“There weren’t as many AK-47s around in 1966 as there are now, and only a few AR-15s that could be converted, because it was a relatively new weapon,” said Bill Buford, the retired former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Arkansas. He hit ten times as many people as Whitman in a matter of minutes, killing more than five times as many Now the instructions for converting a weapon are freely available on the internet, along with kits costing just a few hundred dollars that either help with the modifications or essentially act as crude conversion mechanisms in and of themselves. In 1966, there were relatively few assault weapons on the market that were convertible to full automatic, and far less awareness of how to do so. Consequently, he hit ten times as many people as Whitman in a matter of minutes, killing more than five times as many. In the interim, the damage Whitman was able to inflict was limited in part because civilians and police officers on the ground were returning fire.īy contract, Paddock appears to have had the capability to fire his weapons on full automatic, either because he somehow obtained a military-grade machine gun or because he managed to convert a high-capacity semi-automatic to full automatic. It took the police, who at the time had no frame of reference for a mass shooting and were thinking largely on their feet, more than 90 minutes to sneak into the clock tower via an underground sewer system to corner and kill Whitman. Whitman thought and acted essentially like a sniper, mostly squeezing off individual rounds from his bolt-action rifle to hit specific people. What made his attack starkly different from that of the Vegas gunman, identified by police as Stephen Paddock, was the weaponry used and the damage he was able to inflict as a result. Whitman operated in broad daylight and moved around the observation deck to spray fire in all directions. Charles Whitman, armed with a sawn-off shotgun, three rifles, three pistols and more than 700 rounds of ammunition, used the marksmanship skills he’d picked up in the military to hit more than 40 people, 11 of them fatally.
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