He brought all those guns to the hotel room he shot from. I imagine it was so he could shoot as many rounds at the crowd with out the need to reload.
Can someone who’s more into gun stuff tell me why people are always talking about the amount of guns someone has?
What makes 23 different guns better than one good one? I can see the point of having like two, in case the first jams, but based on my (limited) experience I would much rather have a single HK416 than a dozen of anything else.
Also with fewer guns you need fewer ammo types (unless you for some reason have 23 guns with the same ammo, which to me makes even less sense).
phoneymouse@lemmy.world 7 months ago
skyspydude1@lemmy.world 7 months ago
But that really makes no sense. Unless you have them all set up in a row pointed exactly where you want, you’re probably not even saving half a second vs reloading. The old “switching is faster than reloading” thing doesn’t apply nearly as much when you’re at a static position and can have all your mags out in the open at arm’s reach.
24_at_the_withers@lemmy.world 7 months ago
He was operating a significant number of his weapons on bump stocks. Bump stocks allow firing at a much higher rate than the weapons were designed for. Operating at a higher rate causes the weapons to overheat. Overheating causes misfires and jams (and inaccuracy and can permanently damage weapons, but I doubt he was particularly concerned about those things). He did have them all set up in a row and many on mounts. He broke out the overlooking windows of his hotel room before he started shooting. It seems he was shooting with one until it jammed and then moving on to the next rather than trying to clear misfires.
CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
If that is the case, that he was using a gun until it jammed, it makes more sense to me. At the same time, how often does an ordinary gun jam? I’ve used an HK416 and an MG3 during a year of army service (conscription training) and to my memory you could fire many hundred rounds (thousands in the case of the MG3) without a single jam, and a misfire takes about a second (max) to clear.
Also, I’ve seen people talking about the number of guns someone has also in other settings, as a kind of metric that people who are into guns seem to care about, I guess I’m more wondering about the phenomenon in general than just this specific case.
OpenStars@startrek.website 7 months ago
Except they can jam up - otherwise as you said it would be better to reload one than to switch?
skyspydude1@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Because it grabs attention and sounds scary, which really what media outlets care about. My other favorite is when they talk about someone having being caught with “hundreds of rounds of ammunition”, which clearly indicates that’s how many people they were planning on murdering, and isn’t just a pretty typical range day, or in the case of reallly common stuff like 9mm, 22LR, or even 223, can literally be a single box of ammo.
PatFussy@lemm.ee 7 months ago
The guy just had a lot of guns. He had 23 with him and he had like another 20 at home.
But I would also imagine that him having them all loaded put into a row in his suite is faster than reloading.
CapeWearingAeroplane@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
A lot of people this thing about reloading, but honestly, my reload time after a couple weeks of basic training was under the five seconds you need to pass, and after a couple months of service plenty of people were closer to three seconds. I have a hard time imagining that swapping weapons is quicker. I guess the reloading thing might be the reason to have many guns, but it strikes me as a strange one.
And really, I’m not only talking about this specific case, I get the feeling that people that are into guns will often focus on the number of guns someone has, also outside this case, which seems a bit of a strange metric to be talking about in general.
aidan@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Can be one of several things, or usually a combination:
A lot of it is just rhetoric
CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world 7 months ago
But it also does raise the question: why did the shooter think he needed a lot of guns?
aidan@lemmy.world 7 months ago
That is true, maybe he thought he was going to have a multiday standoff, but I don’t know why he’d need so many guns for that.