Stephen Paddock Bought 33 Guns in 12 Months. That Should Be Illegal.
There will be a fierce debate about where to draw the line, but no reasonable person can say the Vegas shooter wasn’t well past it. Paddock had effectively assembled a small ordnance depot in his luxury hotel suite. He had at least 23 firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. A majority of those guns were military-style assault weapons; some were mounted on shooting platforms with scopes and tripods and outfitted with devices that made them fully automatic. Investigators later found 19 more guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition at his home.3
ADVERTISING
The destructive capacity of this arsenal is staggering, but it is not out of line with the firepower unleashed by other mass shooters. Omar Mateen, who was responsible for the 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, had three weapons, including an assault rifle, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He killed 49 people and wounded 68 more. Adam Lanza had only 300 seconds to shoot his assault rifle inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown before the police engaged him, but he got off 154 rounds and killed 26 people. James Holmes shot 82 people inside an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in 90 seconds. When Jared Loughner shot up a meet-and-greet with then-Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson, he fired 33 times in 19 seconds.
More: Stephen Paddock Bought 33 Guns in 12 Months. That Should Be Illegal.