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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.
This is what happens when you don't have enough guns. If some of those poor people in the crowd had had rifles, they could have taken the shooter out before so many died.
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.
We can put an end to this controversy once and for all.
They said not to ban it. They said we needed more of it. They said not to limit our rights for the sake of a few.
Now look where we are.
It's finally time, once and for all, to put an end to country music.
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 amazing (but not surprising) how little the lack of meaningful background/facts on this dead guy, his act, his purported "companion" and his motivations matters to those who are already spinning up complex narratives to serve whatever agenda they're usually selling. Doesn't matter who we're talking about or which ax they're grinding. It's just remarkable how consistently the early period following something like this is full of what turns out to be misleading, or outright fictional information. But the speculation and misinformation (it's not even misinformation, it's something else ... just fabrications in the absence of anything solid to go on) now fills in all of the social and traditional media cracks so early and so thoroughly that whenever real information emerges, it can never shake off some of the "facts" that circulated early on.
That indelible quality to whatever gets said first (see, for example, the perfectly incorrect Ferguson story that's still impervious to reality) is well understood now, and creates a sort of awful race to get into that "first mover" narrative position because that's now all that matters. It's not a new observation to say that the 24 hour news cycle generates endless blathering by talking heads looking to fill broadcast time, but the social media frosting on that cake has added an even worse and in many ways far more toxic new layer.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If I could mod your comment into the depths of hell I would. You are making assumptions where there is no information to make such, and showing your own political bias and agenda. And not a very hard attempt either, because the other side of the political spectrum could make the same assumption that he is a Trump support right wing second amendment loving nutjob, since we all know the left is anti gun and this guy had numerious firearms. We also know who he was, a 68 year old native resident of Nevada, which more than likely also makes him a Republican..
But unlike you, I won't jump to conclusions yet to, otherwise I would be a total dick... You should probably do the same else everyone will think you are a total dick.
And yes, while this is not exactly news for nerds, it is still an important event that should be covered.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
a 68 year old native resident of Nevada, which more than likely also makes him a Republican..
Right, all those Nevada Republicans who kept voting Harry Reid in year after year.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Guns don't kill people, people kill people.
The guns the guy used were illegal.
Gun laws won't stop crazies.
Psycho gun killers are Democrats or on antidepressants.
Guns stop zillions of other attacks.
99.9% of gun owners don't massacre anyone.
They still kill each other in DC (or gun free zone of your choice).
We need guns to protect ourselves against New Hitler
We've all heard them a million times before.
The fact is, whenever the news of a "active shooter killing spree" comes out the very FIRST thought people have is "Oh, where in the US is it this time??".
Trying to argue for a bit of sanity there is like trying to convince North Koreans that Dear Leader does actually poo, it's an almost impossible task.
Hey, a whole classroom of kids got slaughtered at Sandy Hook and they did NOTHING. This won't be any different.
The cannon fodder have been conditioned far too well. Not only do they willingly walk to the slaughterhouse, they protest the rights of the slaughterman to kill them.
Just like their second rate healthcare system, and their lack of a social safety net, the ones at the top in the US are only interested in profit. Guns are big business, like healthcare and private prisons. Lots of money to be made, and votes to be had. It's only the little people that carry the burden, so that's ok.
There's no point in rebutting the same old points they raise over and over again. It's just water off a ducks back.
So, now it's time for more "thoughts and prayers", no meaningful action, and some collective amnesia until we read about the next American mass murder obscenity in a week, or months time.
The weapon was fully automatic, which is very tightly regulated. It is likely the shooter either modified a weapon illegally or obtained one on the black market. That is no normal "assault rifle".
I slowed down one of the eyewitness videos and used a tap-counter to count how many rounds were fired. I counted 80 rounds in a single burst. He was either using a belt-fed automatic weapon, or some specialized extremely high capacity magazine. The standard magazine you can buy for an assault rifle is 30 rounds.
For all of the commentators saying this is what America gets for guns being legalized, I would like to point out that in Europe there have been far more attacks using fully automatic, illegal weapons like what just happened in Las Vegas, than in the USA. In fact, Europe still holds the record for the most people killed in mass incidents of this kind. This was a premeditated attack using specialized weapons by someone so incredibly deranged and unhinged that they would obtain several thousands of dollars of gear ahead of time, then open fire on a crowd of innocent people over and over with a fully automatic weapon.
Better known as 318230.
"which more than likely also makes him a Republican" and then " I won't jump to conclusions yet"
Sounds like you already did, bro.
Less than 12 hours and the political blame game already well underway.
Can we all just agree the guy was a fucked up human.... I just wish people that miserable would just use one bullet into their brain instead of killing innocent people as well.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
You are picking an choosing statements from a sentence and taking them out of context. That's a no no.
