Holy shit

[conuly]

Sniper in high-rise hotel kills at least 58 in Las Vegas

Another lone wolf, but we still should be super worried about the scary Muslims from the scary Middle East, right? And in no way should we be concerned about the easy availability of guns in this nation either.

Comments

[cactuswatcher]

Yes, it also puts the lie to those (all too many here in Arizona) who say such things could be prevented if everyone carried a gun. This guy was spraying bullets down from a hotel room across the street. Pulling out your hand gun wasn't going to help. Running to your pickup truck to get your cowboy-mounted shotgun (lots of those in Nevada) wasn't going to help. Nothing short of a high powered rifle was even going to touch him.

[kutsuwamushi]

Every time people argue that attacks like this could have been prevented if more people carried a gun, I think of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting, where a civilian with a gun almost shot another civilian with a gun because he thought he was the shooter.

[randomdreams]

The probability of this happening should rise roughly as the square of the number of people who pull out guns and start shooting back during a mass shooting.

[conuly]

And thank goodness he'd had the good sense to stop and assess the situation. Most people vastly overestimate how much they'd understand at any point in time.

[chickenfeet]

I'm not sure even a rifle would have been much use in this case. It's very hard to hit someone high up in a window from the ground. Especially at night if he's not backlit. It's probably RPG territory and I really don't think permitting large numbers of civilians to carry RPG launchers is a terribly good idea.

[thewayne]

The angle and distance would have made it an almost impossible shot from the ground, especially if he was smart enough to pull his head back between volleys. Short of breaching the room, which was eventually done, a helicopter with a rifleman would have been the quickest appropriate response, and that would have been very iffy, firing from an unstable platform.

I would doubt an RPG would be accurate enough firing at that high of an arc, but I won't claim to be an expert on them. I think they're designed for a much flatter firing solution.

[archersangel]

supposedly people went onto police cars & took their standard issue shotguns, presumably to return fire. i wonder if they got any of those back.

well, the CBS nightly news said took. something called masslive.com said "trying to take."

[cactuswatcher]

No one with any knowledge about fire arms would have bothered trying to fire back with a shotgun from the concert area to the hotel some 400 yards away. NBC interviewed someone who admitted he and others had broken into police cars to get into the trunk for first aid kits. Once the police cars and trunks were open things like shotguns could certainly start disappearing.

[conuly]

Breaking into cop cars for first aid kids is probably ethically okay, but then you do need to leave somebody there to make sure the guns are secured.

[sallymn]

I admit, I am afraid for you all... from the outside it looks so scary.

[conuly]

It looks scary from here, too.

[author_by_night]

It's just all so horrible.

[ratcreature]

It is just horrible. You are always going to have disturbed people (well usually disgruntled men, so I suppose we might socialize boys differently and have the problem drop by 95%...), but it is much better if they just have knives rather than machine guns for weapons. Like awful as it was that two women were stabbed in Marseille yesterday, it was just two not over fifty.

And of course you can always kill people other ways and get creative and convert something else into a mass casualty instrument, like a truck or building fertilizer bombs or who knows what, but you don't have to offer extra opportunities to make killing easier by handing deadly weapons that have no other use out on a platter.

[conuly]

And honestly, most of these crimes aren't exactly well thought-out. Remove the guns and Mr. Spur-of-the-Moment Lone Wolf is just going to masturbate or something.

[rhoda_rants]

I've had a dark metaphorical fantasy type thing processing my own reaction to mass shootings kicking around since Aurora, Colorado, but it's always too "fresh" to finish. *long beleaguered sigh*

[randomdreams]

There has been an average of roughly 0.96 mass shootings per day in the US for the last two years, where by 'mass shooting' I mean 'shooting more than two other people', so if you're waiting for it to be long enough since the last one I suggest you start thinking in hours rather than days.
(http://www.newsweek.com/mass-shooting-almost-every-day-us-675334 and it stretches much further back than 2017.)

