Las Vegas Shooting: 50+ Dead 500+ Injured at Jason Aldean Concert

[FlamesAddiction]

Originally Posted by FireFly

I think this was the right decision. How many additional people were injured or died because of that officer's inaction? He is supposed to protect and serve and sometimes that does involve life threatening situations. I'm certain the LVPD is probably getting sued and whatnot for his inaction.

It's amazing to me that they knew where the shooter was within minutes and had someone within one floor roughly 5 minutes after the shooting started. He's probably haunted by all the lives that were lost or destroyed because he waited. He didn't hesitate, he waited and it cost lives.

Especially considering the trainee was the one asking where he was going when he started going the other way.

I am actually impressed that the police are facing this head on and didn't try to cover it up or bury it. It would have been easy enough to do.

[transplant99]

Originally Posted by FireFly

I think this was the right decision. How many additional people were injured or died because of that officer's inaction? He is supposed to protect and serve and sometimes that does involve life threatening situations. I'm certain the LVPD is probably getting sued and whatnot for his inaction.

It's amazing to me that they knew where the shooter was within minutes and had someone within one floor roughly 5 minutes after the shooting started. He's probably haunted by all the lives that were lost or destroyed because he waited. He didn't hesitate, he waited and it cost lives.

You have to remember that the shooter had barricaded himself at the end of a hallway and had set up cameras to see who was coming down it. A maintenance guy was shot through the shooters room door while checking something unrelated but was able to slide into one of the neighboring door alcoves and radio down his exact position/room number. The cop in question here didn't know all this of course, but there would have been nothing he could have done to stop things.

No excuse for anything but chances are good had he approached the room he and his partner and the hotel security guy with him might all be victims as well.

This short video compiled by the NY Times is phenomenal in taking you through step by step how it all went down. And also another on how meticulously it was planned and how he was able to compile his arsenal.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100...12-bursts.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZRgVX8SYX4

[afc wimbledon]

I can see why a cop shouldn't be expected to run into the room guns blazing in an act of suicidal bravery causing their certain death but I think its perfectly reasonable to expect they should haul their sorry, presumably Kevlar wearing heavily armed (compared to everyone else) arses up to the floor the shooter was on to see whether there was anything they could do.

If when they got there they realised there was nothing they could do without dying fair enough, but the act of being in the corridor would have distracted the wacko and divided his attention even if they didn't actually do much else but take cover.

[stone hands]

i have no great love for the police but the herculean will some people expect high school bullies who give out speeding tickets to have seems entirely unreasonable to me

[Matata]

Did they ever come up with a motivation for the shooter, or is it still "Man who made a fortune playing slot machines goes kill-crazy for no discernable reason"? Or is the idea of him being a gun runner and money launderer still in the realm of conspiracy theories?

[transplant99]

Originally Posted by Matata

Did they ever come up with a motivation for the shooter, or is it still "Man who made a fortune playing slot machines goes kill-crazy for no discernable reason"? Or is the idea of him being a gun runner and money launderer still in the realm of conspiracy theories?

Nothing concrete.

There all kinds of conspiracy theories though, none of which have any real basis.

With the amount of planning and trial runs in various locations he went through, this was no man that just got mad and suddenly went whacko. Its hard to wrap ones head around but it seems like he was just a guy that decided to commit one of the most deadly mass shootings ever seen, simply because he could.

[OMG!WTF!]

I think the most interesting "conspiracy" is the second shooter. There are some very credible reports of consecutive and subsequent shootings along the strip as well as first hand police reports of a second suspect. Those were all replaced by the lone gunman theory almost immediately afterwards. The report of a guy arrested in Tennessee 23 hours after the shooting with the exact same arsenal in his car is weird too...


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tenness...ns-ammunition/


So a guy has the exact same stuff Paddock had and is arrested about 20 hours drive from Vegas but the very first report says there is no connection. I just wonder what happened with that.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

I can see why a cop shouldn't be expected to run into the room guns blazing in an act of suicidal bravery causing their certain death but I think its perfectly reasonable to expect they should haul their sorry, presumably Kevlar wearing heavily armed (compared to everyone else) arses up to the floor the shooter was on to see whether there was anything they could do.

I don’t agree with the officer’s decision to not take further action to provide actionable intelligence, but let’s set some expectations here. Most cops, if they wear a vest, are going to be wearing soft body armor designed to stop low velocity hand gun rounds. These are not designed to stop a high velocity round like those coming from a rifle. Those 5.56/.233 rounds would go through that soft armor like it was butter. The officer would have had to have been wearing hard armor, which is very expensive and heavy. Cops can’t afford to absorb the cost nor carry the weight. Considering their daily rig is 20-30 pounds, adding another 5-10 pounds greatly impacts their ability to perform.

Next, most cops are going into a situation like this with the weapon they carry daily. They can only possess weapons they are certified to carry, so one weapon is it, and usually a side arm in 9mm or 40 caliber. Some elect to carry a .45, but the do so knowing they are limiting themselves in the number of rounds they carry. The double stack has its advantages in shootouts. If they are certified on another weapon platform they would have it secured in their cruiser and have to go back for it. When responding, especially a first responder, you rarely have time to grab your alternative weapon. So it is likely the officer had anything on him but his side arm, and he recognized he was under armed and not prepared for what lay ahead.

