First look inside Stephen Paddock’s hotel room shows guns, shells and a hammer

NY Daily News ^ | October 3, 2017 | BY TERENCE CULLEN

[Oldeconomybuyer]

The Las Vegas hotel room of gunman Stephen Paddock, who killed 59 people and wounded more than 500 at a country music concert, was littered with assault rifles and bullet shells, photos of the room show.

A Boston 25 News reporter tweeted a photo of Paddock’s room that shows a hammer along with dozens of casings on the floor and a bullet magazine. Among the casings is an assault rifle fixed with a scope and bipod.

A second photo showed another long assault rifle with a long magazine and handle at the front of the stock.

Police believe Paddock used a hammer to bust a window in his Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino hotel room.

[Mathews]

Have you ever had a hot casing from a rifle after a couple hundred rounds have been put through it at cyclic ROF? It’s hotter than hell and will put a 2nd degree on you especially if it goes down the back of your blouse. Just for clarification:
M-14
M-16A2
M-60D
M-240B
MP5
M4
M79
M203
M2HB (single and twins)
GAU 17
M242

These are just a few weapons I am infinitely familiar with. Comes with 20 years of Naval training. 15 of that in NAVSPECWAR.

[lurked_for_a_decade]

You will never hear the two sounds a gun shot makes until a high powered bullet or round has been fired at you! The bullet leaves the rifle travelling faster than the speed of sound. You have to have a bullet pass close to you to hear the first sound.

The first sound you hear is the bullet as it passes you and is travelling faster than the speed of sound. It passes you and makes a small sonic boom just like a plane breaking the sound barrier makes a sonic boom that you hear as it passes you but the bullets sonic boom is smaller.

That first sound is a snapping or cracking sound. If you hear it, that means the bullet has already passed you and missed you. It does no good to duck when you hear that crack or snap. The bullet has already passed you. If you don’t hear the bullet, it hit you and if you’re lucky, you’re dead. It’s the shot you don’t hear that kills you.

The second sound you hear from a single bullet fired at you is the loud bang made by the explosion of the gun powder in the bullet cartridge in the gun that accelerates the bullet to greater than the speed of sound coming out of the barrel of the gun. That bang sound of the powder expoding travels at the speed of sound and takes longer to reach you than the bullet itself which is travelling faster than the speed of the powders bang noise.

Think of thunder and lightening. You see the lightning and then a little later you hear the thunder. The further away the lightening occurs the longer the time between the lightening flash that you see first and the sound of thunder that you hear second.

Suiting up for game day on the two way rifle range is the only way to experience the two sounds. You can also let someone shoot at you if they promise to miss and you trust them. ;) The other way to hear it is to raise and lower targets after marking target hits at a long distant rifle range so the shooter can see where their bullet hit.

On some of the videos of the LV shooting you can hear the snap or crack sound passing by the person filming with their cell phone. The snap or crack sound is the bullet. The boom, boom, boom noise is made at the point of origin. ie the gun.

[a fool in paradise]

Housekeeping gets paid by the room...

[justa-hairyape]

He was spray and pray, but he had a strategic plan. First fired up close to stage. Then when people ran to back. Fired toward back. He intended to kill hundreds. He was moving the mass of people around like cattle. Trying to keep them in kill zone. Then that brave hotel security guard came for him.

[Mathews]

I don’t know about the inner workings of hotel management and all... Just made a couple of observations.

[MPB]

We took turns firing and “working” the target. I only heard one shot.

Well dang, how close were you to the target anyway? Sounds risky (and how far from the shooter was that)?

I've only been unintentionally downrange on one occasion... national forest doing some target shooting, and some other shooters on a nearby hill decided "who needs a backstop" and the rounds were literally flying just over our heads until we flagged a passing ranger down to go stop those idjits.

Our group definitely heard the crack of the round go by followed by the report later... I'd guess they were maybe 800 yards? Hard to say... around a bend in the road and uphill from the same place we were and I'm terrible at estimating distances. :)

[Myrddin]

Muzzle blast as the bullet exits the barrel is the first source of "boom". That is the one a suppressor can reduce by containing the gasses in a series of connected expansion chambers and bleeding off the pressure slowly. The 2nd source of noise comes from the bullet breaking the sound barrier at around 1200 FPS. Shooters who use a suppressor will usually look for subsonic (1000 FPS) rounds to avoid the supersonic crack. Getting a semi-auto to produce enough gas to cycle a subsonic round requires some effort. Much easier to go bolt action plus suppressor. Standard AR-15 ammo has a muzzle velocity of 2700 to 3150 FPS. Add a muzzle break to reduce recoil and you get a louder muzzle blast too.

A short barrel (7.5") AR-15 uncorks at 50,000 PSI. At 20 inches, the pressure is down to around 8,000 PSI. Values observed by using a barrel starting at 24 inches with pressure transducers and chopping off one inch at a time to measure pressure and muzzle velocity.

[Panzerfaust]

The two sounds are 1) muzzle report created by propelleant gasses exiting the muzzle. These gasses create air movement (sound), that of course travels at the speed of sound. 2) the supersonic crack of the bullet as it goes by. Bullets traveling ~3000 fps are going ~2000 mph.

Speed of sound is +\- 767 mph. So, the bullet is going 2.6 times the speed of sound.

