Even as Dan and I were recording our first podcast, recounting the mystery that has become the Mandalay Bay hotel shooting, the Las Vegas Sheriff’s department revised the crime’s timeline. Again. chicagotribune.com:
Las Vegas police said Friday that the gunman who opened fire on a country-music festival far below his hotel suite did not shoot a security guard six minutes before that rampage, contradicting a timeline that they had offered earlier this week.
For those of you keeping score, the Clarke County Sheriff’s department has now provided no less than three different accounts of this crime.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Sheriff Lombardo told the public that Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos (above) interrupted spree killer Stephen Paddock’s attack, drawing his fire and inspiring the killer to kill himself, ending the slaughter.
Sheriff Lombardo hailed Mr. Campos as a hero. And then, earlier this week, Lombardo revised the timeline. He said that Mr. Paddock had shot Mr. Campos six minutes before opening fire on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans below his 32nd floor hotel room.
https://youtu.be/MNJXPQFm3vU
When that bombshell hit, including the revelation that the Mandalay Bay hotel didn’t call 911 during those six minutes, MGM went public with a third timeline.
The owners of the Mandalay Bay claimed that just forty seconds elapsed between Mr. Campos’ injury and Mr. Paddock’s assault on the crowd below.
Sheriff Lombardo is now telling the world that MGM got it right, and his investigators got it wrong. Twice.
On Friday, Lombardo said that he stood by providing the 9:59 p.m. time, which he said “wasn’t inaccurate when I provided it,” but said that he was told that the time had been written by someone in a security log.
Upon investigation, he said, police learned that Campos first encountered a barricaded door on the 32nd floor at 9:59 p.m., and that he was fired upon by Paddock “in close proximity to” 10:05 p.m., when police say the mass shooting began.
“He attempted to relay that information via his radio and it was confirmed because he also relayed that information via his cellphone,” Lombardo said. “So the timeline associated to both of those sources have been verified.”
Conspiracy theorists note: it’s entirely possible that Sheriff Lombardo and his officers are stupid and lazy and poorly trained and media hungry enough to rely on the hotel’s written log to establish a timeline. And a cell phone call log is solid evidence.
That said, is it a coincidence that this new timeline — which eliminates the six-minute gap during which the Mandalay Bay hotel failed to contact the police — could save MGM billions of dollars in legal liability?
“There is no conspiracy between the FBI, between LVMPD and the MGM,” Lombardo said at [Friday’s] news briefing, during which he partially read from prepared statements and took no questions.
“Nobody is attempting to hide anything in reference to this investigation. The dynamics and the size of this investigation requires us to go through voluminous amounts of information in order to draw an accurate picture.”
Speaking of pictures, an “expert” speaking to the latimes.com reports “that one place the casino’s cameras don’t have eyes is the network of hallways inside the Mandalay Bay hotel.” Wait. What?
Hallways can be difficult for security cameras to capture — they might be too long or too dark to show what’s actually happening — so hotels instead put cameras on bottlenecks like elevator banks.
Does that look like a “dark hallway” to you? Is there such a thing as a dimly lit area that a modern security camera can’t adequately record? The Times says their pet expert “declined to be identified because of concerns of future litigation.”
If you suspect that Las Vegas law enforcement is helping the hotel avoid future financial catastrophe by covering up the hotel’s reaction (or lack thereof) to the shooting, add these two facts:
– Sheriff Lombardo won’t say whether or not the Mandalay Bay hotel called 911 to report Mr. Campos’ shooting, and if so, when.
– Mr. Campos, the security guard, disappeared on Friday, immediately before a scheduled interview. His whereabouts remain unknown.
And yes, there are other important unknowns [via the chicagotribune.com] . . .
MGM also said that police officers “were together with armed Mandalay Bay security officers in the building when Campos first reported that shots were fired over the radio. These Metro officers and armed Mandalay Bay security officers immediately responded to the 32nd floor.”
However, MGM’s statement raised further questions, including what time the company thought Campos was shot, whether it thought the mass shooting still began at 10:05 p.m. and why, if police and security “immediately” headed to the 32nd floor, officers did not arrive there until 10:17 p.m.
A spokeswoman for the company did not respond to a request for comment on these questions.
The Sheriff’s Department said those on-site police officers — whose reason for being in the hotel remains undisclosed — responded the wrong floor (31st), delaying their arrival on the 32nd floor. As of this writing, there’s has been no official revision of that “fact.”
