Court unseals Las Vegas shooter emails talking about bump stocks and AR-style rifles


In response to a lawsuit from media outlets, a judge on Friday unsealed hundreds of pages of documents connected to the investigation of the mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people and wounded about 500 more in October. The search warrant affidavits date from the immediate aftermath of the attack by gunman Stephen Paddock and may not provide a current account of investigators' thinking.
Emails included in the disclosure see Paddock talking about bump stocks, a modification device he used to allow semiautomatic rifles to fire more quickly. "Try an ar before u buy. We have huge selection. Located in the las vegas area," says another message sent to an account believed to belong to Paddock.
The documents also show Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, was deemed a person of interest despite her claim to have no knowledge of his plot. Danley reportedly told law enforcement they might find her fingerprints on ammunition "because she occasionally participated in loading magazines" for Paddock in the home they shared.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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