New Frontier Armory, near the Buffalo Wild Wings on Centennial Parkway,
in North Las Vegas, is on the shortlist of places to go if you want to
purchase an actual machine gun within twenty minutes of the Strip.
“We’ve sold quite a few over the years, with average prices of fifteen
thousand dollars,” David Famiglietti, the store’s owner and operator,
told me on Monday. Famiglietti, who is in his mid-thirties, is also the
vice-president of the Nevada Firearms
Coalition, the state affiliate of the National
Rifle Association. He was described to me, by one of his friends, as
“the most prominent guy in the Las Vegas gun industry.” Famiglietti
wouldn’t go quite that far, but New Frontier
Armory—a dealer, distributor, and
manufacturer of firearms and class-three weapons, which include machine
guns, silencers, and short-barrelled shotguns—is a notable part of the
Las Vegas gun scene. There are approximately three hundred holders of
Federal Firearms Licenses in the Las Vegas Valley area, including
Henderson and Boulder City, who can retail guns and other firearms
legally. “We pride ourselves on being very involved in our 2A
community,” Famiglietti said, referring to staunch local supporters of
the Second Amendment, “and offering the best customer service in town.”

Famiglietti told me that he sold “a few guns this year” to Stephen Paddock, the sixty-four-year-old resident of Mesquite, Nevada, who, from a room on the thirty-second story of the Mandalay Bay hotel, shot and killed nearly sixty people attending the Route 91 Harvest festival, on Sunday night, and injured hundreds more. Famiglietti added that the transactions were conducted “lawfully” and that Paddock passed an F.B.I. background check. “No red flags were raised,” he said. In a subsequent e-mail exchange, he clarified that there were two guns: a shotgun with “an effective range” of thirty yards, and “a rifle that did not leave my store as a Machine Gun, nor did it leave my store modified (legally or illegally) in any way to shoot more than one round per pull of the trigger.” Fully automatic weapons, or machine guns, are relatively rare, very
expensive, and highly regulated by the federal government. But owning
one is not illegal, provided it was made before 1986 and properly
registered. Famiglietti told
NBC News that Paddock made his purchases in the
spring;
in that interview, he said that agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives had spoken with the store employee who sold Paddock the
guns, adding that Paddock bought guns at his shop only once, “so it wasn’t someone we knew personally.”
Famiglietti explained to me, and later to the BBC, that the
weapons Paddock bought at New Frontier Armory were not “capable of what
we’ve seen and heard in the video without
modification.” (On
Tuesday morning, the Associated Press reported that Paddock had two
“bump-stocks,”
legal devices that make it possible to shoot a semiautomatic weapon at
a machine-gun-like rate.)

Famiglietti expressed frustration that “people jump to blaming a ‘tool’
instead of figuring out what would cause a person like this to do
something so horrible.” He went on, “I sell tools. Ninety-nine per cent
of the time, they are used lawfully. I can’t fix the rest,
unfortunately, just like the C.E.O. of Ford or Chevy can’t stop people
from killing people with their cars.” Famiglietti described the tiresome
task of “dispelling myths” about guns and gun owners and combatting what
he called the “false info out there.” He mentioned common confusion
about the terms “automatic” and “semiautomatic,” which, he noted, “are
used interchangeably and that’s not true at all. I urge people that want
to be ‘against’ something with such passion to take the time to educate
themselves first.”

Earlier in the day, I spoke to another Las Vegas resident and gun-rights
advocate, who has a personal collection of more than a hundred firearms.
He asked that I not use his name. “Guns are very common in Las Vegas,”
he said. “Way more than in other cities. My co-worker just had a gun
pointed at him on the expressway, driving home last Wednesday.” When a
shooting happens, he thinks, “I hope that’s not someone I
know.” And sometimes, he said, it is. Some local gun shops, he told me,
sell by “playing up fear of local gangs.” He mentioned a notorious local
seller named Kelly Carn, who, last year, pleaded guilty to “three felony
counts of unlawful receipt or possession of a machine
gun.”
His shop, since closed, was called Machine Gun Kelly’s Gun Vault, and
sat a few miles down the street from Mandalay Bay, on Sunset. According
to the Vegas resident, Kelly sold handguns without registering them. “I
bought one from him, and had to bring it myself to metro to get a blue
card,” he said, referring to a county ordinance, which is no longer
enforced, that required the registration of concealable weapons. How did
the resident feel about the shooting? “Personally, the timing of this
was bad, because my son was still freaked out by the active-shooter
drills at his elementary school two weeks ago,” he said. He also
expressed sadness for the victims.

Famiglietti acknowledged that Nevada is “very gun-friendly,” but he told
me that the Las Vegas metropolitan area is “becoming more and more
anti-gun every year, as more people move here from California and other
very liberal cities and states. Fortunately, we have a large number of
law enforcement, military, hunters, and sport shooters in our valley
that stay very active in the preservation of their rights.”

I asked Famiglietti what, beyond frustration, he felt when he heard
about the shooting. “Anger was my first thought,” he said. “Anger
directed at this whack-job shooter. Second was anger towards politicians
and people that instantly tried to use this tragedy for political
motives.” He mentioned Hayley Geftman-Gold, a vice-president at CBS who
was fired after suggesting in a Facebook thread that the shooting
victims didn’t deserve sympathy because “country music fans often are
Republican gun
toters.”
(Geftman-Gold has since called the comments “shameful” and said that she
regrets them.) Famiglietti also mentioned a pair of
tweets that Hillary Clinton posted yesterday, one of which said, “The crowd
fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a
silencer, which the N.R.A. wants to make easier to get.” This rhetoric
was “sickening” to Famiglietti, who seemed to chafe at the timing of
what he perceived to be an attack on the N.R.A. so soon after the
shooting.

“Las Vegas, especially the Strip, is a very target-rich environment for
a mass murderer,” Famiglietti went on. “I’ve always said, in the back of
my mind, that I was surprised something like this hasn’t happened sooner.
But I always expected it to be some type of terrorist attack. We don’t
have the details about this guy yet to try to understand what the
motivation was and what kind of creature could do something so
horrible.”

He continued, “We’ll have to wait to see the facts as they’re released,
and then we’ll know if it was a legally owned fully automatic rifle that
was used, or a modified rifle that was made illegally.” Still, he added,
“I honestly don’t think it would have mattered what type of rifle he
had. Well-aimed shots fired one at a time could have done just as much
or more than the ‘spray and pray’ he did into a crowd of sitting ducks.”
An analysis of video of the shooting published by the Times concluded
that in one ten-second burst, Paddock fired roughly ninety
times.