it is official statements. Sheriff Lombardi. of course the next day they changed it to 23 firearms in the hotel.
add: "in excess of 10 suitcase" doesn't mean suitcases filled with bullets. THe question was how he got the weapons into the room.
https://www.youtube.com/user/LasVegasPolice/videos
On another site I saw a rundown of Nevada's firearms laws. I'm not familiar with every state, but theirs seemed far more permissive than any I was. Anyway, I'm guessing a hotel that can't really do anything about it until almost after shooting has started doesn't bother to check.
Also, being Vegas, having lots of bags isn't that unusual - there's always conventions in town (I know somebody who took five suitcases just for two days at the Star Trek Las Vegas convention a couple months ago), lots of long term visitors, especially wealthy retirees like this guy, and the problem gamblers who bring personal things to hock for emergency cash, the Pawn Stars crowd who think they'll hit it rich at one of the upscale pawn shops with all their "antiques" (also, coincidentally, often retirees). Having ten suitcases is probably unusual in the, "Huh, wonder which one he's going to," sense than the, "Damn, I bet he's up to something," sense.
Good point well made. Balancing that, though, not all bullets will have hit someone. Counting the gunshot sounds on the recordings would presumably tell.
Either way, though, even a single automatic weapon in his hands in that situation would class to me as a terrifying amount of firepower, but that may be coloured by me being British. It seems insane to make that sort of weapon so widely available.
They aren't, even in the reddest of the red states. They're not completely unavailable, but the special credentials you need to buy one legally are hard to come by and basically constitute an invitation for a variety of agencies to drop by and look at your stuff without warning.
Now, the guns he actually had were all widely available in their base, civilian model forms. Those forms are basically just like any other rifle, but dressed up in a cooler military looking package. They're semiautomatic, have reasonably sized magazines, nothing fancy like compensators or suppressors. Plenty of mass shootings have been accomplished with them, but nothing on this kind of scale. Had those weapons still been in the form he probably bought them in, you could probably drop a digit off of the casualty numbers.
However, a little loophole in US gun laws: Components and mod kits are almost 100% unregulated. The stuff you need isn't nearly as available as the basic guns themselves, but it's out there. Meaning once you have that impressive looking rifle that's only slightly more dangerous as a cheap hunting rifle, all it takes is a few trips to gun shows and a few YouTube how-tos and you can convert it into something totally else, the likes of which you would never, ever be able to actually purchase legally (hell, in some cases even illegally).