You’re wrong. Mr. Mathematics.
Having fired AR-15 and AR-10 platforms, I can assure you that there is muzzle walk on the weapons in single shot and in rapid fire situations. If you are targeting at 500-600 yards range even a millimeter of walk on the muzzle drastically effects the impact location. You’re not talking about a 1mm rise at the muzzle being a 1mm rise at the target, because its not a straight shot. Even with high velocity rounds such as the 5.56mm nato round, its still a ballistic shot. This is well documented and proven science. At 500 yards, the 5.56 (M193) drops roughly 60 inches by the time it reaches its target. Altering the muzzle by 1mm, since its not a flat alteration, but an arced alteration, can make the impact distance between rounds many feet apart. That is to say, three rounds on one target that is moving at that range is not possible except under the most controlled circumstances. Rapid fire is nowhere near the controlled circumstance required, so this is pretty much an impossible feat.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minute_and_second_of_arc#Firearms
My guess is that these stories are exaggerations made by people under extreme duress\stress. This is a lot more likely.
I do agree that the 22,000 people in attendance made it difficult to miss.
You are failing to take into account that he was shooting “downhill”. He was 32 floors above ground, that’s roughly 350ft, while his targets were 400-500yards out at ground level. Bullet trajectory is more flat when shooting at an angle.
You seem and the author seem to maintain it is not plausible to get three rounds in a row in a shot grouping on a single target at 500 yards. I completely agree with this.
Let us say we put a blind fold on and shoot randomly at a piece of paper 20 feet away while shaking the gun, and we shoot many dozens of bullets this way.
If we see a group of holes in the paper closer together than some others, we should not assume they were from a targeted group of consecutive rounds--because obviously we were shooting too poorly for that. But neither should we be surprised it happened. The common sense guess is that some of the rounds out of all ones we shot happened to end up closer than other rounds. Of course the more rounds we fired in the same general direction, the closer these groups are likely to be by luck. The shooter fired a lot of rounds. He may have concentrated on some areas with more bursts than others.
Now the number of hits per target could be reasonably modeled by a Poisson distribution. It is not at all unusual or suspicious with such distributions to have 3 occurrences of one event and 0 of another when the events had equal chances.
Hey, now, this guy was not shooting a folks 600 yds away. Google earth and its scale shows not more than 300 yds to the center of the plaza of the concert venue, the vertical height does not add much, as the room was approx. 320-350 feet above the target area, my trig shows a cosine angle of about 12 degrees, so 340 yards on the slant. This was not to do at all. Just took a big distraction ( loud concert, late evening drinks flowing freely etc) then havoc and confusion to make the target area remain fairly static for a few more minutes.
12 slide-fire equipped rifles, optic or dot, bipods and 30 to 60 round mag.... Lots of fires in a few minutes, then interrupted by the Sec Grd, caps himself (maybe, maybe not?) shortly thereafter.
Expert rifleman? not likely, good at planning this awful event? definitely. Alone or had help? You tell me. But I do subscribe to the monthly “Occam’s Razor” magazine....
I can hit a beer keg at around 300 yards with a 45 auto pistol.
Might take me a few tries.
Probably couldn’t do it on demand, but I have done it before.
;)