This is also the first mention of armed Mandalay Bay security responding to the shooting. Who, how many, where did they go and what did they do when they got there?
https://youtu.be/JxmEFeKy8aI
We’ll continue to follow this “fluid” story — without descending into the full-blown grassy knoll conspiracy theories filling the information gap created by the credibility-compromised Las Vegas police.
Meanwhile, one thing’s for sure: we don’t know the truth about the sequence of events that led to the death of 59 people and the injury of 545, 45 of whom are still in hospital, some in critical condition.
Gun control worked well in Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s PRC, Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, ….. , right?
Kitty Genovese, Sharon Tate, the victims of Richard Speck… all advocates for gun control, right?
“Most gun control arguments miss the point. If all control boils fundamentally to force, how can one resist aggression without equal force? How can a truly “free” state exist if the individual citizen is enslaved to the forceful will of individual or organized aggressors? It cannot.”
― Tiffany Madison
“One man with a gun can control a hundred without one.”
― Vladimir Lenin
Well I try not to assume an even with a conspiracy theory when straight incompetence will do. But at this point it’s getting hard to decide if we do actually have an example of someone trying to hide something. Because at this point either someone is really bad at their job, or someone’s trying to hid another shooter.
You guys hit the nail on the head in your podcast when you pointed out that everyone involved has a reason not to tell the truth. It appears that in attempting to expose how easy it is for an average American to commit mass murder with guns, what Paddock has instead revealed is the extent people will go to in order to protect what means the most to them.
Because one needs a MINIMUM of FIVE firearms:
1. rimfire pistol
2. rimfire rifle
3. centerfire pistol
4. centerfire rifle
5. shotgun
Then, to add utility, specialist arms for whatever that one might want to specialize in. Modified race guns for matches, perhaps. Also bolt actions for long range SBRs for close encounters, shotguns with slug barrels, different chokes for different ranges, perhaps one for skeet, one for trap, one for the field, etc.
Naturally, any anti would have no clue that there are different games, ranges, target sizes and toughnesses, etc. How could they, while they remain blissfully ignorant about EVERYTHING, including their own positions?
The so called hero security guard was supposed to give some interviews, but he has disappeared. I still call bullshtein on one shot in the leg after a barrage of two hundred rounds, but I digress.
Harvey should worry about controlling his own ‘gun’
The Sheriff being the good Democrat probably is covering for for the black ops of the Democratic Party!
Seem,s funny that when ever the Democratic party faces in house woes and is losing Black, Illegal Immigrant and terrorist Muslim support, along come’s a mass shooting, this is orchestrated and choreographed to get peoples minds off of the Democrat party as the Anti-American party who then prove it by advocating gun control. Sorros and Bloomberg are the one’s supporting these mass shootings, {who totally own the democratic party} weakening already weak minded Anti freedom American resolve on our Freedoms.
the Shooter was so hi on Valium he couldn’t shoot, thanks to radical Muslims who then capped a bunch of people, and made it look like a suicide, then shot their help the bell boy and calmly returned too their lower rooms
Logic check: If the Democrats wanted to distract people from thinking that they are the “anti-American party”, why the hell would they set up a false flag so they could push to repeal one of the most fundamental, unique features of the Constitution? Hard to spin that as anything other than “anti-American”. Not to mention, polls and elections have consistently shown that gun control is a losing issue for Democrats anywhere but the bluest big cities.
If that was their plan, whoever came up with it is an idiot.
You think white will show powder burns! Dear you look good in any color!!
Oh no, a powerful liberal taking advantage of women. This has to be the first time this has ever happened. /sarc
Yes.
A friend of mine exchanged gunfire with two armed robbers. He was hit and still managed to permanently dispatch both of them. It’s not something he glorifies but he is here today because he was armed.
It was around that time I also decided to purchase and carry a gun.
thanks for all the insite on gp100.I will be picking up my 1715 tomorrow and at range this coming weekend…..i am pumped to get this being that i have a few pistols but no revolvers
Yes. Many years ago, a friend and I were in the city late at night and we, um, had to make a pit stop.As nothing was open nearby, we stopped behind some bushes. A group of 4 – 5 guys approached us from the sidewalk, asking for a light, cigarettes, money. We had finished our “business” by that point and turned to face them. We were both carrying in shoulder holsters and, without saying anything, simultaneously opened our jackets. The gentlemen apparently had urgent appointments elsewhere because they walked away in a hurry. We just went home. No harm, no foul.
