Posted on 10/05/2017 12:25:22 PM PDT by Bob Celeste
One thing that I have always adored about Free republic is the vast quantity of thoughtful and informed analysis and information about a multiplicity of subjects. I am EXTREMELY disappointed about much of the bumpfire stock controversy. Much of it sounds has though it was promulgated by the ignorant gun grabbing left.
I am a 2 tour Vietnam infantry combat veteran, and a member of the Illinois National guard for 26 years, to include service in iraq and the first Gulf War. I was a certified Illinois State Police Firearms and Defensive tactics instructor, and a member of Special Reaction and SWAT teams. I have fired hundreds of thousands of rounds through automatic weapons of all types, belt fed and shoulder mounted, ranging from .45 caliber M-3 sub machine guns up to M2A1 40 mm twin anti-aircraft guns mounted on an M-42 self propelled anti-aircraft gun.
I am retired and spend one day a month on the rifle range shooting my AR-15 rifles. When this slide fire device was first introduced, the low cost and novelty intrigued me and I purchased one. It was a bit awkward to use at first, but in one afternoon, after a bit of practice I was able to get 90% of any length burst on a man sized target at 75 yards, which is close to the normal engagement ranges for truly effective full auto fire from shoulder mounted weapons. It is not as useful has a true selective fire assault rifle since it requires two hands to employ, but it DOES have some measure of limited tactical utility for anyone who practices with it. I never really considered this item to be a true tactical instrument, but I did appreciate the ingenuity and thought that went into turning “bump fire’ into almost as accurate a technique has I could use with a true select fire assault rifle.
The battle has been joined. The anti-gun hysterics are in full cry. They will never satisfied until they achieve near total firearm confiscation. The genie is out of the bottle. You cannot stop psychopaths employing bump fire methods unless you can repeal the laws of Newtonian physics. I realize that some sort of regulation will ensue in the wake of this horrific atrocity. But i don’t like it one damn bit.
If they do this, then they should compromise by repealing the 1986 Hughes Act which caused the prices of full auto weapons to skyrocket. There is NO REASON for a legally transferable M-16 to cost over 50,000 dollars. You can be assured that any such owner will be thoroughly vetted by the background check that would be required to purchase one.
It’s reported that 1,500 rounds were fired. So far we have 59 dead and over 500 hit.
That’s 1 person hit every 3 round at a distance of about 400 yards at night.
With all due respect to the author, he has no idea how easy it was for the 60+ year old Paddock to put his cased rifles on a bellman’s cart and haul them to his room. As long as they were cased, no one in Nevada would have said or ‘noticed’ anything wrong about it. In most places in Nevada, you could have rifles slung over your shoulder and no one would have said anything. In Clark County, less so. I have colleges who live in Nevada and get around on motorcycles with AR’s slung over their shoulders.
Again, no disrespect for the Marine authors knowledge or service, but Paddock was fully capable of pulling this off on his own.
It’s being reported 72 minutes of shooting.
Here from the L.A. Times 72 minutes of terror.
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-las-vegas-response/
Where did you get the 10 minute number?
Where is there any proof that 500+ people were hit by gunfire? 500+ people were injured. That includes people getting trampled, falling down, etc.
We have no idea at this point how many people were actually shot and how many had other injuries. You can’t make this kind of analysis until you have that fact.
It was 72 minutes from shots fired to all clear. Here from the L.A. Times.
http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-na-las-vegas-response/
Its mentioned in several places, including the article you cited. From that article, “Investigators believe he had been firing off and on for nine to 11 minutes.”
It has been established in multiple other reports that he was only firing out of the windows for about 10 minutes.
You seem and the author seem to maintain it is not plausible to get three rounds in a row in a shot grouping on a single target at 500 yards. I completely agree with this.
Let us say we put a blind fold on and shoot randomly at a piece of paper 20 feet away while shaking the gun, and we shoot many dozens of bullets this way.
If we see a group of holes in the paper closer together than some others, we should not assume they were from a targeted group of consecutive rounds--because obviously we were shooting too poorly for that. But neither should we be surprised it happened. The common sense guess is that some of the rounds out of all ones we shot happened to end up closer than other rounds. Of course the more rounds we fired in the same general direction, the closer these groups are likely to be by luck. The shooter fired a lot of rounds. He may have concentrated on some areas with more bursts than others.
Now the number of hits per target could be reasonably modeled by a Poisson distribution. It is not at all unusual or suspicious with such distributions to have 3 occurrences of one event and 0 of another when the events had equal chances.
colleges = colleagues
actual shooting out the window was 10-12 minutes. The remainder was spent preparing for the police assault from inside, and committing suicide
The Sarge is correct from a military perspective. The Sarge is wrong from a Terrorist perspective.
He is right that the terrorist appeared to have supported his firearm (bipoid in some pictures) and that allowed multiple rounds to hit the same relative place down range.
It is my opinion that the terrorist (and that is what I will call him he may have been a domestic lone world terrorist or affiliated with some group-—time will tell), was doing what use to be called “spray and pray.” Actually, I would wager that the area at the near max accuracy range of the AR was quite target rich and that putting a long burst down range would result in several casualties.
I have to doubt the 4 bullet to the head comment, but the two bullets within a downed body could indeed have happened.
I will wait until more information is known before I credit the terrorist with being a master marksman.
For me the most interesting issue is the attempt to explode the aviation fuel tanks with a rifle.
Shooting any large caliber weapon in a city will bring all sorts of false noise as various materials amplify, reflect and absorb sound waves. I’m no audio expert—damned near deaf in one ear—but I do know that audio testimony is far less accurate than eye-witness reports which vary widely from recorded events.
You appear to believe that all of the injuries were bullet wounds. Probably more than half were rolled ankles or collisions while running, impact with the ground when knocked down in the panic or tripping, trampling, cuts and bruises form scaling the fences and dropping to the ground...lots of ways to get hurt in that environment.
Here are several articles talking about a short time frame
for the firing, 9-12 minutes depending upon which you read.
I think the same thing is going on here. I would be much more interested in the opinion of a statistician with crowd estimation and control experience than an expert marksman in this situation. As somebody with a BS in mathematics, I would offer this much: the common belief that random events scatter uniformly is not correct; there is a large tendency to cluster, for reasons that are well understood statistically, and it is only when you step back and sample over the entire distribution that the average location is uniform.
Guy being hit three times -- especially when the bullets might have been fired seconds -- or minutes apart strikes me as conclusive of nothing.
A fowl odor... Lol lol lol
No. Most of the people injured were injured tripping, falling, getting trampled, or being pushed by other panicky folks into obstacles.
As for hauling the guns up
Suitcases with wheels, elevators.
Correct, and clustering within the Poisson distribution is well known. It's why, for example, in a locker room three random dripping wet guys all wind up within a few feet of each other with no one else in the room.
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