That particular aspect of course, I should have backed up, which say a link. https://www.nytimes.com/electi...
You will note that the majority of the state is red, so that backs up my statement "which more than likely", which is a guess based on statistical data. Then again, at the same time the individual was from Misquite NV, which is in Clark County, same county as Las Vegas, which went blue. But like most counties that have major metro areas, the city typically goes blue, where as the surrounding areas are usually a solid red, but the number of city votes beats the rural ones (very similar to Virginia in which Northern Virginia is solidly blue, but the rest is solid red).
The point being, I made a supposition to support my original statement "because the other side of the political spectrum could make the same assumption" showing the OP that I could do the same thing and go in the opposite direction, providing the same guess work, and coming up with an opposite ideological conclusion.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
This is a whole new level of insanity I just cannot wrap my head around. I just don't understand the mentality or whacked-out level of disgruntlement, depression and motive it takes to want to walk into a concert and mow human beings down with an assault rifle (I presume), then have your own life taken. That in itself, minus the news-fed death toll that's rising as I type this, is a tragedy.
It's just downright scary as fuck anymore to go to any public event. I look at the school shootings from the late 1990's and 2000's, that 'joker' impersonator who took lives at the Batman movie premiere, Boston marathon bombings, the Ariana Grande concert in London as of late, and now at a fucking Country music concert at Las Vegas? Talk about wanting to just stay at home anymore. Living in the United States or not, I think anyone is going to start second-guessing
Point I'm getting at is, one life or a million lives, this insider-thread-homeland or organization-led terrorism shit happens every day on scales that blow my mind. I wish that it all made headlines so we'd, as a world of people, would figure out how to handle it. Because it's not right or just, and even though this is making huge headlines, we sure don't blink more than once at headlines for any war-torn country where a car bomb erases hundreds of lives --- and that's just as terrorism-led and tragic. We need to stop minimizing it and come together to end this type of behavior.
It's honestly sad and I'd be the first one to say, the more and more this happens, the less and less I seem to find an answer to any of it.
yeah i mean they ALWAYS shoot up country concerns.....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
We don't know yet.
Yes we do. 64 years old, lived in Mesquite, no currently known political affiliation despite what some AC trolls on here are saying. Over 400 sent to hospitals, roughly 10 firearms found in his hotel room, apparently killed himself before police arrived.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The reason stories like this make it to the front page is because we give it a hell of a lot of comments and even more views. As of this response the story has been on the page for nearly an hour and a half has already broken more than 135 comments while the actual tech story about a backdoor in Cisco's Umbrella platform has been up nearly two hours and....there's 10. 10 comments.
The Slashdot editors are simply responding to the communities actions as to what stories to pull to the front page and ignoring our denouncements. Actions speak louder that words. If we actually responded to the tech stories more than this trash...we'd see more of those. But... judging by the comment volumes alone, tech stories just don't interest the community much.
Can we all just agree the guy was a fucked up human.... I just wish people that miserable would just use one bullet into their brain instead of killing innocent people as well.
Despite how divisive politics is these days, once you make the jump to go on a killing rampage the only real allegiance you have is to violent authoritarianism. Whatever perceived injustices that led one to commit that kind of atrocity is more like the window dressings that surround a deranged mind. People like James Hodgkinson, Stephen Paddock, and even Timothy McVeigh have a lot more in common than they do separating them apart. It's really important that we stop trying to project these people as extensions of the left or right. It makes it too easy for people to start demonizing anyone that doesn't agree with them.
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.
I quite honestly can't see any reason why civilians should have access to assault rifles, fully automatic or not, in a country like the U.S. We're not talking about a warzone like Iraq or a country with a semi-militia army like Switzerland. Weapons like bolt lock hunting rifles and sports rifles have legitimate uses they're specifically designed for. Assault rifles however are designed for warfare and in any other uses lose to weapons actually designed for these tasks.
However I have a feeling any response I'm going to get will be the usual mix of insults, claiming that people need their assault rifles so that they can overthrow the government, that a handgun or something less effective isn't enough for personal defense or some half-assed attempt to prove that assault rifles make for good sports rifles.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Because they already identified the shooter, there is no assumption. The guys name is Stephan Paddock from Misquite NV.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Speaking as an outsider, these days it feels as if all discourse in the USA exists only within the narrative of Red Team vs. Blue Team –and it doesn't actually matter what those teams represent or what they do. Even things like the well-being of the country are secondary to the question of which team "wins". That is deeply troubling –especially since the USA have nuclear weapons and a propensity to project their power wherever they want. An unstable USA is in nobody's interest.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
We need to stop looking so hard at the "left vs. right" paradigm, and start looking at the "asshole vs. great person" paradigm.