And according to our opponents on this issue: that wasn’t a defensive gun use, you didn’t even clear leather – let alone shoot them.
We must never pass up an opportunity to beat the gun bigots over the head with this fact: legal self-defense does not mean anyone needs to get shot.
Sounds like they were about to rob Tuco’s cousins.
If our government ever did inact this, it would be as flimsy as the feature bans are now, where we created binary triggers and bump stocks to get around the machine gun ban. You would see people with hundreds of trusts, each owning two guns a piece. If they found a way to ban that, there would be trusts owned by businesses owned by the same people. You can’t ban something people want, the war on drugs should have taught us that.
Yes –
After an incident on a highway that resulted in the other party getting all road-ragey, a friend of mine had the guy follow him off the highway to a gas station. As my friend started to pump gas, the other guy got a baseball bat out of his truck and charged across the parking lot. My friend drew, and swept him across the face with the attached laser, whereupon the guy dropped the bat, screeched to a halt, and drove across a flower bed in his departure. Witnesses got the license of the truck (stolen, of course). My friend was interviewed on the scene, but no further action.
There have been a couple other incidents as well, but that’s enough for now.
It’s disturbing to see the conspiracy nuts out in full force at TTAG, esp. the the nutter comment on Building 7
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they operate on the assumption that the Gov is completely competent and can carry out these “Ops” perfectly, in complete secrecy. And no one ever (despite verified secrets/classified info being regularly leaked) can provide one iota of actual evidence of these items being carried out
I have.
Guy tried to rob me. I went for my snubby. He changed his mind and beat feet.
Interesting article….
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-04/16-unanswered-questions-about-las-vegas-shooting-mainstream-media-doesnt-want-talk-a
Stop and think about all the video and audio the authorities r having to go thru second by second, it’s going to take time and there will be corrections and updates. If it was a true conspiracy, they wouldn’t be updating or correcting anything!! Also, the guy in the ballistics video, Mike Adams, look up some info on him. He’s a man of many theories on everything, and an expert on none!!!
When you lie and get caught, you make up another lie. Then your lies get out of control and expose you. You have to control the information that gets out and stop any possibility someone can expose the truth. If it was a major conspiracy people will start to disappear or strangely die.
Right now it looks like no one wants to take responsibility and the government wants to use this event to remove human rights. It doesn’t have to be a government conspiracy for them to use it for their own gain.
If it was a government conspiracy the Alex Jones crowd would be blaming Trump. Oh, wait. Alex Jones doesn’t talk bad about Trump because he sold out. If it was Trump’s fault, Alex Jones will cover it up by blaming Antifa, ISIS, arms dealing, prescription drugs, multiple deep state assassins, etc.
6 years old, my Marine Pop’s old Springfield 15Y .22 he had used on a trapline before WWII, He said it cost $2.98 out of a Sears Roebuck catalog.After the war he used it to feed my Moms rabbits and squirrels until she was sick of ’em .
I remember getting off the school bus , getting the rifle and a few cartridges and waiting for him to come home for supper from the fields, I’d have some cans/etc. set up and he’d supervise me “killing ’em” and correct my shooting positions. I never even thought about firing it without his sayso. After I was 7 was allowed to hit the woods and bring home some squirrel meat on my own.
Never were we allowed a BB gun. Pops knew kids (some of ’em) would shoot each other with ’em, said you might as well form safe habits with a real gun. He agreed with Patton about the M1 Garand. Gave him one when he turned 75(92 now). And of course the old Springfield is still here – if it was notched for all the squirrels,rabbits,hogs,cows,groundhogs,crows,pigeons/etc. it has accounted for, there would be no wood left !
My wife’s cousin shot and killed a guy who with a couple of other thugs attacked him and his girlfriend. The jury didn’t believe his claim of self defense and he got 90 days for invol manslaughter. Plus a felony and a dishonorable discharge.
I was involved in a criminal case where a guy claimed self defense during a fight- he shot and killed a known gang member who confronted him empty handed. He claimed self defense and I believed him, but the fact was he left the fight briefly to a point of relative safety and returned with a gun. Not good enough for self defense, and he got 21 years.
Do we limit this to just civilian dgu’s or do we combine civilian and military events? I always felt like I was defending myself.
I’m looking forward to more!
Dad served with the 3d Marine division in the Pacific and was wounded on the island of Guam. He was very reticent about his wartime experiences.
