Las Vegas Priorities

In reply to tuna55 :

Yeah. And he probably would have been more accurate from something other than the 32nd floor but lets just be grateful that he wasn't.

In regard to particular ideas:

I'd start with psychological testing requirements, no timeout exemptions for background checks (combined with more capacity to perform said checks), and safe storage laws. These would've stopped Adam Lanza and Dylann Roof and might've stopped this guy too (an unattended hotel room is not a secure space). Closing the gun show loophole and applying the same standards to private sales as to dealer sales across the board would be obvious steps too. It's almost silly to do anything else while these obvious if rarely used loopholes exist.

Safe storage means the gun must be on your person or in a secure space (typically a safe) controlled by you at all times, and if it gets lost or stolen you're in deep E36 M3.

Some ammo control could go a long way too. Ammo control means you're only allowed to carry up to a maximum number of rounds per gun with exemptions for some places, and that ammo purchases are tied to your gun license, so that if some guy goes around to a few Wal-Marts and buys 500 rounds it throws up a red flag. By extension this makes operating in the black market for ammo more difficult. By me your limit is set depending on your purpose for owning the gun, for those who get one for home protection (as in, not for any job-related reason) it's 15 rounds IIRC. There's an exemption for the premises of licensed shooting ranges (where you can collect ammo by legally transferring it to the range where it's securely stored, or purchase ammo stocked on-site).

In reply to STM317 :

That's completely true. If a guy basically had his way with a tightly packed group of thousands of people for an hour, we should be grateful he only killed 60. That's actually far better than it could have been, though that sounds harsh and strange. If the dude was really a terrorist he could have done far worse. It sounds like he just went nuts for no real reason, other than perhaps the Valium, and wanted to just spray bullets at everyone.

This is not intended to disregard the lives lost, it's an incredible sad and painful thing to happen. These people went to see a concert and basically ended up in a war zone.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

We should probably discuss these offline. I know you're a reasonable guy but we don't want this thread to devolve. I don't agree that those things would help, though.

tuna55 said:

In reply to STM317 :

That's completely true. If a guy basically had his way with a tightly packed group of thousands of people for an hour, we should be grateful he only killed 60.

It wasn't even close to an hour. 13 minutes from the first reports of "shots fired" to the time when the shooting stopped. It's an insane amount of carnage for a single, inexperienced person to enact in that time, but you're right that it could've been even worse.

Edit: I'm saying inexperienced in that he had no formal law enforcement or military training. I'm certain he'd shot  his guns before.

I'm aware of what a suppressor can and can't do, despite what movies show.  I have to disagree that at 400 yards, from the 32 floor, and during a live concert that having suppressors on would not make a difference.

Maybe it would only work well for one magazine worth of rounds, but he had 23 different guns on hand and they all could have had them installed.

In reply to STM317 :

I think it was close to an hour before they crashed into his room. Basically he show for a while and then waited for the cops. Some reports say he fired at a guard in the hall through the door. 

Anyway, yeah, it could have been far worse. And there is nothing anyone could do from the ground. 

Ya know what makes a fine substitute for a silencer?  Oil filter.  That's right, screw one of those on the end of your rifle and it covers the flash almost perfectly.

The crack or supersonic bullets is another thing entirely. 

And yes, I'm real glad this guy didn't know what he was doing.  It wasn't a "war zone" it was a single shooter with a good vantage point and a tightly massed target rich environment.  The things we use in actual war zones are orders of magnitude worse and more destructive.

KyAllroad said:

Ya know what makes a fine substitute for a silencer?  Oil filter.  That's right, screw one of those on the end of your rifle and it covers the flash almost perfectly.

Yep, you just hear *klink* from the gun firing, just metallic noises like a dry firing, and then *pop* from the bullet's sonic boom. It's a good thing criminals and nutjobs haven't figured this out.

500 rounds is considered a lot of ammo? I've gone through 1k rounds in one evening. 

Dr. Hess said:

sleepyhead said:

re:News
there's a big difference between "reporting what happened for 4 mins" and "reporting endlessly for hours on end even though there's nothing new to report"... which leads to sensationalism.  Which is not to say this is a recent phenomenon... lest we forget to remember the Maine!

Hey, the Maine was important.  If it wasn't for the Maine, we wouldn't have the 1903 Springfield today.  Or be real concerned about Puerto Rico, or have that wonderful naval base we used to have in Subic Bay before it blew up and we gave it back.   The Maine, (and  Hearst's empire) brought us all that, just because it happened to accidentally blow up in someone else's port.

Does anyone else notice the irony of the most highly coveted journalistic prize being named after quite possibly the largest proponent of Yellow Journalism? Makes me think that modern day journalism isn't what we think it is. 

Bobzilla said:

500 rounds is considered a lot of ammo? I've gone through 1k rounds in one evening. 

Heck, I just reloaded more rounds than that last night.....on a single stage reloading press. 