Thus, from the firing line, you will only here the single report of the muzzle blast. If you are down in the target butts, pulling & scoring targets, you will first hear the crack of the bullet as it flies by overhead at 2000 mph, into the target. Then you will hear the sound of the muzzle report, that has travelled from the firing line down to the target, at 767 mph. 767 mph is .22 miles in one second. .22 miles is 1161 feet in one second.

The Vegas shooter was approx 450 yards (~1400 feet) from the beaten zone. That means it would take the sound of the muzzle report about 1.2 seconds to travel from the window down to where victims were standing.

The sound of a rifle bullet going by is a high pitch crack, followed closely by the deeper “boom” of the muzzle report. It is unmistakable. I hold a Master rating in NRA Highpower and spent many days in target butts. I’ve had many, many thousands of bullets fly by, about 3-4 feet over my head. When you get into rapid fire stages, you’ll have 20 guys firing 10 rounds in 60 seconds, so you’ll have 200 rounds going by (vast majority 5.56mm) in 60 seconds. It’s a pretty lively experience. And you MUST wear ear protection in the butts. The crack of a bullet is REALLY LOUD and it is painful without at least using plugs. I used to both plug and use muffs, because I value my hearing.....

As a result, I know exactly what it sounds like to be shot at (and missed!). I also know that when I hear that sound, I won’t stand around and think it’s fireworks. I recommend volunteering to pull targets at your local highpower match. They’ll love you for helping and by the end of the day, by God you will forever instantly recognize the sound of a bullet whizzing by. Such knowledge may just save your life some day.

So, this whole screed of mine proves how stupid Hillary is with her “silencer” comment, since suppressors do not suppress a bullet’s sonic boom, only the firearm’s muzzle report. The combination of a suppressor and sub-sonic (e.g. 140+grain bullets in lower velocity 9mm ) is what LE /military use to keep the noise down.

Trust me, at that Vegas scene it’s the crack of the bullets that’ll be 10x louder than the muzzle report, suppressor or no suppressor. If all you can hear is the putt-putt-putt of the muzzle report, you aren’t the one getting shot at.

When you listen to audio of the scene recorded by someone who was close to the beaten zone, you’ll first hear snapping of bullets, then both snapping and muzzle report and then just muzzle report and then just echos. So it’s snapsnapsnapsnap, snapboomsnapboomsnapboom, boomboomboomboom, then echoes.

That’s because first just bullets are going by, then it’s bullets and muzzle report, then just muzzle report, then echoes that had to travel all the way out to a building and then back to you. If you listen to the various audios of the event you’ll hear what I mean.

[Trailerpark Badass]

Second photo is a Surefire 100rd magazine

[HamiltonJay]

Again, if he was a pro in terms of maximum casualties he would not have been spray and praying until the clip was empty... I have no doubt this was planned, but to portray this as multiple professional gunmen doing this as the person suggested in the original post I responded to... not even close.

He could have and would have killed and injured far far more had this truly been multiple people professionally trained, with the kind of time and ammo he had at his disposal.

[justa-hairyape]

Listen to first 15 minutes of police scanner. That fourth floor flashing was reported by a police officer. He warned that the light was some type of flashing alarm and not the shooter.

[MPB]

Second photo is a Surefire 100rd magazine

Yeah, I just pulled up a pic to verify since I wasn't sure if it was 60 or 100...

[Myrddin]

I always wear long sleeve shirts, button collars, a cap to keep the hot brass out of my glasses. I did get a mouth full of hot 9mm brass from a SEAL buddy trying to shoot an AR-15 9mm as fast as possible. I was behind and right. The spew of brass came pretty fast. It didn't have a nice brass deflector of the style offered on current CMMG 9mm AR-15 uppers today. As you noted, the hot brass is uncomfortable (especially down a shirt).

[justa-hairyape]

He wanted to kill hundreds. Tried to keep them in kill zone for as long as possible. Everyone down there thought there was multiple shooters. They had no idea where to go or where to run.

[4yearlurker]

There was a live band playing at the time with the crowd maybe cheering or singing along.

[Panzerfaust]

Great post, much more concise than mine. I feel like that guy who gave the three-hour speech at Gettysburg and then got blown away by Lincoln’s 87-word address!! :-))

[Lovely-Day-For-A-Guinness]

could be he used the hammer to knock out the shreds of glass on the lower part of the pane after he blew the windows out with his guns...

A machinist's spring-loaded punch makes short order of nearly any glass. And, the only noise it makes is the snap when the catch releases. No one would recognize the sound of that and it's not loud.

[justa-hairyape]

That quote by Hillary about the silencer betrays the fact that they wanted or were expecting more deaths. So next incident expect better silencing from the insane pussy hat wearers.

[Loud Mime]

Very informative! So much so that I posted it on FB. People need to understand this stuff and how phony Democrats and Hillary are.

I will never forget the first time I heard bullets going by me. The third one is when I realized what was happening, which was about a second. HFS!!!

[libertylover]

I've not attempted to count, but I'll guess at least 40 or 50 per burst

I'll admit that I don't know much about guns, but I agree with your 40-50 per burst estimate. How many would you say the clip in the 2nd photo would hold? My semi-wild guess would say about 30.