Another deeply sad incident has slammed the United States. Last night, using several high-powered military assault weapons, a shooter – identified as retired accountant 64-year-old Stephen Paddock (a resident of Mesquite, Nevada) sitting on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas – rained unremitting gun fire on attendees of the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival on the Strip below. As of this writing, reports says that at least 59 people were killed and 500 injured, the worst such mass shooting in American history.
The carnage mirrored the Orlando night club shooting (49 dead) and the 2012 Sandy Hook gun massacre (28 dead). Paddock was not believed to be connected to any militant group, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters, adding. “We have no idea what his belief system was… We've located numerous firearms within the room that he occupied.” By the time the “good guys with a gun” (police) showed up, the “bad guy with a gun” had already decimated the lives of thousands… and killed himself.
The Trump administration – which called the assault “pure evil” – has consistently pledged to remove Obama-era limitations on gun ownership, and there is a bill proposed in Congress to make silencers legal (making stopping shootings that much harder). The NRA has done its job well. Even as the obvious screams for limiting legislation mount, a GOP Congress led by a Second Amendment near-absolutist President are unlikely to attempt any limitations on guns in this nation.
What’s their explanation? Conservative commentator, Bill O’Reilly, responded to the horror with this October 2nd blog post (Titled: Murder in Las Vegas): “This is the price of freedom… Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.” O’Reilly also claimed that “having covered scores of gun-related crimes over the years, I can tell you that government restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people.” This despite the rather obvious statistical contradiction to his statements – reflecting how much higher gun (non-military) violence deaths are here than anywhere else on earth.
With tourism to the United States dropping because of our visa policies and open hostility to foreign travelers, there is a concomitant body of travelers who simply believe the United States is no longer a safe travel destination anyway. Vegas is the quintessential tourist town, and this shooting is horrible news all the way around.
Here are some of those scary statistics: Nichols Kristof writing for the October 2nd New York Times: “We don’t need to simply acquiesce to this kind of slaughter. When Australia suffered a mass shooting in 1996, the country united behind tougher laws on firearms. As a result, the gun homicide rate was almost halved, and the gun suicide rate dropped by half, according to the Journal of Public Health Policy.
“Skeptics will say that there are no magic wands and that laws can’t make the carnage go away. To some extent, they’re right. Some criminals will always be able to obtain guns, especially in a country like America that is awash with 300 million firearms. We are always likely to have higher gun death rates than Europe.
“But the scale is staggering. Since 1970, more Americans have died from guns (including suicides, murders and accidents) than the sum total of all the Americans who died in all the wars in American history, back to the American Revolution. Every day, some 92 Americans die from guns, and American kids are 14 times as likely to die from guns as children in other developed countries, according to David Hemenway of Harvard.”
My condolences to all the injured and the families of those killed last night. There is no excuse, no reason you could ever give me, to justify the civilian use of such assault weapons. Whether the shooter was left, right or just plain mentally deranged without political motives, there is no justification for having a single such assault weapon in the hands of anyone other than a trained and authorized government official. When is enough “enough”?
I’m Peter Dekom, and I cried when I heard the news.
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