Vegas: Day Five - A Plea To Stop The Derp

Please, stop being This Guy.

Dear Internet Loons and Rubes: Put the Potato Bong Down

This part is easy: if you don't now what you're talking about, just sit back, and have a big steaming cup of STFU.

1) "I can't believe he got all that crap up to a 32nd floor suite"

That's because you're an idiot, or unfamiliar with Vegas, firearms, and about 48 other facts that many people find to be common knowledge.

We know now Paddock checked in on September 25th, giving him only six f***ing days to get a $#!^load of guns and ammunition to the 32d floor from his car. Seriously, anyone who thinks he carried them out in the open, and up 32 flights of stairs, on his back, is a fucktard. If that includes you, step away from the keyboard.

In Vegas, like many hotels, there are these things called luggage carts:

I've been to the SHOT Show in Vegas multiple times. For the perpetually clueless, it's only the biggest annual gun-industry display of every implement known to man for shooting something, and the accessories for same. They bring MRAPs and friggin' armored personnel carriers in, and literal trainloads of ordnance. And vendors arrive from companies large and small, and tote far more stuff than Paddock did, and keep a lot of it in their hotel rooms.

As I said in comments, if you tip the bellboys, and have enough trunks (you should ignore the pun) and they don't leak blood, you could cart a dismembered elephant to your room, and no one in any Vegas Strip hotel would give two wet farts.

Stop the derp, and close your gaping dropped jaw. And wipe up that drool puddle, eh?

2) "There were two (three/nine/eleventy) other gunman on other floors of the hotel, because I saw Sumdood's shaky cellphone video that showed muzzle flashes from the REAL shooting spot."

Look, asstards, besides yesterday's post, there's a wee problem with that blisteringly dopey hypothesis: there are only two holes in the giant wall of glass at the Mandalay Bay. Both of them in Paddock's two rooms, on the 32d floor.

So I don't give a flying f*** what you imagine you've discovered, but someone shooting from the fourth (or any other) floor would have to first BLOW A HOLE IN THE GLASS (exactly like was done in 32-135 to get Mr. Bullet through Mr. Glass, before sending him to hit Mr. Innocent Bystander At The Concert, M'kay?

If you can't grasp the level of magic you're postulating with no handy holes in the windows, maybe just ponder that glass reflects two things really well: sound, and light. Especially when it's forty-three stories tall, and covers about four acres, at a shallow angle facing the targets.

LIKE THE MANDALAY BAY HOTEL DOES.

For a bonus, his first string of fire is apparently what set off the fire alarms in the entire hotel, which triggers strobe lights in every room and corridor, including all the conference rooms on the fourth floor. None of which, BTW, have any holes blown out through the glass, which faces palm trees, and from which even seeing the concert venue, let alone hitting it with gunfire, would be problematic.

Drop the Magical Bullet Theories, and just stop.

3) "No way could he have hit all those people at that range, because Derp!"

Right. Because it's like, a total mystery how someone firing 50-60 round strings on spray-and-pray, at 400m range, could hit 600 of 22,000 people all standing and sitting in a packed group covering a couple of acres under stadium lighting. Because you know nothing whatsoever about firearms, and have shit for brains.

Stevie Wonder could have done this much damage. The biggest mystery about the actual shooting is how he managed to miss 21,400 people, not that he hit 600 or so. He could point anywhere across an area literally the size of a warehouse, and been unable to miss hitting people with every shot, until they finally caught a major clue, and started to unass the impact area, or gain useful cover from the incoming fire.
And an updated  tally says that only 197 of his victims were GSW wounds, and the rest were injuries from trampling and crashing through barricades and over fences in the melee rush to escape the carnage.

4) "Firing would have kicked his ass, and he'd have had a heart attack shooting that long, because it was so physically taxing."

Um, no, Cupcake. He was shooting for maybe five minutes. By about twelve minutes in, he was done. If he had six of these 100-round magazines,

the total time he'd have been shooting several hundred rounds would be about 54 seconds. Meaning he could have been strolling back and forth between two windows yards apart, casually reloaded a fresh mag, and been done, as he was, with time for a sandwich and a coke in between, in well under 5 minutes.

So what don't we know, still?

