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In high school, I had a trigonometry teacher named Fr. Cylwicki. He would demonstrate parabolas with a water pistol, both to dramatically show what a parabola was, and to wake us up during the 8am slog through such tedium.
Trigonometry is used to calculate ballistics. Arrows, bullets, artillery, and even Kim Jong-Un's rockets follow parabolic arcs.
What that has to do with the Las Vegas massacre and Stephen Paddock should become apparent shortly.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I was a competition shooter and a pretty good one, by most accounts. I won awards and patches and a couple of nice guns, too.
Because of that, I have an intuitive sense of trigonometry. I hated the class, but I understand the physics of it. I know how to calculate where an arrow or bullet will go, based on my elevation, wind speed, muzzle speed and other variables. I also know that one of the hardest shots to make is when the shooter is above the target - even a few feet.
Shooters know that at level, the arrow or bullet will travel in an arc - a parabola - from the muzzle to the target. Depending on distance, air desity, wind speed, etc., the arrow or bullet will fall slower or faster, depending on these factors. Even at 100 feet (30 meters) from the target, arrows and bullets will drop a significant amount, all other conditions being perfect.
Non-shooters generally don't know this. Someone who picks up a gun for the first time with try to aim directly at the bull's eye, and will invariably hit low. They also won't compensate for recoil, muzzle speed and the like, so the arrow or bullet may end up far to the right of left of center, and significantly below.
That's at the same level as the target.
A figure now called Stephen Paddock, who supposedly had no firearm training, was not known for shooting or even having and interest in it, and who certainly would not have sniper training that included elevated positions, would very likely have no idea how to compensate for all the listed factors in order to target even a large crowd.
Most folks will look at those last two words and think, "How hard can it be to hit thousands of people in a small area with a machine gun?"
Answer: incredibly.
The alleged sniper's nest was on the 32nd floor of a hotel that is 0.7 miles (over half a kilometer) from the venue. The window is therefore a minimum of 320 feet (90 meters) above eye level, not counting any floors that aren't part of the numbering convention that gives us 32.
At that distance, the entire venue would have been about the size of a bull's eye on a standard target at 100 feet. Without a very high-powered scope, the sniper would not have been able to see individual souls.
On the night of 1 October 2017, between the hours of 10:05p and 10:15p PDT, according to "official" records. Sundown was around 5:15p, meaning it was 5 hours after dark. The minimum temperature that night was 79F/26C, with a maximum humidity of 20%, air pressure was 999hPa, with no measured rain. Wind speeds were measured at 3.1 miles/second, or 7mph/11kph, out of the South West, with visibility up to 10miles/16km.
Because the window was a minimum of 320 feet/90m up, there would have been a temperature gradient of roughly 5F/10F, meaning the air density would have changed moving downward, from cooler to warmer air.
According to Google Earth, the sniper's nest window faced South East, meaning the wind was from the back, but would likely have had some swirl effect around the edge of the building and into the cavity formed by the two wings. The wind was blowing across the venue from audience right to audience left, with the stage facing the hotel. The sniper's nest direct line of fire would have been to the far audience left of the seating area, meaning the shooter would have had to angle a bit to target the direct center of the venue.
So, a direct shot out the window, all other factors aside, would have hit the back left corner of the venue. A cross wind, even a small one over 0.7 mile, would have hit wide of the venue into the street beyond. There are no reports I have seen that say bullets landed outside the venue.
In clear, midday conditions, this would be a hell of a shot, even just spraying with a machine gun, at night it would be near impossible but for the best sharp-shooters. No witnesses mentions tracer rounds (glow in the dark), so the shooter would have to way to confirm what was being hit. A scope would be almost useless with a machine gun, since the constant jerking back and sweep to the side would make it impossible to look through, not to mention dangerous to one's eye. The shooter would have no way to verify hits without a spotter (second person to verify hits).
Since I can find no reports of exactly what gun was used in Las Vegas, and the sound matches several that I know of, I can guess at what it was like to fire the rifle.
Machine guns are designed for close-range target suppression, not long range accuracy. The muzzles expel gasses to the shooter's left, so that the gun automatically sweeps to the right. The normal way to fire such a gun is to begin on one's left and let the momentum of the gasses carry the muzzle to the right, so that the bullets spread out over an arc. They are not designed for use in full-auto mode when shooting with precision over long distances.
And 0.7 mile, or more than half a kilometer, is a long distance.
Back to our parabolas. Since the shooter was supposedly up 320 feet, we can imagine that being the peak in the arc of a parabola. The shots would fall off rather quickly and if one was aiming at something 0.7 mile away, would hit well short of the target.
Add in a cross-wind at 3.1 miles/second, changing air density, dry conditions (humidity), temperature gradients, low light levels, and very likely a high heart rate and adrenaline causing muscles to quiver, In addition, the window makes for a small operational area, and the sweeping motion of the machine gun would limit the length of time one could hold the trigger (certainly not the 100+ rounds recorded on audio).
Add up all these factors and you basically have an unbelievably difficult situation for even a weekend warrior. Certainly 58 kills and 500+ injuries in 10 minutes, given all these factors and variables, would put this shooter in a rare class indeed. It doesn't sound like anything a millionaire accountant could pull off, even with two weeks' practice in the desert.
More than all the other unbelievable information coming out with the Las Vegas massacre story, this one assumption completely destroys the whole narrative, in my opinion. Either the shooter was not Stephen Paddock, or what we are told about him is completely false.
And even once we've considered the logistics of using a machine gun at 0.7 mile from the target, there's the matter of the bullets.
You see, with standard ammunition, half a mile is pushing it for most loads, and one mile is about the limit for hot loads. Most of the energy behind the bullets would have been spent by the time they reached the target, in this case.
Once one begins picking this story apart, the pieces don't add up.
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