This guy falls strongly on the asshole side of the spectrum. I guarantee it.
No one is calling for an outright ban... okay some are... fine a good majority are, but in many cases that is a knee jerk reaction to a heinous crime like this. Many sane people that are anti gun in their own homes (like my wife), are more for better control, and meaningful regulations. Would that eliminate all gun violence, of course not, but it would cut down on it to a major extent, and make those who are too stupid (read: irresponsible) to own guns more liable to the damage and death caused by them. Laws, and for that matter, the Constitution itself, really do need to catch up with the times. Not saying radical changes, but what the framers had in mind when it was written, is not how we exist today. Things change, and as a country and a populace, we need to change appropriately, which means, time to rethink some laws and Constitutional elements.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
> 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?
Outlawing guns in an area that has wide open borders with no customs or other security checks and is directly adjacent to areas where guns are readily available makes no sense. You might want to compare areas of Europe rather than making an argument that's akin to saying 'look, we made a no-pissing end of the swimming pool, but it's still full of piss, non-pissing swimming pools can't possibly work!'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The problem in the US right now is that many people on both sides of the political spectrum pick one issue they care about and choose a candidate simply because of that. There's a large subset of Americans that only care about the 2nd amendment, the right to bear arms (own guns). They don't give a shit about the rest of our Bill of Rights as long as they keep their guns. On the other side, there are people that want open borders hell or high water.
These people are lost to reason. There can be no compromise.
I'm stuck in the middle, however we're such a minority now and also relatively soft spoken that our opinions are washed out. The talking heads want controversy.. if the people are too busy fighting with each other we'll never see how terrible our elected officials are. If Trump wants to drain the swamp, term limits are needed for Congress.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
This is bullshit. There is no such right. The 1st Amendment protects them from government prosecution — one can not be jailed for making a statement. It does not protect them — nor anyone else — from the disgust of their fellow citizens. Private employers may fire assholes — indeed, just the other day y'all were celebrating firings of the folks (accused of) taking parts in KKK marches...
Consistency much?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I own a tiny hybrid and a HUGE pickup truck. I worry about not seeing small vehicles sometimes while driving the truck. I don't worry much about trucks seeing me.
You worry too much about political statements. We're not all on edge, but you are. Step away from the media. They make money by glueing you to themselves for profit. Rob them of the profit and have a more relaxed life.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I know it's going to be pointless debating anyone online/here about this, but I just wanted to drop some points for thought.
Not all liberals are anti-gun. This liberal owns several. But that's because I also own fire-extinguishers, and not because I'm trying to play fireman/cop. I own them because I recognize and accept that it's my personal responsibility to control an immediate emergency as best I can until the pros arrive. Which can be 30-45 mins in rural areas. I hope I never have to use either.
I also recognize that I have a 1-in 110,000 chance of dying in a mass shooting, as terrible and sad as events like this are. Meanwhile I have a 1-in-113 chance of dying in a car accident. So I try to live my life with some perspective and control my fear/paranoia.
"We have an unfortunate loop-hole in the law that allows conversion parts to be sold legally, as long as you do not posses the weapon they can be used to convert. "
That is not true either. Anything that can be used to convert a weapon to full-auto falls under the NFA and must be registered as well. A full-auto seer, for example is a trivial $2 part that now sells for $20k if properly registered.
Islamic state claims Las Vegas shooting, says attacker recent convert to Islam
One can't take a well defensible, higher ground, position, lock himself up there and keep lobbing cars or pressure cookers at thousands of people half a mile or more in the distance.
Nor can one ambush those thousands of people with a car. Or keep running over people once they realize that the driver of said car is running people over.
Purely based on a fact that a car is a lot more visible and avoidable than a bullet.
One can dodge a Dodge but one can't bullet a bullet.
And while one CAN ambush people with a pressure cooker... Constructing one, then hauling it and placing it without blowing oneself up IS a tiny-winy bit trickier than point and click effort of using a gun.
One can't just bang-bang-bang at a crowd outside one's window with a car or a pressure cooker cause one is suddenly and gravely disappointed in the effectiveness of those pills which promised that penis enlargement OR cause one is annoyed with loud music those pesky kids are playing.
One can't do either on whim - the way someone with a gun can.
Plus... Neither cars nor weaponized pressure cookers grow on trees, and it is easier to find a gun store in US of A than a store selling... well... anything other than gasoline.
There 14146 McDonald's restaurants in the US, 16708 franchised car dealers, 36536 grocery stores and 143849 gas stations... but 51438 gun retailers.