My uncle was an eyewitness and related this incident:
It seems three veterans stationed at Pendleton after the War were in a Buick convertible on a road trip in ’48 or ’49. Owner was driving, Dad riding shotgun and my uncle was in the back seat with the provisions.
Somewhere south of Tijuana, banditos had blocked the road with a pile of rocks. As the car came to a stop, several banditos approached to rob the turistas.
Dad jumped up and blazed away with his 1911. Uncle says Dad dropped a couple of them, but they didn’t stick around for a body count. Driver hauled ass for the border, and they never went back.
My Father and my Uncle are now resting at Arlington.
RIP, gentlemen. And thank you.
If on duty LE and military counts, I’ve had several
Just one in a capacity as an armed non police/mil citizen, and no shots had to be fired
Yes, little ole Me. 1984 Lawton,OK. Stationed at Ft.Sill lived off post, about 3 am some nimrod tried breaking into my apt. 2nd floor of a house steps outside and I lived upstairs. As he was trying to pry open the door I opened it an pointed my 1911 at him, he fell backwards over the railing and fall down go boom. Limped off. Then about 1 month later 2 Detectives showed up with the same guy in cuffs. He and his buddies robbed a Curtis Mathis Store. Says he put the stuff in my place. His buddies ditched him. Cop asked if he could look, said go ahead. Told them to story about him trying to break in. He went to jail.
Me in 1992 – Rodney King riots. On the day the riots broke out, by blessed coincidence, I too to work an old Polish FIS pistol my father brought back from WWII. My boss at the time was a fellow historical gun nut and wanted to see it.
So the Rodney King riots break out and our office on the southwest corner of Manhattan Beach closed early. Driving up Rosecrans on my way to the 405 (San Diego) Fwy in my old Chevy S-10 pickup truck. That’s the point at which Rosecrans leaves the boundaries of Manhattan Beach and crosses into Hawthorne or Crenshaw…it was a pretty dicey neighborhood in those days.
As I come up to the onramp, I see a small crowd surrounding cars attempting to get on the freeway…pounding on cars, throwing rocks and bricks, and all sorts of fun stuff. A crowd forms around my truck and a guy with a baseball bat approaches the driver side door. I roll down the window. With the pistol in my right hand, I drape my left arm over the window opening and make an obvious move to lay the pistol over my arm…pointed directly at the guy with the bat. I thought I was going to be forced to shoot the guy…and maybe one or two others…to get out of that fix. But Bat Guy sees the gun and immediately backs up with hands up and wide eyes, yelling “let’s be friends!” at the top of his lungs. Someone in the crowd yells “gun” and the crowd scatters. I floor the gas pedal and zip up onto the freeway thanking my guardian angel for getting me the heck out of there in one piece.
And that’s my defensive gun use story. Was I illegally brandishing my weapon? Probably. Were there better ways to handle the situation? In retrospect, probably. Would I do it again if faced with the same situation? Without a doubt.
BTW, it would be illegal for me to possess that gun in California today. Which is why I’m so grateful I no longer live there!
Who says that the Mandalay Bay has “billions of dollars” in legal liability? Certainly not, me, and I’ve been a civil litigator for thirty years. In fact, I agree with an article on MSN news (not sure where they copied it from): establishing liability against the hotel is an up hill battle that is unlikely to succeed. First of all, absent specific prior instances, a business owes no duty to protect against the criminal misconduct of third persons. Second, one of the most important factor in establishing liability is establishing that the incident was “foreseeable,” and that therefore the property owner might have had a duty to protect against its occurrence. Just ask your self: was an attack by a “lone wolf” high rolling gambler who had probably stayed at that hotel numerous times “foreseeable”? Heck, his family and girlfriend are all telling us that they were clueless that he was intending to do what he (apparently) did. Has anything like this happened before? No. Without foreseeability, the hotel simply owes no duty to protect even its own guests, much less people at a location almost a quarter mile away.
“Of course, the entire incident might never have happened if the KCPD had arrested him for a charge of sexually assaulting a minor that they let slip between the cracks years earlier.” What? LOL! I got 30 sex offenders in a (5) mile radius, and you think that should have prevented him for acquiring a firearm? LMAO!
Yea. What he said.
I have a 15 plus yr. old Stainless Ruger Mk. II target (old heavy tapered barrel no longer made) 6 7/8″ and a Smith “Victory” 5.5″ stainless with fiber optic front sight. The Ruger has an older style patridge front sight. I also have a 5 1/2″ super single six, and a 1947 K1xxx Smith K-22 target masterpiece.
