Supreme Court Reverses Bump Stock Ban After Las Vegas Shooting

Eleven minutes. That is all Stephen Paddock needed to turn a Las Vegas music festival into a killing field. From the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, he unleashed more than 1,000 rounds of gunfire on a crowd of 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. The date was October 1, 2017. By the time police breached his room, the 64-year-old gambler was already dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He surrounded himself with rifles and explosives, showing no intention of leaving alive.

There was no manifesto. No note explaining the carnage. The tragedy remains a devastating milestone in American history even nine years later. As the deadliest mass shooting by an individual gunman, it sparked fierce debates over firearms laws. Specifically, it targeted bump stocks. These attachments let semiautomatic rifles fire repeatedly with just one trigger pull. President Trump's administration banned them in 2018, but the Supreme Court overturned that move in 2024.

Hospitals improved their triage and mass-casualty protocols right after the event. Police departments beefed up training for sniper attacks. Organizers of open-air events added aerial surveillance and heightened security measures. MGM Resorts finalized an $800 million payout to survivors and affected relatives in 2020, settling significant legal turmoil. Yet despite these lasting impacts on gun policy and emergency response, Route 91 has largely faded from the national consciousness. It gets overshadowed by the endless stream of mass shootings that followed.

But for the survivors, October 1, 2017, never ends. Russell Bleck, 37, told the Daily Mail that many people forget it even happened. He is sporting a 'Vegas Strong' tattoo on his forearm now. For him though, it feels like it happened just last year. It is really crazy how time doesn't seem to pass after this kind of trauma.

Bleck said he still has nightmares almost nightly about that night. Before unleashing eleven minutes of horror, Paddock meticulously planned the attack. He checked into Mandalay Bay days earlier and made repeated trips to his suite. He hauled more than 20 bags of guns and ammunition up there sometimes with help from a bellman. When staff questioned the mountain of luggage, Paddock claimed it was for a family reunion. As a high roller and regular at the Mandalay, he enjoyed privileges ordinary guests did not get.

He installed surveillance cameras in the corridor to watch for approaching law enforcement. He placed one strategically on a room service trolley. Then he used a hammer to shatter two panoramic windows. When hotel security guard Jesus Campos came to check on an open-door alarm, Paddock shot him through the suite door around the same time he started firing on the concertgoers below. Amid the chaos, authorities struggled to pinpoint where the bullets were coming from. Once they did figure it out, officers took an hour to finally enter his suite.

Survivors relive those eleven minutes almost every day. The night the music stopped but the bullets didn't stop remains a nightmare for many who witnessed the horror firsthand.

I wake up naturally on my own without an alarm at 7am every morning because of the nightmares." Bleck, 37, and his now wife Breanna, 36, were both high earners enjoying the Las Vegas lifestyle when they attended country music singer Jason Aldean's performance on the third night of the festival. Russell and Breanna Bleck were in the VIP lounge watching the show when the first shots rang out. The Blecks have since moved to a quiet town in Ohio, away from crowds and their lucrative careers. But haunted by the memory of concertgoers being shot as they fled the VIP lounge, the couple told the Daily Mail they left Las Vegas and walked away from their lucrative careers in Sin City. "Life has extremely changed. We both had killer careers. We were career driven and worked so hard to get where we were only to have this happen and set us completely back to the beginning," Bleck said. The Blecks now live in Ohio, in a small town of 700 people off of Lake Erie, far away from large crowds.

The Blecks aren't the only survivors still reeling from the senseless massacre. Natalie Grumet was celebrating being cancer free for ten years when she heard what she thought were fireworks – then felt a searing pain that made her think her face "was on fire." A bullet had shattered her jaw, leaving her critically injured. Fifteen surgeries later, Grumet, 46, told the Daily Mail she is grateful for her recovery, though the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder has been "very challenging" and the survivor's guilt "really hard" to overcome. "I had to heal mentally, physically and emotionally. I had surgery after surgery. I dealt with a lot of night terrors," she said. Having survived cancer and a mass shooting, Grumet now works as a motivational speaker in California.

Natalie Grumet, 46, was shot in the face during Stephen Paddock's rampage. She required 15 corrective surgeries to repair her jaw, which was shattered by a bullet. Identical twin sisters Natalia and Gianna Baca were also shot at the festival. Gianna still has bullet fragments in her hip, and Natalia's wounds were so severe that she had to be intubated at the hospital. "October 1 will always be a part of who we are," said the twins, both 26 and still living in Las Vegas. "There was so much more to healing than recovering from being shot. There was fear, trauma, survivor's guilt and trying to understand why we got to walk away when so many other people didn't."