[rhoda_rants]

Which is an important thing to keep in mind, sure. But the thing is, I can't write an entire 60k to 80k word novel in a matter of hours. That's what I mean.

---

[randomdreams]

It sucks that we can't type as fast as someone can shoot, granted.

[monanotlisa]

Oh no! Now is not the time to talk about guns! Tomorrow is not the time to talk about guns! NEVER is the time to talk about guns.

[conuly]

Yes, if we talk about guns after a shooting, why, we're just using tragedy for politics!

[randomdreams]

Yeah, I remember how long politicians and republicans waited after 9/11 to start talking about islam and terrorism.
Owait they didn't pause for one second.

[alasse_irena]

I am sorry this has happened, and I hope things change for you all over there one day soon.

[moxie_man]

I was surprised it took this long for this too happen. Yes, I've lost that much faith in those who live within our borders.

That, and Congress still won't do anything. Why? Well, they wouldn't do anything after a bunch of children were shot. You'd think after members of Congress got shot, they'd do something. Nope. So, after a bunch of concert goers getting shot, there will be a bunch of hot air spouted again, but they still won't do anything. Big corporations own the politicians. If those big corp execs (like the crook at Equifax who got to "retire" with $90 million) start getting shot, then maybe, just maybe you'll see something done.

[thewayne]

The thing that's ridiculous is that the lobbying arm of the American gun manufacturers, the NRA, is not that big of a voice. They're a disproportionately LOUD voice, but the number of voters they represent isn't that big. It's just that they have so much money behind them.

If Congress were to disentangle money from politics, which isn't going to happen without a Constitutional amendment, the NRA would be greatly diminished in power and something might actually happen.

As another story of firearm idiocy, a woman saw a shoplifter running from Home Depot store security. She was not threatened, she pulled out her gun and opened fire. Fortunately she didn't hit anyone, she just recklessly endangered who knows how many people. And she was arrested for it.

[conuly]

At least they're consistent.

[moem]

Another white, male lone wolf. Although I feel that the word 'wolf' sounds too noble. Cockroach?

[konsectatrix]

Yeah, lone wolves go off and quietly die of starvation in the woods without needing to take out half the pack with them.

Wannabe queen bee, maybe? I honestly can't think of an animal that deliberately kills because it can't handle its own fucking irrevelancy.

[moem]

Good point. I was mainly looking for something less heroic. Calling someone a lone wolf sounds like a compliment...

[konsectatrix]

Yeah, agreed. It makes him sound like he's some kind of anti-hero. *twitch*

[randomdreams]

I suspect the somewhat heroic implications of that epithet are at least partly intentional.

[conuly]

Cockroaches are fastidious, social insects. (That is, they live socially. They aren't eusocial like bees and ants.)

[zesty_pinto]

I don't expect anything to change. The NRA has been doing a great job behaving in ways that I can only associate with PETA-esque vegans; reacting nastily to anything that doesn't remotely reflect their views and refusing to accept reason because they believe that everyone being armed will stop every crime.

For example, not even a week before this happened, Scientific American posted a collection of study results that reflect how more people carrying will not stop more crimes. In reaction, the page itself seemed to mount with angry commenters upset that it showed results that do not benefit their ingrained beliefs, both on Twitter and Facebook. In comparison to the 50-something comments I saw accumulate, I normally expect SciAm to get little more than maybe a dozen remarks. The only other times I ever see this happen was when
they comment on things like lettuce using more water than feeding animals. It's ridiculous how sensitive some carriers are.

[silveradept]

Easy access to weapons is a God-given Constutional Right, say the people who don't realize the contradiction of the same.

I wish it wouldn't take having someone close to them killed by guns before they reconsider.

[adafrog]

I agree.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"Paddock lived in a retirement community, owned rental properties, held a private pilot's license and liked to travel to Las Vegas to play high-stakes video poker."

Oh yeah; totally sounds like a jihadi.