The questions aren’t as clever as they are meant to sound.
#1. Listen to the audio. Most of the time he wasn’t shooting, so we don’t expect piles of brass from ten minutes of sustained fire. The brass in the photos looks about right.
#2. In full-auto fire, the brass won’t get as hot from the weapon as it would in semi-auto. The magazine doesn’t get hot, and the brass is only in the chamber for a tenth of a second. It will be hot enough to give you a mild first degree burn, but not hot enough to scorch carpet.
#3. The 72 minutes makes sense when you go through the decisions in that hallway. The shooter had stopped firing. They did not have armor that would stop rifle bullets. There could have been explosives inside that room. There were innocents in adjacent rooms. Waiting was prudent in the absence of an urgent need.
#4. Duplicate guns are not unusual. I don’t find having two identical ARs suspicious.
#5. The word “sniper” is being misused. He was hosing down an area target, which is what full-auto fire is for. As for the effectiveness of .223 at a distance, I would not want to be hit with even 25% of the muzzle energy at 400 yards. In fact, 400 to 600 yard is mid-range shooting, and the .223 is considered ideal for this range. [Google “.223 effective range” and you will get exactly that answer.]
Particularly with an area target where the murderer wanted to hit a crowd rather than an individual, questions of bullet drop become irrelevant. Particularly with time to plan and sight his rifles in shooting at his known and planned range from a bluff in the Nevada desert, questions on bullet drop become irrelevant.
None of this was hard. None of this required outside training or unusual skill. Breaking an AR into its upper and lower to fit them into a suitcase and bring them into a hotel is so completely routine that my wife, who has never shot an AR, could do it in one minute after watching a YouTube video. Setting up a webcam is not hard; nontechnical college students and welfare parents do it.
The conspiracy theories are silly. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a horrific crime is as easy as it looks.
My role in that bit of ‘truther’-style op-ed was to put up the whole text.
My only question about the event itself is, where was the monitor for the hallway cam? Seems like he had an awful lot to do. And if he’s got the camera in the hall, why? That suggests he had a plan to get out. If it were just a suicide mission, he wouldn’t need to know what was going on in the hallway. But OTOH, if it were not a suicide mission, he’d have caused the chaos, shot a bunch of people, then bailed out before anyone reached the room. Unfortunately, he’d rented the room, so it would then become a manhunt.
Best guess is, he had not thought things through, was under the influence of prescription and/or street dope, and wasn’t too bright in the first place.
The alternative is, he never fired a shot, and two others were present; or at least one other shooter was present, who kept an eye on the camera monitor, and perhaps was trying to shoot the tanks, then capped the patsy.
Thank you. Couldn't have said it better.