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Las Vegas Shooting Leaves at Least 50 Dead, More Than 200 Wounded (wsj.com)
Readers share a report: At least 50 people are dead and more than 200 wounded after a shooting late Sunday at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternative source). Police said they were first alerted to reports of an incident at 10:08 p.m. and then determined there was a shooter on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino who was targeting the nearby Route 91 Harvest Festival. Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said in a briefing that officers responded and shot dead the suspect. He said the suspect was a local resident but declined to identify him, citing the ongoing investigation. Police are also trying to locate a female companion, who they named as Marilou Danley, who was traveling with the suspect.
So is this called Terrorism? Will people of the same skin color now be targeted? Because that would be bad.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
As a first responder, this is the kind of stuff we train for and pray we'll never have to respond to. I was doing active shooter training at my town elementary school just last month, and our typical gallows humor was on wide display, the only way we can deal with what would be a horror show in the best possible circumstances and only goes downhill from there.
This kind of thing never happened when I was a kid. How have we as a society come to this? And more importantly what's the answer. Ban guns? I don't personally own a gun and have little thoughts about them one way or the other, but with millions of guns on the street would this ever make a difference? If you ban automatic weapons, are not many regular weapons relatively easy to modify? And much like the war on drugs, I can't help but feel that a war on guns would have much the same effect - people who want them can still readily get them and our prisons are filled to bursting with low-level offenders. Maybe we ban all brown people from coming into the country, except this guy in Vegas wasn't brown, has lived here all his life, and from his profile it seems unlikely he is a jihadist (further information pending). Perhaps this is the fault of our frayed medical safety net which leaves people with serious mental illnesses more or less to fend for themselves, but you can't force people to get mental help or take their medication regularly when they do - as a guy with a bipolar sister, I can swear to that.
Meanwhile politicians will go on TV and spew whatever talking points support whatever their tracking polling tells them, and people out for a night on the town will continue be shot en mass. Anyone have any new ideas, or can convince me that something old will sound somehow new and fresh this time around?
It's pretty obvious if Stephen Paddock's name was something like Abdul Fatah, the entire right would be screaming "Terrorist!" (which is how Breitbart started their coverage). It looks like it was an old white guy with an Anglo name, though, which complicates things. If it turns out Paddock was a lefty...Terrorism!!! If Paddock was a conservative, the blame will fall on mental health issues which weren't addressed because Obamacare.
I'm betting on a different motive: the guy was a music lover.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
As a European I fully agree with your core point, which is that people who're motivated to do harm will go to great lengths to achieve their goals. However, one slight thing to point out: in Europe getting any kind of gun is a lot more difficult than in the US, which means if someone planning an attack, they pretty much have to get their weapons illegally, and if one's already about to go to the black market to get a gun illegally, might as well make it an automatic.
That being said, the US still has numerically a lot more (mass) shootings than Europe because the abundance of (legal) guns means that acquiring a gun of some description even illegally is far easier than in Europe. Thus you have a higher rate of gun crime and homicide than countries within the EU. That is, someone just wanting to get their hands on any kind of gun to go shoot up their school/workplace/etc. will have a much hgiher chance of success in the US than in here. Most mass shooters are mentally unstable, often depressed, so the difficulty of getting a gun illegally in here means the rates of mass shootings are much lower.
However, it should be noted that it's not about the plain amount of guns. There are plenty of countries in Europe that have high amounts of firearms, we (Finland) among them, Switzerland is another famous example where everyone that goes through the army keeps the rifle in their home, yet we both have several times smaller homicide rates as well as rates of mass shootings. Why then is this? Well it's because we do have regulations about how the guns must be kept and transported. And in Switzerland the ammo for the rifles provided by the army is strictly controlled. In here to get a hunting rifle you actually need to be part of a hunting club for a while and pass a psych exam, and it's illegal to transport the weapon in public without it being disassembled.
My point here is this: gun regulations do affect the amount of deaths by guns, but these regulations are too often thought of in the black and white mindset of 'less vs. more guns'. However, as I said we're both in agreement that even the most sensible regulation cannot stop all mass shootings or acts of terror. We've had a handful of mass shootings in the 2000s, all of them with the exception of a single case committed using stolen/illegal weaponry (and that case itself went to court that determined the police were guylty of dereliction of duty when they did not confiscate the weapon/license even though the perpetrator had been investigated based on his online writings idolizing violence). However, the only terror attack we've had which happened earlier this summer was done with a knife and the death toll was only 2 because of that.
So while you're right that this incident especially could not probably have been affected by more regulations, it's still good to keep in mind that the kind of regulations in place do affect the overall number of gun crimes and homicides significantly. One thing that is also a factor and I feel is too often sidelined in the american gun discussion is the availability of mental health services. Obviously it's too early to say what role if any that played here before knowing if he even tried to seek help, though it's rather that the guy was a nut of some description.
My heart goes out to anyone here with friends or family in Vegas, stay strong people!
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
So it doesn't bother you that the fact that no, nobody legally "freely hands guns to" criminally insane people kind of contradicts your point?
Regardless, gun advocates routinely point out that:
1) The number of people killed by ANY means (including murders with guns) has been doing down nationwide for decades, even when you include crazy mass murder attacks like this.
2) That guns are used hundreds of thousands of times every year to prevent, halt, or lessen the impact of violent crimes by other people. That's the "value" part you're asking about.
The vast majority of murders in the country that happen to involve guns are intra/inter-gang murders in a handful of specific cities that haven't acted on their gang problems.
In cases like this, where the crazy guy appears to have used rifles of some sort (we have no details about them or their provenance yet), it's worth noting that the FBI says that far more people are killed every year with knives, clubs and bare hands that are killed by ANY sort of murder involving a rifle or shotgun. That long and larger trail of death and injury is just a constant dull roar, so nobody pays attention to it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
> Even things like the well-being of the country are secondary to the question of which team "wins".
This is the thing that irritates me the most about US-American politics. Where I live we just had a general election and though the party I voted for did not win the majority and will be in opposition I'm fine with other parties trying to form a (3-party) coalition. They will try to govern all of our country in a way that they perceive as possible optimum for all of the people. Even if I will disagree with some of those decisions they will be justifiable.
I guess my friends voted for at least 5 different parties in these elections, one even was the head of the local election campaign for a party I decidedly did not vote for.
Yet we don't beat each other up but have passionate discussions over beer and dinner.
What is wrong with "you" in the US?
You are absolutely correct, so I'll make a stab at an indelible fact....
The guy was crazy.
There, I said it. Crazy dude gonna do crazy dude stuff. T
It is probably worth remembering that one of the first (and only) things this Congress did was to overturn Obama-era rules that restricted gun sales to people with certain severe mental illnesses. Now granted those rules wouldn't have caught this guy, because they only applied to people with very severe and obvious delusions. Statistically your likelihood of running into one of these people toting a gun is practically nil, but eventually someone is going to.
Congress did this in the same act that repealed the rule that required coal mines to monitor water quality in adjacent streams.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There is one way to get more gun control in the US.
Hand out assault rifles to Black Lives Matter protesters. Gun control laws would suddenly become very, very important to many of the people who are horrified by gun control today.
Tell that to all the dead people in EU that have been victim of being killed by a terrorist using a motorized vehicle as a weapon.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The best news article I have seen so far come out of this tragedy is this guy who didn't duck down, and instead drank his beer and looked to spot the shooter, then gave him the finger.
Brave, stupid, and conveying a message from all of us.