Quote Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
This hasn't been discussed anywhere to my knowledge, but I believe Stephen Paddock killed himself believing he failed.

His goal was to cause hundreds or thousands of casualties. He attempted to blow up large fuel tanks, failed, and then fired upon the crowd.

However, he still believed he would have a lot of time to fire on them until the police located him and stopped him, which is why he brought 23 guns up there.

Imagine his shock when he saw a security guard approaching his room just 12 minutes after he started shooting.

In reality, the guard was up there to investigate an alarm on a room door a little bit down the hall (I'm guessing triggered somehow from the broken windows or shooting causing an unusual vibration), and police response would be far behind. Nobody realized where the bullets were coming from at that point.

However, Paddock didn't know this, and figured they located him quickly. He didn't fire one bullet at the crowd after that, and likely killed himself right at that moment.

I bet that one of his last thoughts before killing himself was, "How did they find me and get up here so quickly?"


I scratch my head at that whole fuel tank situation.

Frankly, after assessing the info presented so far, I think the fuel tank targeting was an afterthought - either that or Paddock knew much less about weapons and had much less training than the public is currently led to believe.

The guy supposedly had 23 guns in his room.

As far as I've seen with the types of guns he had, not ONE of those guns are going to penetrate the fuel tanks from that distance. It's a LOCK in my book. The semi auto's (obv made auto with bump stocks) aren't going to do that (or it is HIGHLY unlikely that they will)

The rounds are too small and the distance is too great; Supposedly the fuel tanks are approximately 2000 feet. Even after you successfully place your shots at that distance, you have to penetrate the metal, which I would imagine is probably reasonably thick considering the size of the tanks

He could have more likely accomplished that feat with a nice high-powered large caliber rifle.

23 guns and you didn't get one to properly accomplish the goal you supposedly had?