SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Over 50 dead in mass shooting in Las Vegas
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 442 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The person who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @06:03PM (2 children)
Probably why it's illegal to own such a weapon without the extensive background checks that come with a ~$20k permit. It's not like the guy was on a suicide mission and could have simply stolen a truck to plough into a crowd of people or anything is it? Do you think trucks should be banned? What about cars? What about corrosive acids? What about boiling water? What about knives? What about pointy sticks?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 02 2017, @06:55PM
I'm anti-pointy stick, personally. The Roomie's masculine child has an annoying penchant for swinging them around without paying attention to either the stick or what might be in its way.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @12:07AM
What in the world are you talking about? There's no "permit" required to own a machine gun in the US; there is a transfer tax to buy one, but that's only $200.
There is a background check, and it takes anywhere from three months to over a year depending how busy they are, but the real obstacle to buying a machinegun isn't the tax or the background check, it's that the machine gun registry was closed in 1986, so no more machine guns can be registered and thus legal for normal people to possess. The fixed pool of registered machine guns, combined with the ever-increasing number of people who want one, naturally sends the prices up, but it's made even worse because a bunch of rich people buy machine guns as investments. So a registered machine gun of a reasonably common type might go for $10k-20k, even though an identical gun that's not on the registry might cost $1k or less (to military or law enforcement, since nobody else can buy them); machine guns that are rare in transferable form (e.g. those that were brought to market shortly before the registry closed in '86, or foreign-made guns where few were ever imported) can go well over $100k.
I've made some slight simplifications there -- e.g. manufacturers and dealers are also allowed to own unregistered machine guns, in order to sell them to military and law enforcement customers -- but I've covered the essential points, and there's nothing in there like a $20k permit.