In attempting to decipher what led Paddock to attack, authorities found few clues of what was to come in his background. A former mail carrier, real estate investor, pilot and federal tax auditor with no known criminal record, Paddock led a seemingly unremarkable existence in a quiet Mesquite, Nevada retirement community just 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Yet, detectives uncovered troubling financial clues in the lead-up to the rampage. A high-stakes video poker player, Paddock had suffered substantial gambling losses during the prior two years, and in the days before the attack, wired $100,000 to his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, who was visiting relatives in the Philippines at the time. Observers, too, have spent years searching for Paddock's motive.

One theory, sparked by an FBI interview with a fellow gambler who knew him well, claimed Paddock snapped because he felt casinos were mistreating high rollers like him. The unnamed source told investigators that a man of his status deserved a penthouse suite on a higher floor, not where he was staying. Las Vegas police pushed back hard against this idea in 2022, noting there simply was no strong evidence that resentment toward the casinos drove his actions.

Another angle suggested Paddock wanted to achieve infamy similar to his father, a bank robber who hit the FBI's most wanted list in 1969 after escaping prison and staying free for a decade. Other wild guesses, links to ISIS, a botched arms deal, or an accomplice, have been debunked over time. The FBI eventually admitted it could not pin down a single motive.

'Throughout his life, Paddock went to great lengths to keep his thoughts private, and that extended to his final thinking about this mass murder,' the agency stated in a 2019 report. 'Active shooters rarely have a singular motive or reason for engaging in a mass homicide.' Even his brother, Eric Paddock, couldn't explain it. In a raw interview with reporters less than 24 hours after the shooting, Eric said his heart was torn and destroyed for all these people but he could not tell anyone why Steve did what he did.

A 2018 examination of Paddock's brain by Dr Hannes Vogel, director of neuropathology at Stanford University, found no stroke, tumor, or other abnormality that might explain the attack. Four months before the rampage, Paddock picked up an order for diazepam, also known as Valium, an anti-anxiety drug that can sometimes lead to aggressive behavior. Eric told reporters there was something that happened and drove him into a pit of hell. He prayed for data points because without them, no other rationalization exists. 'He didn't plan this for 35 years - whatever happened to my brother happened over the course of months,' his brother said.

Evidence suggests Paddock looked at multiple targets while planning. Investigators found he researched large venues as early as May 2017, including Fenway Park in Boston. In August, he reserved a room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago overlooking Grant Park where the Lollapalooza festival was taking place, though he never checked in. Then in September, he stayed at The Ogden in downtown Las Vegas during the Life Is Beautiful festival and reserved units facing the outdoor event. His internet searches around that time included questions about open-air concert venues, SWAT weapons and tactics, ballistics, and explosives. Investigators were never able to establish definitively whether he intended to attack those earlier events.

When approached by the Daily Mail to speak on the ninth anniversary of the shooting, Eric declined to be interviewed. Danley also declined to comment. For many survivors of the Route 91 Harvest Festival, the shooting did not end when the gunfire stopped.

Some survivors still fight debilitating PTSD. Others did not survive at all. Telemachus Orfanos was just 27 when he walked away from the Las Vegas massacre. He served in the Navy before that nightmare. Less than a year later, he died again in Thousand Oaks during the Borderline Bar & Grill shooting. His life ended while his mind still hurt from the first tragedy.

Not everyone walks this path alone. Some families went deep into conspiracy theories about Paddock's motive. But for Grumet and the Bacas and Bleck families, that rabbit hole holds no appeal now. Grumet speaks to crowds in California as a motivational speaker today. She made a hard choice to stop chasing those unanswered questions.

'I just had to make a choice for myself that I couldn't let myself get lost down that road,' she told the Daily Mail. 'Because what would really come of it? Would any good come of it?' Obsessing over why Paddock acted did not change her pain or help her heal, she said.

The community moves forward slowly but surely. On October 2, survivors and supporters will gather at festival grounds for a groundbreaking event. They are starting work on the permanent Forever One Memorial right after the shooting anniversary. For years, those fields were paved over to make space for Raiders football parking lots. Two acres in the northeast corner stayed reserved as 'a place of healing and remembrance.'

'We may never have an answer to every question surrounding that night,' Bacas said. Learning to live without them has unfortunately become part of our healing too. The road is long, but people are walking it together now.