A gun store owner who sold firearms to the Las Vegas shooting suspect, Stephen Paddock, says that he feels “physically ill” about having interacted with the mass murderer.
Guns & Guitars general manager Christopher Sullivan told CBS News that his company did the required checks before Paddock purchased the firearms.
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“We do everything right … We can’t control what someone does once they leave this store,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan explained that Paddock had been a customer of Guns & Guitars for about a year. Over the course of that time, the shop sold Paddock five firearms.
“It made me physically ill to think that we had interacted with him and he had committed such a tragedy,” Sullivan said. “I may have very well been the last person to shake hands with that man.”
On Sunday night, Paddock, 64, opened fire into concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. The shooting claimed the lives of 59 people and injured more than 530 others.
According to law enforcement officials, Paddock had 24 guns in his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Resort. From his room on the 32nd floor, Paddock burst a window and took aim at the crowd.
Of the firearms found in the hotel room, Paddock had placed bump fire stocks on 12 of the weapons. The devices are used to simulate automatic fire by allowing squeezed triggers to slide back and forth more faster.
“These bump stocks are basically a work-around that allow people to take a gun that’s perfectly legal and turn them into something equivalent to a machine gun,” UCLA law professor Adam Winkler told CBS News.
Guns & Guitars has said that the company did not sell Paddock any automatic weapons, ammunition or bump fire stocks.
In addition to the guns found at Paddock’s room at Mandalay Bay, he also had thousands of ammunition rounds at his home, which is located about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. There were also explosive materials and unclassified electronic devices found alongside them.
