas casinos, according to an NBC News source who read the suspect’s Multiple Currency Transaction Reports (CTR) and a casino gaming executive.
According to a U.S. statute, a CTR is a Treasury- and IRS-mandated report that casinos have to file when “each transaction in currency involving cash-in and cash-out of more than $10,000 in a gaming day.”

Nobody dumps federal IRS CTR forms from an active investigation at that level, unless they were told to do it. 
This is a f**king movie plot, not a crime scene.

And somebody isn't assembling facts, they're weaving a narrative.

Patsy?
Bureau?
Agency guy?
Terrorist?

Spin the wheel. I have no idea.
But I do know one thing:

This is not the work of a cook.