A gunman fired upon thousands of people attending a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night, in a brutal attack that is blamed for at least 58 deaths, police say. In the mass shooting and panic that ensued, 515 people were injured. At least one of the dead is an off-duty police officer who was attending the concert.
Editorializing: Interesting how media always emphasize ISLAMIC terrorists, but downplay domestic terrorism as psychologically disturbed individual lone-wolfs.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:05AM (4 children)
I noticed elsewhere a talking point that seems to be going around the pro-firearm ownership blogs these days. If you're going to suggest a gun control policy in response to a mass shooting, show it would have fixed the mass shooting. Seems a reasonable thing to ask here.
Maybe we'll learn differently, but right now, we have a guy who apparently went to extraordinary effort to collect some nasty weapons and prepare the scene, yet doesn't belong to any of the traditional classes of people who would be denied ownership of firearms by law. With what has bounced around so far, he doesn't seem to have exhibited signs of serious mental illness or committed felony crimes in the past, for example.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday October 04 2017, @06:01AM (3 children)
> If you're going to suggest a gun control policy in response to a mass shooting, show it would have fixed the mass shooting.
I proposed earlier that regular citizens shouldn't be allowed to possess weapons which can deliver tens to hundreds of bullets per minute which are still lethal at a quarter mile or more. You don't kill 59 people from 200 yards away with a handgun, a Winchester, a hunting rifle, or a pump-action shotgun (all of which were the NRA's bread and butter, until the popularity of the Black Gun forced them to change their narrative to protecting your right to an insurrection).
The semi-auto version of a weapon of war, easily converted back to full-auto, should be treated like other weapons of war: missiles, tanks, nukes...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday October 04 2017, @11:10AM (2 children)
Yes, you can. The "bump stock" is not particular to guns that are painted black nor is it the only technology for making guns shoot faster. Rich guys with no prior record who pick the best weapons at the time and a venue in which to massacre people aren't going to be well handled by any sort of gun control law. It's quite irrational to even try.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday October 04 2017, @04:19PM (1 child)
> It's quite irrational to even try.
It's totally irrational to do nothing, just because some people will find a way around the rules.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:47PM
I agree, let's not "do nothing".
Let's take the time to rip away all ~20,000 of those laws that blatantly and directly violate the "shall not be infringed" directive of the legally-enshrined acknowledgement that individual people are free to arm themselves with whatever weapons they can dream up.
Counter-attack sniper rifles! Armed drones! Gas grenades! Smart rifles! [npr.org] All available over-the-counter at your local hardware store.