Ruger had the superior auto until this new S&W Victory, now the race is closer. My ss-six need a Spring Kit to be half as smooth as the vintage K-22. If you want a 6″ gun I’d get an older, 90 percent plus K-22 or Model 17, but I’d look at the Model 18 or the SP-101 if I wanted a 4″ barrel. I think the Smith K-Frame handles best for my medium-large hands, but the GP-100 might be the ticket if you want a 10-shot revolver in a heavy frame and have big hands. I would also check out some 617’s, as most I have felt have good triggers. The autos are easier to load and might shoot better as a rule, and appear to be less expensive. They all shoot well-enough for utility purposes. Target guns usually out shoot field models, but since you can put a red dot on anything now that difference may be negligible in the field. Good luck with your decision!
I’m surprised they didn’t claim to do it with a Mosin-Nagant dug up from the Kursk battlefield using ammunition found at the back of a storage shed in an abandoned former Soviet military base.
I think the NRA did a dumb thing in this, but it is fun to see them in the middle between congressional gun grabbers and the ATF. Whatever they decide, it will anger one or the other… and maybe all three.
“Here’s What You Have to Do . . .”
GO F yourselves with something sharp and heavy.
And stand the fV<K by til we find your replacements.
This is gonna be fun to watch…
Said it before, will say it again. From the sound of the gun fire, it definitely sounded like more than one shooter, and from the cabbie video of that evening, it sounded as though one shooter was right on top of the Mandalay’s portico cover.
The crime scene shoots looked staged, if the guy was going cyclic the rifle cases would’ve melted into all but wool carpeting. Rifle on it’s side looked ‘placed’ but who would place it on its side if it had its bi-pod extended. Whole bunch of crap.
Totally planned, ABSOLUTELY DONE TO FORWARD AN AGENDA. TOTALLY PAIRED WITH SIMILAR INSTANCES OF EVIL POS (D) SHOOTINGS – Like Trump’s campaigner – http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/14/former-trump-campaigner-and-rubio-intern-shot-13-times-while-sleeping.html
Ban the evil POS (D). THEY ARE THE FING PROBLEM ON PURPOSE AND THE PROBLEM ON PURPOSE DOESN’T EVEN GET TO SUGGEST THE SOLUTIONS.
“Meanwhile, I wonder how easy it would be to make one of these with, I dunno, a 3D printer?”
A clone of that should pop up on ‘Thingverse’ in 3, 2, 1, …
(And unlike lots of other printed things, that appears to contain maybe 3-4 grams of plastic, *max*…)
Actually, I thought it was pretty funny…
( I’m old, my two safes have overflowed, I live in Texas. I have several NFA items and we’ve been through this so many times. Stay alert and be ready.)
If you need a Dutchman to admire, Max Verstappen in F1 is worth rooting for.
It’s a bold move to bring a product like this out in these troubled times…
“Par for the course these days if you are public and outspoken on the Right.”
“This kind of thing is going to get worse before it gets better.”
“The big problem is that the private corporations that hold everyone’s information are riddled with leftists …”
I have almost the exact same thought with two corrections:
(1) I don’t see this kind of thing ever getting better.
(2) I don’t see this kind of thing being limited to publicly outspoken conservatives or people on the right.
It is exceedingly inexpensive and easy these days to build, maintain, access, and transfer databases with millions of records. Sooner or later, Progressive neighbors and co-workers will be discretely reporting you to such databases if you express “wrong views” that betray you as an enemy of Progressive utopia. Once you are in the database, they can unleash all manner of ugliness on you. And that ugliness can range anywhere from refusing to do business with you, firing you, refusing to hire you, vandalism, even brutal physical assault and attempted murder.
I see no way to stop this.
My Shield is a fantastic gun. I like to make my guns my own, so I swapped the sights for Trijicon HDs, dropped in an Apex trigger, stippled the grip and added the MagGuts springs to my magazines. Obviously it’s not stock, but I can’t imagine being happier with a gun in this size.
Just got a 809, since they discontinued model it was a steal price wise. A little big in the hand. Shot 50 rounds so far of three different types of ammo with no problems. Accuracy is probably better than I can hold or see with my old eyes. Ok for carry, no better or worse than my .45 Colt. Impressed enough that I just bought the pt 111 on Black Friday for another screaming deal. That will probably be better for carry.