Just what is your definition of crazy?
I have been nursing a grudge against the LVMPD for shooting Erik Scott outside a Costco a number of years ago, so I kind of brushed off the praise that several Vegas residents had for their emergency responders initially, but I’ve reconsidered. LVMPD posted some body cam footage from their officers responding to the incident and they really did handle (at least, in the portions of video they posted) a terrible and chaotic situation about as well as can be expected. Kudos to LVMPD.
I’m pretty sure this is wrong, at least in NV, but I’m not really an expert on all the intricacies of NV’s gun laws. I’ll tell you that I’ve personally had guns in Vegas hotel rooms on a number of occasions.
This is correct. “Gun owner” is not a protected class, and if a business establishment asks a gun owner to leave because they think guns are icky, that request must be honored or the gun owner would be trespassing. Police would be called, trespass notice given, and if ignored still, ultimately an arrest and a trial, and probably a conviction with a fine.
Here’s the catch: Businesses have to make the effort to identify those they’d wish to exclude. Most hotels do not. They’re interested in renting rooms for the night, not make political statements, and don’t really care what you do in the privacy of your own rented room as long as it doesn’t damage their property or disturb their other guests. Thus, no metal detectors or bag searches for hotel guests, no way for them to readily identify those carrying guns inconspicuously, no “leave or I’ll call the cops” warning, no cops called, no trespass notice given, and no arrest. That all may change in the aftermath of this incident, but I’ll be a bit surprised if they get very thorough in their searches. High security (or even attempts at high security) is REALLY inconvenient (cite: TSA). Imagine the expense and inconvenience of paying guys to stand at every entrance to the hotel / casino, and wand everyone that wants to come in, and search every bag.
What happened to Erik Scott was tragic and avoidable, IMO. But the fact that you chose to be outraged over that and not over any of the other times that police have killed citizens and gotten away with it (nor with the system that enabled it) speaks volumes. Heck, the fact that you needed to bring it up speaks volumes.
But yes, our first responders did great this time. It’s possible to acknowledge that without ceding anything else.
I’m outraged at all sorts of police actions all over the country, for whatever volumes you think that might speak. Since none of those were in Las Vegas, none of them held any particular relevance to this incident, and there’d be no point in bringing them up.
I only mentioned the Erik Scott shooting because it did happen in Vegas, and it was in passing simply to explain why their standing had previously been quite low with me, but is somewhat improved given their collective response to this incident (ie no surfer guy’s Avalance shot up, no shooting the neighborhood newspaper ladies in their blue Tacoma, no girl sleeping on the couch lit on fire and shot, no 6-year-old boy murdered, etc).
I agree that they did great this time. Perhaps we should just agree to leave it at that?
We’re never gonna find out who shot Tupac now.
Yeah, somebody posted the photo of Stephen Paddock with his brains blown out on Reddit.
If you wanna see (obviously NSFW/NSFL):
His boo is back on the US and is once again a person of interest.
I’m still confused about the timeline. The guy shot for approx. 12 minutes - then stopped? The cops were outside his door soon after he shot the security guard, but did not breach until an hour later?
Of course, no way to get into the madman’s head, but wonder why he stopped before he had to. Wonder if he thought the jig was up when they found his room, and he wanted to make sure he wasn’t taken alive.
I believe, after readying through various news sources including LVMPD press conference, that he was found within about 15 minutes. He had a camera in the hallway, so he could see approaching police/hotel security. There was an exchange of gunfire through the door and then everything stopped. Police waited for appropriate breaching equipment and did not rush the door as long as the gunfire remained silent (it did). It’s believed, but not yet confirmed, that the gunman committed suicide after the police arrived at the door to the hotel suite.
It was relatively quick to find him and then a long delay to breach the door.
Yeah - that’s what I understood. I guess I’m tumbling into the problem of trying to get into the head of a madman. If I’m trying to pile up body count, why would I stop spraying a SECOND before I HAD to? Hell - wouldn’t even need to shoot himself - coulda dove out the window as the door crashed in.
If he wanted notoriety, a lengthy trial and imprisonment would enhance that.
IMO no. Rather the opposite. Consider Kazynski. He was famous (albeit anonymous) while the crimes were happening. He *knew *he was famous even if the public didn’t know his name. Once his trial started, and especially after his sentence started, he simply disappeared, filed in the publics’ conscious as “Forgotten loser rotting in a cell.”
Amatuer psychoanalysing these things is a mug’s game. Here’s my muggery. IMO …
Folks like this are more suicidal than they are homicidal. Their primary goal is to be dead. Their secondary goal is to be notorious and the way they chose to achieve that is to kill a lot of people. Alternatively the killing is more important than the notoriety and they want to kill a lot of people as some form of revenge for all the ways ordinary society hasn’t been good to them. IOW "Bwah-ha-ha!!! I’ll make them all pay for ignoring / slighting meI "
The bottom line of this approach being that the plan needs to end in absolutely can’t-fail suicide. Which is only can’t-fail while the cops can’t touch him. The moment the room door opens the bad guy loses control of the situation; sure the cops might just execute him, but they also might just grab him. Even him taking a shot at the cops doesn’t guarantee a lethal response.
As long as he’s busy shooting out the window the cops might get the door open and he doesn’t hear it. It’s also hard for him to watch his hallway cam and shoot at the same time. He got off 15-ish minutes of shooting, got to see lots of panic and lots of people lying dead or dying after the crowd scattered. The target area is getting less and less shootable as more people find shelter.
In all, his plan was a total success up to the moment the cops arrived at his door in numbers. From that point forward, every moment he didn’t kill himself was increasing the odds of the overall plan failing at Objective 1: be dead.
So when he got nervous enough, he screwed up his courage and killed himself.
That’s my theory and I think it applies to a lot of spree-ends-in-suicide events. It’s worth every penny you paid for it.
The folks saying, “Why can’t suicidal mentally deranged people just off themselves instead of killing a lot of people and *then *offing themselves” are ignoring the obvious : There’s no media attention, no global notoriety, if you just shoot yourself in the privacy of your own home without killing anyone else first.
Even stranger, why not barricade the door? Seems that the gunman would logically have moved the bed(s), all furniture, etc. to block the doors, maybe the walls too if he suspected the walls might be C4’d.
He might have tried briefly. It’s not that unusual for headboards to be bolted to the wall, desks bolted to the floor, etc. in hotels.
Ohio, for a period of time, had a strict “no firearms on hotel property” law on the books; I believe since then it has been relaxed/repealed. But the two hotels I used at the time attending shooting events even banned my flintlock from entering my room and a 1734 musket being a little too big to hide in a suitcase I had to find a “kennel” nearby to keep it at or leave it in the car and take the risk.
On another aside the first thing I thought of when this broke was a time last winter when I got caught in a snowstorm on the way back from an event in State College and decided to grab a room near DuBois. I’m in an elevator with two cased scoped rifles heading for the third floor and getting some strange looks. If this ever happens again, I’ll probably have to pull the bolts and risk leaving the rest in the trunk.
Of further interest to me are the trace (?) amounts of explosives they are finding at various locations. Where are the explosives? Did he have something bigger planned? If he did, why didn’t he have a better exit strategy in place? I feel like something isn’t adding up yet.
I know nothing about tannerite beyond what I read in the papers, but could these traces of explosives be residues from target practice?
If his intent was to maximize carnage, he would have booby-trapped the room so that several police officers would have gone up with him when they broke in.
Pure speculation, but I would imagine he probably thought he had his girlfriend in on things. When she backed out, or refused to be involved at all, his plans changed a bit.