** Late Breaking ** The shooter in Vegas shot the security guard before he shot his other victims.

[jberryhill]

59. "It was reported he was outside the door"

Yes, he was outside the door. I agree with that. What you read into that report is that he was adjacent the door.

"It was reported he shot THROUGH the door"

Yes, it was also reported that it was some 200 rounds. The door does not look like it has 200 holes in it.

When you say things like "it was reported" you have to ask yourself how would that fact be known. It's not as if a reporter was sitting there watching it, so the "report" depends on second hand accounts, which often get garbled. If the door looks like it has a few dozen holes in it, and the hallway looks like 200 shots were fired, then what do you suppose happened there?

"It was reported to be a bullet that required surgery."

Again, the magic of "it was reported" does not make it a fact. From whom was the report made?

Initial reports are often wrong, because of the way that people unconsciously weave inferences into the things they say without realizing there was a range of other possibilities. That kind of "speculation", as opposed to making conclusory statements, actually helps to avoid reaching incorrect conclusions.

On the morning of 9/11 "it was reported" that a bomb had gone off at the State Department. It simply didn't happen. That's not because people are making stuff up, it is because we are constantly, without realizing it, interpreting cognitive inputs. Could someone in a building with a view toward the west have seen rising smoke from the Pentagon in the direction of the State Department, and incorrectly concluded that the smoke was rising from the State Department? Yeah. Because judging the distance of things in the sky is something that humans are really bad at doing.

You are seeing a "contradiction" between it having been reported he fired 200 shots into the hall, and that he had shot through the door which does not seem to have 200 holes in the portion we can see. It is not "speculation" to suggest that (a) nobody was watching him fire those shots, and (b) the statements "he shot through the door" and "there were 200 shots" can both be correct, even if he did not fire ALL 200 shots through the door as opposed to firing some shots through the door and some shots through the doorway.

But to go from "the guard was shot first" to "therefore the police had to know his location" requires a lot of assumptions, when there is a range of reasons why the guard's location and condition may simply not have been known after he was shot. That's all.

My initial question was simply "How does him being shot first imply that the police knew his location?" as suggested in the OP.