AP twitter is reporting that ISIS is claiming responsibility.
If the response time was really all that fast perhaps that implies that they were already enroute when the shooting started.
To gather the team, drive from HQ, enter the hotel, locate the room, and breach it is the work of WAG 20+ minutes. I haven’t followed the story closely enough to establish a timeline from Paddock’s first to last shot. But if it’s much less than that there must have been some early warning.
The other possibility is that if indeed Paddock killed himself, he could have done that well in advance of when the SWAT team breached his door.
IOW, he starts shooting at e.g. 1:00am, kills himself at 1:15, and the SWAT team breaks down his door at 1:45 to find a dead guy and a bunch of guns & spent ammo. They initially get credited with a 15 minute response time to end something that ended itself over half an hour before they got involved.
We should eventually learn what really happened in due time.
The hotel doesn’t routinely search bags of hotel guests do they?
It’s clear that he didn’t get up yesterday, snap, and go on a spree. There was at least several days of foresight and planning. Unfortunately, the reality is that it’s not that hard to kill a lot of people when they are massed together. Given what we know, it’s lucky that the death toll is limited to 50 so far.
Russian bots were all over this all night long with bullshit posts and theories.
Rooms are tight on the Strip this week because of G2E. Just getting a room at MB at any price was extraordinary.
My wife’s cousins were supposed to go to that concert. Thankfully they decided not to go at the last minute. She has other family and friends living there. We’re still waiting on news but as far as we know no one else would have had a reason to be in that area last night.
Add me to the “what planning” camp. Sure, the guy had to request a room with a view of the concert venue. How unusual/suspicious is that?
I understand some long guns disassemble, such that they could fit into a large suitcase or garment bag. Or without disassembly in a golf bag case. How uncommon are those in LV hotels? Do they commonly search visitors’ bags?
Couldn’t you do the same for just about any other sporting event/concert/street festival/parade in a big city?
Correct. It wouldn’t require any effort at all to transport eight long guns up to his hotel room. Guests coming and going with all sorts of bags, he would look like just one more schmuck with too many bags on his way to his hotel room.
Yeah, WTF is with anyone suggesting that this is some kind of a “high security” hotel that he would have had to smuggle these guns into. It’s not like brought them onto the casino floor. Have any of you ever stayed in a hotel? Has anyone ever made you open a suitcase when you check in?
Or, as the great James Fitzjames Stephen, Judge of the High Court, put it in his bracing way:
“Some men, probably, abstain from murder because they fear that, if they committed murder, they would be hung. Hundreds of thousands abstain from it because they regard it with horror. One great reason why they regard it with horror is, that murderers are hung with the hearty approbation of all reasonable men.”
I agree this guy did not do a totally spur-of-moment spree. This was a pre-meditated attack of whatever motivation.
We probably differ on what “detailed plan” means. Assuming one is already a marginally insane person with a gun fetish I see the planning effort as about like this:[ol]
[li]Decide you want to do a killing spree.[/li][li]Check http://www.lvcva.com/ for upcoming outdoor festivals. Pick one. Any one.[/li][li]Rent a room for a couple days on the correct side of a nearby hotel. Any nearby hotel. And almost any room will do. Just tell the clerk you want either the east or west side as appropriate, about half way up or higher. No *It takes a Thief *sneaky Pete reconnaissance required. Anyone who lives in Las Vegas knows which hotels are near what and where east and west are. Anyone else can consult Google maps.[/li][li]Drive from home with some guns and ammo in your luggage. After check-in take a hotel luggage cart down to your car in the parking structure & bring the stuff upstairs. Repeat was necessary over hours or days until you have enough stuff.[/li][li]While the event is in full progress and your nerve is strong, start shooting.[/li][/ol]Easy peasy. Even a badly deranged person can plan this far ahead. As treis and steronz said, hotel / casinos aren’t airports: luggage isn’t screened and many, many guests bring truly insane amounts of luggage on their trips.
If one is a calculating terrorist rather than a deranged gun fetishist there’s just one more step up front:
- Stop by some gun stores and buy a bunch of rifles and ammo. You might need to make a couple stops to get everything. No waiting.
This isn’t hard.
That would be incredibly common and it’s likely the rooms were booked out months in advance. Clearly it’s not an intricate plan, but it would at least take some foresight and effort to pull off.
The Daily Mail reports on a video, apparently produced by ISIS and posted in May, that calls for lone wolf attacks and shows images of the Las Vegas strip.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4940156/ISIS-video-called-lone-wolf-attack-Las-Vegas.html
One article I read said that ISIS claimed the shooter converted to Islam four months ago. Taking that as true for the moment, and assuming he had to book the room at least a few weeks in advance, he went from apolitical schmo to jihadist in about three and a half months?
Trump is reading scripture off a TelePrompTer. They should’ve sent Pence out.
I know that ISIS will regularly claim credit for Islamist-inspired violence, even where the person has no (known) link to ISIS itself. Does ISIS also claim credit for violence that is later determined not to be motivated by Islamist ideology (whether it turns out to be non-ideological or motivated by another ideology)?
That’s sort of a circular question. Unless ISIS HQ had been on contact with this guy before the event they don’t know any more than anyone else watching CNN.
If that’s the case then they’ll eventually take credit for something unrelated just by the odds. Whether that disconnect will be discovered, publicized, or matter to any of their intended audience is very much another matter.
My uninformed bet would be that they’ll take credit for darn near any mass violence anywhere. People will remember the credit-taking, but forget, or ignore CT style, any later debunking of the claim by the authorities.
Particularly since ISIS’ main audience is in the Muslim world, it’s easy for them to double down later by saying “Who you gonna believe, us Jihadist good guys or those evil American policemen? Of course our noble soldier has struck another blow for the Glory of Allah.” And they’ll be believed by enough of their audience to label that a success by their standards.
In the world of narratives, truth is a sometimes-convenient luxury; never a necessity.
Good question. Has ISIS ever claimed responsibility for something like this which was later shown to be untrue?
No cite, but it’s relatively common for them to claim credit for mass shootings they didn’t have anything to do with. Also common for them to claim responsibility for actors that are, at best, only marginally attached to ISIS. ISIS doesn’t seem to provide much, if any, logistical support either. They are more in the inspiration and encouragement business. That makes it a bit more difficult to determine what they are “responsible” for.
Have to say this is the strangest ‘target’.
I don’t think it’s a circular question. I understand why ISIS would claim credit for any act of violence that occurred. And I agree that their intended audience might on care. This could apply to general disasters as well. For example, they could claim credit for some factory explosion and then claim that the authorities were covering up their success when they conclude it was a gas leak (or something like that).
My question was whether or not they do this.
I recall them claiming credit for Islamist violence where there is limited or no evidence of an actual link to ISIS. But there’s certainly enough non-Islamist violence in the world to know whether they indiscriminately claim credit for everything. I just don’t know the answer.
How on earth would anyone on here know.
What you have is a bunch or professionals doing what they do; everyone wants to be the first because the first message is what the public hear. So the police response time was brilliant and ISIS were behind the attack.
Neither are probably correct but both organisations made sure they framed the part of the issue relevant to them.