Report: Vegas shooter bought 55 guns in 1 year

David DeMille | The (St. George, Utah) Spectrum

Show Caption Hide Caption Vegas Police: Paddock Researched His Attack Investigators have still not discovered what motivated Stephen Paddock to embark on the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, but determined that he researched SWAT tactics ahead of the massacre and investigated other possible targets. (Jan. 19)

The gunman in the Las Vegas shooting that killed 58 people and wounded 489 others last October had purchased at least 55 guns in the prior 12 months, according to a report released Friday out of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.

Stephen Paddock, the 64-year-old who police believe acted alone in the shooting, had purchased 29 firearms between 1982 and 2016, according to the report, but then bought nearly twice that many between October 2016 and September 2017, according to the report. Most were rifles in various calibers, along with more than 100 firearm related items purchased through a variety of retailers.

Federal law requires gun stores to report multiple handgun purchases to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, but not multiple rifle purchases.

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Among the weapons mentioned in the report were 23 found inside the hotel room from which Paddock fired into the crowd, including 13 AR-15 rifles equipped with "bump stocks," a controversial device that allows shooters to fire bullets from semi-automatic rifles at a faster rate.

Fully-automatic weapons, which can fire continuously on a single pull of the trigger, are tightly regulated by the federal government and illegal to purchase in a number of states. But members of the public can easily buy bump stocks and achieve a similar rate of fire, without government oversight.

Police also reported finding ammunition and magazines for both AR-15 and AR-10 style rifles inside the hotel room, including hollow point and polymer-tipped hollow point ammunition.

Investigators are still working to determine a motive in the shooting, police said Friday, although reports suggest Paddock had planned the attack meticulously, scouting various hotel rooms, researching weapons and stockpiling guns and ammunition ahead of the attack.

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On the night of Oct. 1, Paddock fired more than 1,100 bullets from a hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay into a crowd of 22,000 people gathered for the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. About 200 shots were also fired through his hotel room door into a hallway where an unarmed security guard was wounded in the leg. Several bullets were fired at aviation fuel storage tanks at the nearby McCarran International Airport.

Authorities reported finding about 4,000 unused bullets in Paddock's two-room hotel suite.