129817 gun dealers if you count in "collectors" (61,562), pawn shops (7,356), and importers and manufacturers.
And WE KNOW that Americans have a McDonald's problem.
But even if cars and cooker did grow on trees - one still has to find the said tree, pick the car, drive it to where people are, get enough traction...
I mean... look at that cunt in Charleston.
He had to drive AAAALLL the way from Ohio to South Carolina, only to be able to run over a single person.
It took planning. And work. And driving. And finding his way around a foreign town.
You can't just type in "People to run over with a car" in your GPS, you know?
Also, fenced venues such as open air concerts tend not to allow one to take cars OR weaponized pressure cookers inside.
But you can still squeeze off a couple of shots inside.
Just get yourself some high ground and... bang-bang-bang your way to that penis enlargement! Show the world you're NOT firing blanks!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well, to counter your point:
The guns aren't the issue
This is more clearly phrased as "to completely change the subject because the previous tactic was blowing up in my face...."
However, if you can tell me how guns are at fault here without taking into account whose hands the weapon is in, you'll impress a whole lot of folks
Gun control is about reducing the general availability of guns, so that crazy people have a harder time getting them. That doesn't mean crazy people will never get one, because the definition of "harder" does not change to suit your political objective of protecting your precious.
Gun control is also about making the actual mass shooting slower and less efficient, so that fewer people are killed before an organized response can deal with it. And again, the definition of those words does not change to suit your political objective.
Gun control has always been a damage mitigation strategy. Not a damage elimination strategy. But again, that nuance doesn't suit your political goals.
To point out the elephant in the room, the problem is people. There has never been a mass killing in history without a human mind to think it up and / or put it into motion. Regardless of the tool used ( guns, bombs, vehicles, whatever ) they all have the same common denominator.
Feel free to propose how to eliminate all crazy people.
While doing so, keep in mind the NRA has fought all efforts to take guns away from crazy people via making it very difficult to have a gun owner considered legally insane until after the bodies have been piled up.
once you make the jump to go on a killing rampage the only real allegiance you have is to violent authoritarianism
Where'd you get this idea? Someone like this could just as easily be an anarchist.
You are thinking of authoritarianism and anarchism in terms of political views (which at least for anarchism can be pretty nebulous depending on who you ask), but I am thinking of it more in terms of psychology:
"Authoritarian personality is a state of mind or attitude characterized by belief in absolute obedience or submission to one's own authority, as well as the administration of that belief through the oppression of one's subordinates. It usually applies to individuals who are known or viewed as having an authoritative, strict, or oppressive personality towards subordinates."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I would argue that murder is sort of an absolute means of forced submission to one's own authority. If not of mind, it certainly is of body. The murderer imposes their will and once it's happened the victim is powerless to overcome it (at least in so far as the mortal world is concerned).
Or a nihilist, who doesn't fall anywhere on the left-right political spectrum. This sort of thing doesn't have to be motivated by ideals or mental illness. Disillusionment is enough, in some cases.
I guess that's most of the point that you were making. And that's a fine point.
Ultimately it really comes to "might makes right".
There's another element. Rural people often have a great fear of the Federal Government turning heavily liberal and ruining their rural and/or religious way of life. They see guns as one of the few insurance policies protecting them from a run-away "Big Govt". The loss of life from mass shootings is not big enough to justify losing this "insurance policy" in their mind.
They do the math and conclude that sometimes "freedom is better than life". It is rational to THEM: the cost of the insurance policy (a lost % of life) is less than the perceived danger of the Big Gov't taking over. They are willing to sacrifice a few percent of the population to events like this to prevent 100% of everybody they know from being ruled by Big Gov't. Nobody can accurately calculate the odds of their "socialist doomsday" scenario, so their guess is as good as yours or mine.
It's similar to what you often see in the middle east: protecting their "way of life" is more important to many than (current) peace. They are willing to die to protect their way of life. NRA thinking is just a variation on this theme.
Table-ized A.I.
Hi US people,
I noticed that you are a) trying to guess which party the gunman voted for and b) discussing the merits or either better or worse availability of guns as a solutions.
As per gunman's voting record, I would suggest to you that it is irrelevant: Your political side won't score any points nor get any additional votes, even if it turns out that the gunman voted for the other party.
As per the availability of gun: It is not viable solution. It has been studies and the gun laws do not correlate in any manner with the number of deaths in these types of events. So there, gun laws are not a working solution. Hence, I would recommend that you look in to something that might work: Having better availability of mental health services.
Finally, I have a sad observation to make. You are not interested in discussing the merits (or the lack there of) of mental health approach because it does not involve political divide. You have forsaken your country. Petty political point scoring reigns supreme.
Sincerely yours,
A guy from Finland