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.