by Chris
There are lots of unexplained oddities, enough for me to know that the officials are hiding something. Probably something embarrassing to them, of course, because that’s far and away the #1 reason for anything to be declared “sensitive” or classified. It’s simply embarrassing.
Like the FBI knew all about the plot in advance and somehow didn’t prevent it, or even were the suppliers of the weapons in some other botched attempt at a sting or while tracking an unrelated plot of some sort.
At any rate, one oddity that simply didn’t make any sense to me was this one:
An eyewitness to the deadly mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival on Sunday night described staying with a friend who had been shot three times as bullets continued to fly into the crowd.
“It was very chaotic, but my buddy was shot so there was no way I’m gonna leave him,” Mike Cronk told Savannah Guthrie and Matt Lauer in a phone interview on TODAY Monday.
Cronk’s friend, who he did not identify, was in surgery on Monday morning after being shot three times in the upper chest area.
Hmmm…the official story is that a somewhat aged man with medium to lesser gun skills (not Delta OP, or its equivalent) using bump stocks from 350 yards away on a downward trajectory shooting out of a busted out window (i.e. not a perfect flat, stabilized platform), was the only shooter.
Now as a recent graduate of the Front Sight experience I can tell you that at 15 yards hitting a chest cavity reliably three times takes some careful aim. I took advantage of their Uzi shoot and had trouble keeping a light caliber (9mm) weapon trained on a chest cavity from 5 yards! Back that up to 50 yards and no freaking way. At 100 yards I’d be lucky to land any at all. But at 350 yards? When the chest outline could not even be seen behind the narrow front sight? Puh-leeeze! No way.
Now that’s with a pistol and an Uzi, of course, and a rifle is a different beast, capable of shooting a lot more accurately.
But as the owner of a semi-auto rifle I can tell you they kick. Pull the trigger and you’ve got to settle that thing back on the target (in the calibers used in Las Vegas). At even 50 yards, you’ve got to settle that thing back down to get it on target. By 100 yards, hitting a chest sized target requires real concentration. At 150 yards my tongue is coming out the side of my mouth and my breathing is controlled to even be sure of hitting the target in single shot mode. At 200 this takes serious skill and concentration. At 250 it’s even more difficult. 300 is serious shooting. But 350? That’s some hard stuff right there. Prone pose, good scope, and all of that.
So the idea to me that someone of Paddock’s age and skill shooting from 350 yards(!!) with a bump stock (which is shooting at a pretty fast rate) hitting someone three times in the upper chest…well, it just strains my sense of probabilities past their easy acceptance point.
So we have to explore other possibilities such as:
(1) The victim was not hit three times. This is an error of reporting.
(2) Someone other than Paddock was shooting probably with a stabilized platform
(3) Someone was shooting from much closer than 350 yards.
All of those possibilities are much more likely that hitting a single upper chest area 3x from 350 yards, highly elevated, and using a bump stock.
I would roughly imagine that from that distance and height, even a highly trained bump stock operator would be lucky to hit a van 3x, even if they were aiming for it specifically.
I mean, it’s possible that this one person being hit 3x was just a fluke, the sort that can happen very rarely, right?
But it turns out it happened more frequently than that:
Rachel Sheppard, who was shot three times at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, remembers everything up until she was put under for surgery. She was attending the concert with a group of friends from her home town of Tehachapi, California, where she works as a bartender and wedding coördinator.
The bullets hit her chest, just under her left breast, and her abdomen, injuring her liver and her aorta, the largest blood vessel in the body. “I flew like three feet,” she recalled recently, her voice ragged. “I mean, I just flew like a fish, just straight back.” It took a long time to reach the paramedic tent. “People kept picking me up and dropping me, and picking me up and dropping me, because we kept hearing the shots,” she said.
(Source)
While unclear from the writing, it sounds like this woman was also hit by a burst, not three times, randomly, over some stretch of time. The people around her were helping carry and attend the wounded, not also being hit by stray bullets flying about.
Again, my law of probabilities, and shooting experience, has to really take a back seat to square up these accounts with the official story.
I simply don’t know what happened, but much like bldg 7 going into free fall, these “three shots to the chest” stories just don’t make a lick of sense if you understand shooting at all. If they do, I really would like to have them explained.
If anyone doubts this, join us next year at Front Sight and we’ll be sure to go to a 350 yard range and we can demonstrate this easily enough.