Posted on 10/03/2017 12:23:28 PM PDT by Mariner
Rate the difficulty of this...
With a fully automatic rifle, from a range of 500 yards and a 30 deg down angle, at night with no tracers, put over 500 rounds in a "kill box" of approximately 2 acres.
Knowing a little about ballistics, angles and ranging. And have fired a fully automatic rifle recreationally, this seems to be extraordinary shooting.
Professional grade.
But I'm not a professional auto shooter. You are.
What do you say?
You can find everything he used on the major firearms sites online. Installing the optics is easy, as is installing a bumpfire stock. I heard one of them last week at my local range (I didn't go look because wasting ammo annoys me, and shooting just to hear "bang" strikes me as a waste). As for why he did it, I imagine we will find out soon.
In his position, with two bumpfire weapons, I would expect him to shoot both dry and then reload. Cycling between them gives each one a short rest to cool. They will both get hot, but he didn't care about accuracy.
You are right; he could have killed more by loading his plane with the explosive of his choice and then crashing into the concert. I assume the guns were for a fantasy in his unstable little mind. He wanted to be Rambo or whatever image he dreamed of.
See post #98 from a real expert.
One of the weapons had a bi-pod and looked like it had a Surefire recoil suppressor on the barrel. Running it on full auto would be no problem spraying rounds and hitting so many people in such a packed crowd at a mid-distance, especially at the angle afforded from the 32nd floor.
With such a large area completely packed with people one does not need a scope to kill and maim hundreds at that range.
As for my background, I volunteered to put on cammies, carry an M-16 (sometimes an M-60), and hump an 80lbs pack for 2 1/2 years. Much later I volunteered to spend a week in the field with an M-4 and a M-249. If the now-dead scum had a 249 the casualties at that concert would have been beyond anything imaginable.
The photo of one weapon he used looked like a Surefire SoCom muzzle brake. I use those and there is NO muzzle rise when firing with them installed.
Yeah, could easily have been just somebody not knowing what the right thing to do was. Seems wrong in hindsight, people were able to leave the area.
Yes long ago
Colt did a few videos of M4A1s doing 30 rnd mag dumps- 14 mags later, the gas tube burst but the carbine still was running as a manual repeater.... (M4A1s have mid weight bbls and full auto, not burst)
420 rnds as fast as the technician could swap and dump before it failed once.
Bump fire is not as fast as cyclic FA, but still fast.
Add a few spares to swap out and you easily can fire a few k rnds in a few minutes....
In the article behind the following link, you’ll find a diagram that shows 1,100 feet from Paddock’s hotel to the concert area.
That’s closer to my first guess of 300 meters from other videos and pictures within the days before you posted this thread. That distance would make a difference in both accuracy and energy. The high number of casualties as reported would be more likely to have been caused by an attacker with moderate instruction and practice at that distance. Some training before the massacre would still have been necessary, of course.
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