Some videos of the suite that the Mandalay Bay shooter was in, taken by prior inhabitants. This suite is *huge.*
In the grand scheme of things, the question “what do we do with the room” seems pretty minor, compared to the scope of the carnage and the likely political ramifications from those who will try to ride this travesties coat-tails to further their grip on power. But still, it’s an interesting question: what does Mandalay Bay *do* with the room? Once it has been swept by the cops, the windows replaced and any other damage fixed up… do they return it to service? Do they put anyone who requests it on a watch list? Do they turn the place into a museum of sorts? Or do they make the room unavailable, either perpetually or for some number of years? I have no idea what the economics of a place like this is. If the room is locked off, is it going to be an important economic impact to the hotel? Or just a minor blip? Seems like it might be a decent enough place to serve as a storage room.
Economics is going to be important to Mandalay Bay in the coming years. Far as I can tell, they did nothing wrong here; they simply rented a room to someone they probably rented to many times before. Hotels don’t run renters baggage through X-ray machines or otherwise go pawing through it like the junk jugglers at the TSA. Still, you *know* the lawyers are salivating over the chance to sue the bejeebers out of Mandalay Bay… they have the deep pockets, after all.
Unless I’ve missed some recent news, there *still* isn’t clue one about what this guys motives were. He went to a *lot* of trouble, with considerable planning, time, effort and expense devoted to carrying out the massacre. This implies a form of rationality, even if he was crazy; he didn’t just snap. But usually the authorities can reasonably quickly figure out what the perpetrators motives were. Revenge? In this case, for what, and against who? Religion? Politics? Neither seem in play. Was he just in a “my life sucks, I’m’a gonna lash out” spiral? At least so far nothing seems to indicate that… his finances were apparently good; he’d just sent a hundred grand to the Philippines (presumably his girlfriend, who was there at the time).
So, in lieu of any actual facts, here’s my Whackadoodle Conspiracy Theory:
1: His finances in fact weren’t so good. His gambling had gotten out of control, and he’d gotten in trouble with the mob.
2: The mob realized that he was about as boring a person as possible, with virtually no digital footprint.
3: The crime rate has been dropping for the last twenty years, while gun rights have been increasing. This is bad news for criminals, organized and otherwise.
4: So some clever mobsters come up with a plan: force this guy to carry out a senseless massacre (using, say, threats against his girlfriend) using “assault weapons.” The mobsters know that by doing so, using a guy with no known politics or religion, that their useful idiots in the press and the government will immediately latch on to the story and use it to try to ram through new anti-gun regulations.
5: With mob-luck, whole classifications of firearms will get banned. The civilians will be disarmed; the criminal element will be free to relive the good old days of the high crime rate.
6: Profit!
Likelihood of this being the real story: approximately zero. But nothing much else seems to fit yet, so…