In Las Vegas, the gunman, Stephen Paddock, executed his killing spree from a towering window at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino — around 400 yards away from the festival site — well outside the usual security perimeter of pat-downs and metal detectors that is created for such events. He slipped the hotel’s own security apparatus, and chose an open-air target that is by definition vulnerable from a high elevation.
.. Louis Marciani, the director of the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security, struggled to imagine how a similar assault might be prevented in the future. “There’s no way that any good operation would have caught that,” he said of the shooting. “We’ve now got to go back to the drawing board.”
.. even if Mandalay Bay were on high alert last weekend, snaring Mr. Paddock would most likely have required a level of screening that far exceeds current practices.
.. “You’d have to have X-ray machines and magnetometers at every single entrance,” said Mr. Adelman. “No hotel does that.”
.. But he ended the news conference with an unvarnished caveat. “We live in a world now where you cannot protect against every single threat,” he said.