Stephen Paddock, architect of last week’s mass shooting in Nevada, had 43 guns stocked between his hotel suite and two homes, Las Vegas police said Tuesday evening at a news conference. The weapons were bought in Nevada, California, Utah and Texas, officials said.
Fifty-nine people were slain and at least 527 injured when Paddock opened fire in Las Vegas Sunday night. The shooting was the deadliest in US history.
Former Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary John Cohen said videos indicated it sounded "like the weapons were fully automatic," meaning that all the bullets in the gun can potentially be fired by only pressing the trigger once.
"That would be difficult to do with anything other than an automatic weapon," Cohen told ABC, adding, "it’s not legal to purchase a fully automatic weapon, not it’s not that difficult to convert legal semi-automatic weapons so that they are fully automatic," he noted.
According to a September 2016 article published in Slate, a Harvard-Northeastern University survey found that roughly 50 percent of the estimated 265 million guns in the US are owned by just 7.7 million "super owners" representing 3.3 percent of the US adult population. These super owners have an average of 17 weapons apiece.
