as i am given to understand the facts of the shooting in las vegas, there are two things that are salient in my mind. 1.)the venue where the crowd was watching the concert was about 400 yards from the hotel where the shooter was located, and 2.)there were some 22,000 people in attendance at the concert.

that's pretty far away from where the shooter was shooting. and 22,000 people is a lot of people to be watching and monitoring from 400 yards away. especially when the shooter was occupied with shooting and reloading his gun(s).

rollie's brother phil and i ended up watching a fog enshrouded meadow high in the cascades one after, without hearing a sound, not so much as a rock being dislodged by a careless step, or a cough, only to have the fog lift and present us with the sight of about 80 head of elk bedded down very comfortably, in the matter of several minutes when a breeze came up. we glassed the heard from about 200 yards away, and not a set of antlers in the entire group: just cows and calves. all of a sudden, for no reason we could discern, another group of elk came charging around the back side of this little knoll in full gallop, right to and through the elk we had been watching. needless to say, they all spring up, and joined in the skedaddled, and vanished up a draw right into the timber.

we were pretty busy for a few moments trying to find antlers in the melee, and utterly failed to see anything of interest in the group, now numbering about 150 elk. i am telling you, it was just about impossible to pick out an individual elk to look at.

i am here to say that in a crowd of 22,000 people 400 yards distance it is awfully hard to pick out individuals, let alone specific targets, or to see what the crowd is tending to do: is a group making a dash for a fence, another group on the other side of the crowd heading towards an exit, is a person in charge of security trying to marshal a portion of the crowd to follow his lead towards an exit tunnel? and, to try and watch all of this with a view to keeping everybody all gathered and grouped together so they can be fired upon is awfully tough.

i think in order to command the crowd as he must have done, to have kept all those people in front of his rifles so that he could shoot them, demanded an awareness of what they were doing that he could not have exercised by himself.

he had to have had help watching them. he had to have had spotters to watch the crowd, and to direct his fire to a certain portion of the crowd to keep them down, and in front of them. i watched a short film tonight of some people getting up, and edging away from where they were exposed, only to come under fire again, causing them to hit the ground and huddle in fetal positions, hoping for the best. it was the reaction you would expect of soldiers coming under artillery fire in the open, with no place to hide. if you ever watched a herd of sheep being driven by a good sheep dog, you will see the one on the outside trying to get to the safety of the inside of the flock, at the expense of crowding those out already in the center of the flock. the dog watches this, and exploits it.

i am told by the talking heads that the shooting went on for some time, without the crowd rushing for cover. or, trying to escape the venue.

i don't know how the shooter could have done this without spotters helping him keep everyone in place. to my mind, this was absolutely necessary for him.

and, spotters were necessary for another reason. if he were shooting a lot of automatic fire, whether from ar-15's w/ "bump fire" stocks are speculated by some, or from an automatic rifle, (either way), then shooting the rifle and observing what effect his fire was having on the crowd would also have been very difficult. again, he needed spotters to see where, and whom, his shoots were hitting. he could not have done this at all, very well, by himself: go back and watch the youtube videos of the ar's and ak's being fired to breaking, and you will see how hard it is to control a rifle in auto fire. after the first several shots there is no aiming, there is only waving the gun around a bit.

for these reasons i think it absolutely necessary that the shooter had spotters.

john jay @ 10.02.2017