When I hear about situations where the expectation is for an office to walk into a situation against an assault rifle I pity the guy in the polyester fighting suit. He’s been assigned a suicide mission, and I don’t think that is fair. That is why departments have SWAT teams. They are prepared and armed for such events. The beat cop is not, and responding detectives even less so. I sympathize with this guy. He had a decision to make, and he made the one the vast majority of people would make.

[Huntingwhale]

Originally Posted by Ryan Coke

It was his partners first day on the job.

Fair enough, but that means the partner couldn't be counted on to save his life given it was his first day.

Still, I'm not sure what pointing the finger at the cop who froze accomplishes. Saying he could have saved x amount of lives or sacrificing his own does nothing to diminish that fact that it was the shooter who pulled the trigger and killed those people. Nobody but him and him alone is responsible for those deaths.

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by Huntingwhale

Still, I'm not sure what pointing the finger at the cop who froze accomplishes.

I think it comes down to training, orders he received, and explicit expectations of him as an officer.

As asinine as I will sound, if you are trained to do something and expected to do it under certain circumstances but don't, you are failing to do your job. That's just a universal requirement for every single job there is really.

With this one being a life-or-death situation it's certainly not the same as me forgetting to put the new coversheets on my TPS reports but if the Las Vegas department has procedures and training in place for situations like this and he failed to do it, that is an unfortunate problem that really should give them grounds for dismally. You need to have your officers behaving predictably especially in these situations with such chaos. Following their training, meeting expectations, responding to orders. So if he was trained to do it one way, like say to go in quickly to confront the shooter to prevent further casualties and putting himself at risk, that's really an expectation of him (and not to say that Vegas police shouldn't re-evaluate their training and procedures). Conversely, if he wasn't trained in a situation like this, then that's on the department.

I don't blame him at all, but if you're freezing up during high-pressured situations you shouldn't be put in a role where you will deal with high-pressured situations - like being an officer.

[Huntingwhale]

Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen

I think it comes down to training, orders he received, and explicit expectations of him as an officer.

As asinine as I will sound, if you are trained to do something and expected to do it under certain circumstances but don't, you are failing to do your job. That's just a universal requirement for every single job there is really.

With this one being a life-or-death situation it's certainly not the same as me forgetting to put the new coversheets on my TPS reports but if the Las Vegas department has procedures and training in place for situations like this and he failed to do it, that is an unfortunate problem that really should give them grounds for dismally. You need to have your officers behaving predictably especially in these situations with such chaos. Following their training, meeting expectations, responding to orders. So if he was trained to do it one way, like say to go in quickly to confront the shooter to prevent further casualties and putting himself at risk, that's really an expectation of him (and not to say that Vegas police shouldn't re-evaluate their training and procedures). Conversely, if he wasn't trained in a situation like this, then that's on the department.

I don't blame him at all, but if you're freezing up during high-pressured situations you shouldn't be put in a role where you will deal with high-pressured situations - like being an officer.

Agreed. High pressure jobs like that are for certain types of people and it's likely he wasn't that type, which is a failure on the department for hiring him. Heck, maybe the hiring manager needs to be fired also for making the wrong hiring choice, since clearly they are the ones who ultimately decide who is a good fit. In that regard, I feel the dismissal isn't out of line. But I also feel like he's being used as a sacrificial lamb, in a city desperate for answers. Now some people will learn of his dismissal and automatically think some of those lives lost are on him because he didn't do his job. That's not fair or necessarily true.

Hard to say how any of us would react when the sounds of automatic gunfire is going off meters away from us, regardless of what training we have.

[FlamesAddiction]

Yeah, it's really not a big deal. As far as I know, he isn't being charged with a crime or being blamed legally. He just can't be a cop in Las Vegas.

I am sure it sucks for him, but there are vastly greater injustices to worry about than someone who isn't a great fit an an officer in a large city.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by New Era

I don’t agree with the officer’s decision to not take further action to provide actionable intelligence, but let’s set some expectations here. Most cops, if they wear a vest, are going to be wearing soft body armor designed to stop low velocity hand gun rounds. These are not designed to stop a high velocity round like those coming from a rifle. Those 5.56/.233 rounds would go through that soft armor like it was butter. The officer would have had to have been wearing hard armor, which is very expensive and heavy. Cops can’t afford to absorb the cost nor carry the weight. Considering their daily rig is 20-30 pounds, adding another 5-10 pounds greatly impacts their ability to perform.

Next, most cops are going into a situation like this with the weapon they carry daily. They can only possess weapons they are certified to carry, so one weapon is it, and usually a side arm in 9mm or 40 caliber. Some elect to carry a .45, but the do so knowing they are limiting themselves in the number of rounds they carry. The double stack has its advantages in shootouts. If they are certified on another weapon platform they would have it secured in their cruiser and have to go back for it. When responding, especially a first responder, you rarely have time to grab your alternative weapon. So it is likely the officer had anything on him but his side arm, and he recognized he was under armed and not prepared for what lay ahead.

