Active Shooter

On October 1, 2017, a mass shooting occurred when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Nevada from his 32nd-floor suites in the Mandalay Bay hotel. He fired more than 1,000 rounds, killing 58 people on site and wounding at least 413 others. The ensuing panic brought the total number of injured to about 867. About an hour later, Paddock was found dead in his room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Two women wounded by the gunfire died in 2019 and 2020 and were included in the official fatality count of 60, excluding the shooter. The motive for the shooting is not officially determined. The incident is the deadliest mass shooting in American history. It focused attention on firearms laws in the U.S., particularly with regard to bump stocks, which Paddock used to fire shots in rapid succession, at a rate similar to that of automatic firearms. Bump stocks were banned by the U.S. Justice Department in December 2018, but the ban was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2024.