6 magazines, 30 rounds each, weighs 5.6 pounds. I weighed 4 30-round magazines at just about 4 pounds. A guy can pack a lot of ammo.
Yep, that's true. I just received a 1,000 round case of .223 and the package weighs 27 pounds according to UPS. So that's not all that heavy. He could have preloaded it into 25 40-round mags for instance.
I tend to doubt the multiple shooter theory. Fact is, the guy was in there for 3 hours and free to shoot people at his leisure. The media sensationalism about the scary rifle and its high capacity magazines is moot. In 3 hours he could have used a single shot break action rifle to rack up the same number of murders.
The police need to change their idea of how to handle these situations. Leaving the perpetrator free to wander among hostages for hours is causing avoidable death. The better response would be to rush in, in force, and take the risk of injuring or killing hostages. This is just like the airplanes on 9/11. The passengers didn't rush the hijackers because at that time our concept of a hijacking was that they'd make some demands, and the passengers would have a decent chance of surviving. Our concept of hijacking at that time did not include the idea that the hijackers might have no intention of surviving. The one flight where passengers did resist was because they learned of what happened to the other two planes. It's the same with these gunmen. They're not taking hostages for leverage and making demands. They're intending to kill lots of people and then dying a "martyr" themselves.