Motive, sadly, doesn't seem to be one of those things.
But we do know the following:
This was a planned event. This was a planned attack by a person with a burning desire to kill a lot of people, and the intelligence, diligence, and patience to plan and execute it over the course of days or weeks.
And when he executed it, he kept going. There was no loss of nerve, no surge of conscious, no regrets, no second-guessing, NOTHING. Not only that, but he planned on not being taken alive at the end of it. When the cops showed up, he offed himself. He wasn't going to ask for forgiveness, or play with the justice system, or try to explain himself. He ate a pistol so he could die free.
This was not a snap decision.
This was not a bad day at work, or a breakup, or a bad loss in the stock market. This was somebody that decided that raining bullets down on a crowd of 22,000 innocent people at a concert was a good idea.
Maybe he picked a giant crowd of people hundreds of yards away because he wanted the time and distance to do as much damage as possible. Maybe he picked it to insulate himself from the humanity he was destroying. Maybe both.
Regardless, he spend untold hours and money to plan this and put it into effect. He either already had the guns, or bought them. Probably already had them; the total amount he had would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and it's likely he accumulated them over the course of a decade or two. He was in his mid-sixties, after all.
He got the room, made sure it faced the venue, and proceeded to transport his arsenal to the room. They are reporting he had about 20 guns in the room, most of them rifles. Figure 9 pounds per gun, that's nearly 200 pounds of metal and wood and plastic to drag upstairs. Not including all the ammo and magazines and tripods and optics and cameras, plus his actual luggage. So he made several trips, transporting his arsenal upstairs.
At some point, he probably loaded up his rifles and laid them out on a bed, then knocked out the windows, positioned himself deep inside the room, and opened fired. At that distance, a hundred yards up and hundreds of yards downrange, the crowd was just a seething, dancing mass. It's too dark to make out individual features, and even through a scope the images of people are fleeting. Shooting an individual person at 500 or more yards takes a pretty good shot, but he's not trying to shoot *A* person, he's shooting a crowd. He has acres of packed humanity in front of him! He can't miss!
So he begins shooting. Aiming doesn't matter, so he can just shoot as fast as he can. Get bullets into the air. Yeah, the rapid fire and minimal aiming will jerk the muzzle around but the target is so huge it doesn't matter. The bullets zip through the air at over twice the speed of sound and blast into flesh and bone and brains. People all over the multi-acre area fall, dying or wounded, but there's a period of time where the crowd doesn't realize it's under attack. The noise of the gun is relatively faint, against the background of a concert, the hum of the Strip, and the roar of the jetliners from the nearby airport. Groups of people near the impacts are aware of something happening, but lost in fun and music, others are slow to realize that the people falling down are not just drunk or high or stoned, or just got shoved or tripped, but are actually BEING SHOT.
They begin to scream, but it's a concert! Everybody's screaming! Maybe they call 911, but now they have to make themselves heard and understood during a concert. It will take time to relay the message to the concert's authorities, to get the music to stop and to announce over the speakers "We're under attack! Terrorists are shooting people! Everybody get down and evacuate the area!" Police, fire, and EMTs will respond immediately, but it will take time to get there, time to figure out what the hell is going on, and even more time to organize a response. They have to both grasp the situation of the injured on the ground AND the cause of the injuries and deal with both at the same time. And when they do, the man is hundreds of yards away in a hotel room, visible only by the muzzle flashes of his guns. And he's far beyond the reach of beat cops with handguns. Maybe cops from a patrol car have AR-15s, but that guy is a LONG way away, and in a hotel full of innocent people. Missed shots mean more dead innocents.
In the meantime, our psychopath has been methodically reloading and spraying bullets. Maybe he's quiet, maybe he ranting to himself. Maybe he's amazed at how long it takes for the crowd to realize he's shooting at them. Regardless, if a gun jams, he just puts it aside and grabs a fresh one. If it gets too hot, he puts it aside and picks up a cool one. He's got dozens of magazines handy, each one stuffed with dozens of rounds.
Some of the guns have "bump-fire" stocks which allow him to shoot pretty rapidly. I mean, a person can shoot a semi-auto rifle pretty fast if he's not worrying about aiming too much, but the bump-fire stock will let him shoot a lot without getting a cramp in his trigger finger. Because, you know, that hurts.
At some point the crowd becomes a terrorized crowd and stampedes in every direction. It disperses, which means that now he's spraying bullets into a largely-empty space. Maybe at this point he stop spraying and starts actually trying to shoot individual people, aiming and firing with deliberation. Or maybe he's just done and sits back, handgun ready, for the cops.
We know how it ends. He blows out his brains as the Las Vegas SWAT team moves in to breach his hotel-room door. Maybe he thought about trying to take down a couple of cops as his grand finale, but it's likely he didn't want to chance being wounded in a firefight and unable to avoid arrest. So instead, suicide.
That is what we know. Mixed with a bit of storytelling, I guess.
We also know that whether or not the guns used were, legally, "assault weapons" doesn't matter a bit, unless you're going to argue there that the body count would have been lower if his guns didn't have flash-limiters or bayonet mounts or protruding pistol grips. And I don't think anybody is going to argue that.
Waiting periods? Seems he was a long-term shooter and had the guns for a while. 3-day, 7-day, 10-day, 14-day waiting periods? Irrelevant when years have gone by since buying the guns.
Ditto for one-gun-a-month gun-sale restrictions.
Magazine-capacity limits? 10-round magazines instead of 30? Might have helped. Impossible to say how much; this bastard just kept reloading, but assuming that larger magazines were not available (big assumption but let's run with it) the time losses in reloading three times as often would have made a noticeable difference in the amount of shots fired during the long and drawn-out event. Maybe... 30%? 40%? Something like that seems reasonable.
What else, what else... oh, how about ammunition registration and recording the purchases with the government? I fail to see how this would help. Yay, the cops can tell the press all times he bought ammo before he went on the rampage. I'm sure that's useful.
Micro-stamping on spent cartridges? Yeah, not going to help track down the shooter in this case. It's probably the dead guy in the locked hotel room with the smoking rifles and the sea of spent brass on the floor.
Smart-gun technology? He already owned the guns; they were his.
Banning bump-fire stocks? Probably could do that, might have helped in this case. Again, impossible to say how much, probably not as much as the magazine-capacity limit. You'd have to define "bump-fire stock", I guess, then outlaw them. This is the first time it's been used in an attack like this, although the idea has been around for decades. A person can do it simply by sticking their thumb through the trigger guard of a semi-automatic rifle and then hooking it into their pants pocket, or their belt. Harder to aim that way, though.
I have no solutions. Not really. Sigh.
There are bunch of ways people kill others. "Gun violence" is not a simple problem with simple solutions. Laws that address "heat of anger" violence (such as waiting periods) don't work against stuff like this. Background checks don't work if the person's first major felony is mass slaughter. Laws to disarm domestic abusers don't work against non-domestic abusers. And so on.
I have a headache now. I think I'm done for the night.
= new reply since forum marked as read
so don't try to make complicated failures.
