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Las Vegas Shooter Stockpiled Dozens of Firearms & 12 Devices to Turn Rifles into Machine Guns

HeadlineOct 05, 2017

President Trump traveled to Las Vegas and met with victims of Sunday night’s mass shooting, in which Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old white man, killed 59 people, including himself, and injured nearly 500 people. More than 120 people are still hospitalized. On Wednesday, the FBI questioned his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, who returned from her trip to visit family in the Philippines to meet with FBI agents. She said she had no prior knowledge of Paddock’s plans to open fire from the 32nd floor of his Mandalay Bay casino hotel room onto more than 20,000 concert-goers below.

More details also emerged Wednesday about how Paddock had been stockpiling firearms, including buying 33 weapons in the past year alone, from Nevada, Utah, California and Texas. Authorities also say Paddock bought at least 12 devices known as “bump stocks,” that allow semi-automatic rifles to act like machine guns, capable of firing hundreds of rounds a minute. Some Republican lawmakers said Wednesday they’d be open to legislation to ban the sale of bump stocks. In Nevada, even some gun range owners are speaking out against the lax gun laws that allow people to purchase bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. This is gun range owner Genghis Cohen.

Genghis Cohen: “There’s absolutely no reason for an average citizen who wants to have a gun to have a 100-round magazine, OK. There is no reason for them to be able to buy accessories for their gun which makes the gun almost fully automatic. There’s just no reason for it.”

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