This was obviously a tragic, horrific event, and we're all wondering "what could we have done to stop it." I've been asking myself the same question the last few days, and I haven't come up with any good answers.

Denying the right to own a gun for someone who is mentally ill? Sounds like a great idea; but how do we quantify that? Does that mean anyone who has ever been prescribed anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication? If so, you're looking at a huge chunk of the population who are functioning members of society. Is it just people who are *currently* on those medications? If so, how long do they have to be off of them to purchase a gun?

Limiting the amount of rounds someone can purchase/own at any given time? Who sets that number arbitrarily? 15 rounds for home protection? That's great until 6 armed kids from MS-13 bust through your door, beat you to a pulp, and rape your wife and daughter in front of you demanding the cash you made that week from your food-truck (This is not an imaginary scenario, btw. It happened in Norcross a few years ago.)

If you set that limit, guess who gets rich on it? Some enterprising individual (read: gang) who pays people to buy the ammo, then stock-piles it to sell for a huge profit.

I'm not saying any of these suggestions are "wrong," I'm just saying I don't see how implementing them would benefit anyone but criminals.

Also, every time something like this happens, the media starts throwing out misleading statistics, and portraying this as an "epidemic." While it sucks, every once in a while, someone, for whatever reason, decides they're going to off themselves, and decides to take a bunch of innocent people out with them. NO law is going to prevent that. Ever. Period.

I saw one statistic showing that more private citizens in the United States were killed by guns since the civil war than soldiers in every US conflict combined. What they failed to mention is that 2/3 of people killed by guns in the US are suicides (according to NPR.) I was also curious the other day where the US ranked in murders per capita. IIRC, we're at 13th or 14th, and a lot of the countries in the top 10 have very strict gun laws (Jumping through hoops to keep a gun in your home, but you can't carry in public; you can own this gun but not that one, etc.)

I'm not saying any of the opinions here are "wrong," and I certainly wish this tragedy could have been stopped. I just don't see how, if someone decides they're going to pull some horrible E36 M3 like this, there's any law that's going to stop them.

In reply to poopshovel again :

Agree whole heartedly. The coward that did this was also a private pilot and owned 2 airplanes. If he had wanted to cause serious death and mayhem packing one of those with as much anfo as it can carry and crashing into the same crowd would have been worse. 

I wonder if the autopsy won't find a brain tumor. 

I still can't buy the argument that these tragedies can't be stopped with laws when every other country with a functioning government has done exactly that. Also, most other countries have tighter controls on the sale of anfo as well.

It's official...Hell has frozen over.

The NRA just issued (finally) their first statement in the aftermath of Las Vegas...Which is a completely reasonable and rational stance on bump stocks.

Now, maybe it is just the sacrificial lamb to prevent a much larger PR nightmare...But maybe it isn't. Regardless, every change has to start somewhere.

Must be a sacrificial lamb at most. They didn't budge a millimeter after Sandy Hook, which was PR-wise much worse than this.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

Most countries don't have that whole 2nd Amendment thing going. 

GameboyRMH said:

I still can't buy the argument that these tragedies can't be stopped with laws when every other country with a functioning government has done exactly that. Also, most other countries have tighter controls on the sale of anfo as well.

are you sure about that? These are just school shootings.... and they seem to be about as common as the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting

Yeah I'm sure:

Source:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts

Trying something (anything) different is progress. We can't just keep watching it happen. So if something small, or even something big happens relative to guns - then so be it. But if there hadn't been any guns then this guy would have built (and used) a bomb. And if bomb chemicals were outlawed then he would have crashed a plane or a truck into the crowd.

Unless we start trying to figure out what makes people (mainly males) go mentally unstable then we're just screwing around with the symptoms and not addressing the root cause.

GameboyRMH said:

Yeah I'm sure:

Source:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/us-gun-violence-statistics-maps-charts

If that line wasn't there, it would not be at all obvious exactly where or at what angle the line should go.  Which means that must have a terrible R^2* value...In other words, fitting a trend line to widely dispersed data points only denotes that there might be a weak-at-best correlation.  It absolutely in no way implies causation though.  In fact, I'm pretty sure the by far overweighted data point that is throwing the whole graph off is the US.  If you throw out the anomaly, the trend line would probably just about as accurate being purely vertical at somewhere around 15-20 guns per 100 people...Which is to say pretty much statistically meaningless.

The graph makes Barbados and Canada look just as bad as the US.

Argentina looks to be completely off the hook. 

When people point out that gun violence happens more often here we rarely have explosive attacks like happen other places. I wonder if there is a statistic that shows where we stand? Sick berkeleys are going to be sick berkeleys.

edit: add the suicides that contributes heavily to our gun death rate.

John Welsh said:

The graph makes Barbados and Canada look just as bad as the US.

Argentina looks to be completely off the hook. 

Only if you consider more guns per person to be a valid excuse for more gun deaths (per 100k)...I don't. Look at it in absolute terms, and the US is way out there by itself.