So, someone opened fire on a vast music festival crowd on the Vegas Strip with a fully automatic weapon. So far, two dead, 24 wounded; the police report that the shooter is dead. The videos I’ve seen on CNN seem to indicate that the shooter fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another magazine, reloaded, emptied a third. Hard to tell how many rounds were fired, but if those were standard capacity thirty round mags, that’s 90 rounds. One quick lesson to learn here: full auto is an inefficient way to carry out a massacre… 90 rounds shot into a crowd with something like ~30 people shot.
UPDATE: the police just issued a statement… at least *20* dead, 100 injured. A good chance that a number of the dead & injured weren’t shot, but trampled. They know who the shooter was, but are so far refusing to ID him, other than he was a local. They are looking for one Marilou Danley. I’ve already seen internet sleuthery that has located the online info about one such woman and her very leftist -apparent-husband (who the net-sleuths have determined based on nothing that he is the shooter), but given the poor track record of such things (recall the Charlottesville initial reporting), it is at best unwise to start pointing at individuals based on just a name.
ANOTHER UPDATE: 50+ dead, 200+ injured. Shooter ID’ed as one Stephen C. Paddock. Looks like this is the worst mass shooting in US history.
OK, so, now comes the time for rampant unsubstantiated speculating for political purposes. The weapon was full auto, which is an unusual occurrence; was it a legal full auto weapon, shot by the owner or someone who procured a stolen one? Was it an illegally modified semi-auto? Was it a legally modified bump-fire conversion, or some sort of crank-fired gun? The gunfire *seems* to be slightly variable in rate of fire, so maybe the latter.
The shooter is reportedly dead, and reportedly alone. So was the shooter a lone whackjob? Was he a Trump supporting white supremacist… shooting into a crowd of country music loving white folks for some reason? An Antifa/BLM anti-Trumper/anti-white-folk terrorist? An ISIS supporter? This being Vegas, other options are available. Was he some guy who was perfectly fine a day or two ago, but went to Vegas for a fun weekend and wound up losing his lifes fortune playing the slots and it drove him over the edge? Some guy who’s upset about the Reptilian Conspiracy (again, this is Vegas)?
My unwarranted speculation: not a jihadi. This shooting was carried out at some considerable distance; jihadis seem to prefer to kill people up close and personal.
Right now there are a *lot* of people saying “please don’t be one of mine, please don’t be one of mine…” And when the identity of the shooter is released, there will be a lot of people going “Yay, ammunition I can use against my political opponents!” and lots of people going “Damn, I can’t use that.”
Apropos of nothing: CNN is interviewing a lot of people who were on the scene, as you’d expect. And a *lot* of them seem to be Canadians. Is Vegas particularly popular among Canucks?