When I hear about situations where the expectation is for an office to walk into a situation against an assault rifle I pity the guy in the polyester fighting suit. He’s been assigned a suicide mission, and I don’t think that is fair. That is why departments have SWAT teams. They are prepared and armed for such events. The beat cop is not, and responding detectives even less so. I sympathize with this guy. He had a decision to make, and he made the one the vast majority of people would make.

As I said, I don't expect him to do something that would be considered suicide, although we expected guys drafted into the army to do no less in most wars, but I do expect him to investigate, not hide, he has chosen a job where he is expected to take risk, that's what he signed up for and is paid for, I expect him to move towards the trouble and call in back up, not hide a floor down

[Strange Brew]

He was fired. Not charged with a crime. That seems appropriate given what happened and time for him to get a job that better fits what he is able to do. I don’t really get how this can be argued honestly.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

I think the most interesting "conspiracy" is the second shooter. There are some very credible reports of consecutive and subsequent shootings along the strip as well as first hand police reports of a second suspect. Those were all replaced by the lone gunman theory almost immediately afterwards. The report of a guy arrested in Tennessee 23 hours after the shooting with the exact same arsenal in his car is weird too...


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tenness...ns-ammunition/


So a guy has the exact same stuff Paddock had and is arrested about 20 hours drive from Vegas but the very first report says there is no connection. I just wonder what happened with that.

We're talking the US, there are millions of dudes there with pretty much the same guns the shooter had, a half dozen AR 15's and thousands of rounds of ammo

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Strange Brew

He was fired. Not charged with a crime. That seems appropriate given what happened and time for him to get a job that better fits what he is able to do. I don’t really get how this can be argued honestly.

I don't see anyone arguing his termination. This officer should be working at Mayberry PD, not Las Vegas PD. Sadly, this shortcoming likely wouldn't even have been discovered in his psych profile and evaluations. Not many departments are going to test their people for such extreme scenarios. As I said earlier in this thread, LVPD suffered a number of breakdowns during this event, but based on the severity of situation it is completely understandable. No one games for a situation like this. This was extreme to the extreme.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

We're talking the US, there are millions of dudes there with pretty much the same guns the shooter had, a half dozen AR 15's and thousands of rounds of ammo

I know preppers who carry a very similar configuration in their vehicle at all times. The only thing that was odd was the two side arms, but that can be explained by wanting to have a wheel gun to back up the semi-auto. The AR-15 (.223) and the AR-10 (.308) is a pretty good setup as it provides for a layered defense out to 1,000 yards in the hands of a skilled operator. 900 rounds also isn't strange. A common configuration I've seen is a setup with one magazine in the rifle and then a vest with a double stack of three additional mags (six mags) for a total of 210 rounds. With an AR-15 and an AR-10 (175 rounds in seven mags) that isn't extreme. An additional cache of a backup is also common, so that would equate 790 rounds just for the rifles. So another 130 rounds for the two hand guns doesn't seem extreme. Seems reasonable if he's a hardcore prepper. Of course the conversion to automatic for both rifles is a little scary, and highly illegal, but I know some people who will roll those dice as well. The prepper community is a little borderline at times and they are counting on the breakdown of society when the law doesn't matter any more. So I believe this can be explained without connection to the Vegas shooter.

[OMG!WTF!]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

We're talking the US, there are millions of dudes there with pretty much the same guns the shooter had, a half dozen AR 15's and thousands of rounds of ammo

Mmmmm, not really. Bumpstock AR's with the serial numbers filed off and the same large amount and brand of ammo 23 hours removed from the shooting about 23 hours away by car. I think it's unusual.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by OMG!WTF!

Mmmmm, not really. Bumpstock AR's with the serial numbers filed off and the same large amount and brand of ammo 23 hours removed from the shooting about 23 hours away by car. I think it's unusual.

It's not. Bump stocks were very easy to get prior to this event. Cheap too. Buying ammunition is easy. You can buy from a number of web sites at the same time and have thousands of rounds arrive at your door the same week, and no one is paying attention. Buying 5-10,000 rounds at a time does not raise flags. Altering your weapon (filing the serial number off) requires inspection for this to be discovered. No one inspects weapons after purchase. It never happens unless you are using a restricted NFA product.

What do you consider normal? That is a good question to ask. Considering I bought a short barrel AR-15 pistol (an AR-15 rifle with a 10" barrel and no stock) in less than five minutes, including the background, that should tell you all you need to know about what is and is not unusual. The only item that has taken any time during purchase is my suppressor (silencer). That is a NFA restricted item if you elect to go through legal means to acquire one. These devices are also easily manufactured but highly illegal to possess. Mind you, if you're going to use it illegally, I doubt you really care that you don't have the tax stamp.

There just isn't that much that is unusual anymore.

[afc wimbledon]

Wot he said ^