10 suitcases for 16 assault rifles
THE GUNMAN who killed at least 59 people in Las Vegas on Sunday used military-grade ammunition — most commonly fired from an AR-15 — capable of disintegrating bone.
The .223-caliber bullets used in the attack leave the barrel three times faster than a round fired from a handgun. Exit wounds can leave grapefruitsized holes in the body.
The innocent victims were obviously no match for Stephen Paddock, 64, the lone gunman who fired from his perch in a 32nd-floor room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Authorities said 527 people were injured.
Police haven’t said which gun or guns Paddock used in the massacre.
Paddock was surrounded by a deadly arsenal of 23 firearms, including 16 assault rifles and at least one handgun in his hotel room, likely smuggled inside 10 suitcases, authorities said.
Some rifles had scopes on them. One or more of them had been altered from semiautomatic to automatic to increase the number of shots fired per second. There were also two tripods in the room, officials said.
Police found 19 more guns in his Mesquite, Nev., home, along with explosives and several thousands rounds of ammunition, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said.
Shortly after 10 p.m., Paddock used an automatic rifle and sprayed bullets into a crowd of thousands attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival. About 22,000 people bought tickets to the festival, but it’s not clear how many people were there during the shooting.
Paddock killed himself after shooting through a door at police as they closed in. Among the guns they found in the room were an AR-15 and AK-47 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, the sources said.
“It sounded like a machine gun,” said Harvey Morgan, a gunsmith and gun dealer for 53 years in Mount Kisco, Westchester County, who listened to audio of the shooting. “You can’t manually fire a regular gun that fast.”
It’s alarmingly easy — and legal — to turn a semiautomatic assault rifle into a fully automatic weapon, gun experts said. There are videos on YouTube that show how to do it.
Gun experts said anyone with even modest training in gunsmithing can do it using a file on the parts that interrupt the hammer with each trigger pull.
There’s also something called the bump stock or slider stock, which, once installed on a rifle, uses its recoil to repeatedly reset the trigger so it fires faster than a semiautomatic.
“You can do it, but you have to have some training,” Morgan said. Morgan said Paddock would have needed a special federal government license to even buy a machine gun. If he did use a machine gun, a possible model would be the SAW or Squad Automatic Weapon, which fires ammunition similar to the .223.