SWAT Team or SLOTH Team: Las Vegas Response Time
This headline grabbed my attention:It was published here.
We read the following:
It wasn’t the hundreds of muzzle flashes that exploded from the shooter’s automatic rifles that gave away his position.Nor was it the panicked 911 calls from people reporting the rhythmic thundering of gunfire.
It was the smoke.
As the gunman, identified as Stephen Paddock, set off round after round, gun smoke filled his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, said Randy Sutton, a retired lieutenant with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, citing police sources.
The SWAT team used the alarm triggered by the smoke to zero in on Paddock’s position in about 20 minutes — not nearly enough time for a floor-by-floor search of the hotel, which has 3,309 rooms and a 135,000-square-foot casino.
After they located his room, the SWAT team members used explosives to get inside, the sheriff’s office said. Paddock, 64, killed himself before the officers entered, according to Las Vegas Sheriff Joe Lombardo.
It was too late.
Too late indeed. Nowhere does this article tell us how long this took.
Let me get this straight. A guy is firing automatic weapons at a crowd. The windows he is firing from are smashed -- all those bullets, don't you know. They are the only windows that are smashed in the hotel.
The smoke was coming out of one window. That was because it was smashed. That was a tip off, you see. "We saw all that smoke." Yes, coming from where the shots were being fired.
It took 20 minutes for the cops to figure this out.
As comedian George Gobel used to say back in 1954: "Suuuuure it did."
Most of the media are politely silent about the response time.
CNN was precise about when the shooting started: at 10:08 PM. "The gunshots lasted for 10 to 15 minutes. It didn't stop," said witness Rachel de Kerf.
The article never mentioned anything about when the SWAT team broke in.
Here is a headline on Drudge.
I clicked the link. I got this article. There is nothing about 72 minutes. There is not a word on how the SWAT team got to the room, or how long it took. We read this: "But when a SWAT team stormed the room where Paddock had been staying since September 28, they found he had killed himself." When was this, exactly? Silence.
The articles all go into detail about the number of weapons that were in the room. They want the public to remember this. But as to how long it took for the cops to spot a broken window and machine gun fire, it is all a mystery.
It is not a mystery at all.
NBC did report the elapsed time in a short report. It was 72 minutes. We read: "Police initially began searching for the shooter on the 29th floor, working their way up to the 32nd floor where authorities say they immediately realized they were in the right place." Immediately is as immediately does.
What we have here is media manipulation. They do not want readers to ask: "What took the cops so long?"
They do not want readers to think this: "I had better be armed if this happens to me. I had better be prepared to run for cover. I may not have 72 minutes."
The media prefer that we think this: "We need federal gun control laws."
We have gun control laws for machine guns. We have had them since the 1930's.
Britain's Daily Mail got it right. Newsweek also got it right. Most did not.