Stephen Paddock, the man whose Las Vegas shooting rampage killed 59 people and left more than 500 injured, bought 33 guns in the past 12 months, a federal official said Wednesday.
Jill Snyder, special agent in charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, told CBS This Morning that most of the guns Paddock bought since October 2016 were rifles.
Snyder said that federal law requires ATF notification of multiple handgun purchases, but not multiple rifle purchases.
On Tuesday, Snyder announced Paddock had nearly 50 guns — a combination of rifles, shotguns and pistols — in three locations. Snyder also said Paddock had devices attached to 12 semiautomatic rifles that allowed them to mimic fully automatic gunfire.
The gun attachment is a little-known device called a “bump stock” that is not widely sold. The stocks have been around for less than a decade, and Snyder said officials previously determined they were legal.
Paddock killed himself after the massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
He also used surveillance cameras to monitor police approaches to his room at the Mandalay Bay high-rise — including a camera he positioned in the peephole of the door.
“I anticipate he was looking for anybody coming to take him into custody,” Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said.
During the Sunday night rampage, a hotel security guard who approached the room was shot through the door and wounded in the leg.
“The fact that he had the type of weaponry and amount of weaponry in that room, it was preplanned extensively,” Lombardo said, “and I’m pretty sure he evaluated everything that he did and his actions, which is troublesome.”
While Paddock’s motive remains unclear, authorities were putting together a more complete picture of his work history and past. Paddock worked as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, an IRS agent and in an auditing department over a 10-year period.
A spokeswoman for the Office of Personnel Management told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Stephen Paddock’s employment included about two years as a mail carrier from 1976 to 1978.
After that, he worked as an agent for the Internal Revenue Service for six years until 1984. And then he worked a defense auditing job for about 18 months.
He graduated from college in 1977 from Cal State Northridge and also worked for a defense contractor in the late 1980s.
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