1) We don't know why he bothered to cart dozens of guns to the room. By all accounts, all but three were simply props, totally superfluous to what was done. He could have done the entire thing with one, (plus the pistol he evidently capped himself with). So toting an arsenal to the floor was pointless, idiotic, and inexplicable.

2) Why shoot anybody at all? He was an instrument-rated pilot (even with a recently-lapsed license, he owned two planes). He could have gotten in one, and crashed into a jumbo jet on takeoff, and killed hundreds, instead of dozens. He could have pushed lit drums of gasoline out the door onto any crowd. He could have simply crashed into them, and killed five or ten times as many people (which no ban of any kind on anything will ever stop, unless we turn the nation into a giant prison).

3) Why shoot only the concert crowd?? FFS, he had the Vegas Strip at his feet, busy 24/7, and apparently he made no effort to shoot at hundreds of passing cars. He could have shut down the entire blvd. below, making police response impossible for hours. He could have shot at the international airport on one side, or the freeway on the other, and created orders of magnitude more problems than he did.

4) He thought ahead to sealing the emergency stairwell, and putting cameras in the peepholes and in the hall, but he never thought about what to do next, when the police inevitably came calling? Did he wear ear protection? Gloves? Have any sort of an exit and escape plan?

5) If not, and he's got a death wish, he's willing to shoot through the door at an unarmed security guard, and at thousands of people at the concert, but he balks at shooting police who'd be fish in a barrel, and instead quietly pops himself in the head?

6) He has to know they're going to come at him, and he doesn't have a protective vest? He just quietly caps himself instead of making a last stand, and going out in a blaze of gunfire?
Srsly?

7) He knows he's going to certain death, but he buys another gun he's never going to use a couple of days before the shooting?

8) He sends his gf away (an entire hemisphere away), and wires her $100K for a house, but doesn't leave a note, manifesto, or make any plans to dispose of his property beforehand?

9) After sending the gf away, he uses her plastic to check-in and gamble with, leaving a trail straight to her even though she has a bombproof alibi?

10) Where's the hours of video of him? Checking in, making all the trips up with the stuff, etc.?

11) How long between shooting the security guard, and the sealing of the hallway by LVMPD?

12) Was he with anyone else, ever?

13) Was anyone else in the room during his week-long stay?

14) How many other times did he do dry runs on this at other events?

15) Where were his vehicles and aircraft at the time of the shooting?

16) Who was the last person to actually see him alive, outside the room, before he was found dead inside the suite? When and where?

17) Why did the FBI - and not LVMPD -grab all the cameras, electronic devices, and security video surveillance recordings of this from the get-go??

And the Granddaddy of them all:

18) Why would Paddock do ANY of this at all???
I'm no homicide detective, but while he had Means and Opportunity to do the crime he presumptively committed, glaringly absent is any Motive whatsoever.

That's not a petty detail, it's like trying to get a plane off the ground without it having any wings or engine.
Impossibly hard, and ultimately stupid to attempt.

And for those who want to play it:

"He just snapped!" as a defense of "Motive", in a guy who's rich, 64, retired, and otherwise normal and non-descript to the point of disappearing in front of you, when pulled out to explain a caper that was MONTHS in the planning stage, is the textbook photograph under the heading "Deus et machina". And it's a logical fallacy.

This was not an impulsive crime; it was one planned out in depth and detail, with forethought and actions in direct furtherance of the crime that were going on as far back as last October, when Paddock acquired 30 of the 43 (or 50, or 80 or whatever number we're up to now) guns he owned.

This is NOT what "just snapping" looks like. It's also contrary, not to most mass murders, but to every one ever recorded. Unless you know different, and have the evidence to back it up, trying to pin this on the guy because "he just snapped" is tantamount to saying "Fuck a motive, there isn't one, and hey, who needs one of those anyhow?"

Well, other than all of recorded history, no one, I suppose. But if you're going to play that card, own it.

And a working week later, after poring through the details of this guy, there's still nothing whatsoever offered to explain, or that can explain, anything that happened.

And every time they dribble out a factual nugget, they introduce five or ten more unanswered - and unanswerable - questions that undo the entire narrative of the thing.

We're being fed bullshit.
And we don't know why.