58 killed and at least 515 injured by gunman in Vegas

I’m hearing over and over (on Fox News, of course, and from NV police talking heads) that: “Now is not the time for politics.” And that “nothing” could have been done to stop this act, save perhaps higher “El Al Airlines”-level security at Mandalay Bay hotel check-in.

Gee, what could have hindered an individual from owning and firing 10 semi-automatic weapons, using thousands of rounds of ammunition?

What if it were slightly more difficult to own 10 semi-automatic weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition?

Nah… That’s being “political.” Now is not the time for that.

And I’m going to make a fair guess that, 6, 12, 18 months from now, it will also not be the time for “politics,” that is, any discussion about gun control.

(Whats amazing is: they don’t even have to mention "gun control". The dog whistle of “politics” for “gun control” is so thoroughly ingrained, they will never feel the need to go to the questionable statement: “Gun control can never have any effect on preventing a mass shooting.” So there is no question.)

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This was true by ~530AM EST.

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Ah, Fox News. Typical maneuver. Anything that counteracts their normal narrative gets to be brushed off as, “Now is not the time for politics”. If the guy was brown, or nominally Muslim, it would be the time for politics.

If some connection is made to Muslims, or god forbid some sort of liberal leaning cause, it’ll be game on again like that snaps fingers.

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These are two perspectives I both agree with. But a third consideration is that the motives of the killer make a legal difference also. They are culpable for the loss of many lives. But “terrorism” as a legal charge is about the intent behind an act, rather than its effects. Because it is the intent that an accused person is responsible for, and is crucial to an evidence-based trial - even if that trial is only recording the killer’s actions after their death.

For example, I might feel terrified if a person mugged me, but the mugger’s intent was probably not to cause that. This is more difficult since I guess most of us here agree that there is no good reason to kill 50 strangers, but there was certainly some sort of cause. Be it political, religious, medical, psychiatric, etc. Ideally, knowing that cause can help us to prevent further harm. Cynically, others can (and probably will) use it to further reenforce their prejudices and push their agenda.

The kind of reaction I am seeing contributes to my skepticism of “terrorism” as a useful charge/label because it is becoming more generalized from what used to be a very specific definition. And there is a risk of a sort of witch-hunt reactionary mentality when the charges a person faces are based principally upon the degree of agitation of the public, rather than actual evidence. If we combine public outrage with police firepower to solve social problems, nothing good will become of it. There is a special psychology to police culture in the US where everybody is a potential perpetrator and/or victim, and nobody can ever be just a normal person, the basic citizen-as-agent who they nominally serve. So I see the broad domestic terror narrative as strengthening an already bigoted and corrupt legal system, while eroding the rights of people who are more scared and vulnerable than ever. There is a real risk of that approach making social unrest worse.

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Until the NRA changes their position on banning the research of gun violence, the NRA in general and Wayne Lapierre personally are accessory to 100% of gun deaths in the USA, and we should be treating them as such. The federal government is not even allowed to try to find out if there is anything we can do to reduce gun violence because the NRA and Wayne Lapierre are cowards who are afraid of learning the truth. They are willing to let 10s of thousands of people die to protect themselves from it.

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Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a list of what I thought were common-sense ideas for reducing gun crime (whether “repeal the second amendment” is common sense or not I’ll leave to you, but given the Supreme Court’s modern interpretation of it, most of my thoughts on implementing gun control would be hard to implement without doing so). Since that time, it’s become increasingly obvious to me that those ideas are insufficient when it comes to preventing large-scale atrocities like this one. It’s also become increasingly obvious that even if they were sufficient, nobody in Congress would care.

How do we deal with this sort of assault on society when the tools that made it possible are sold freely at every Walmart in the country? How do we deter the perpetrators with threats of punishment when they’re already willing to add themselves to their body count? When anyone in the country can legally amass a battalion’s-worth of weapons and ammunition because it’s their “right”, how can we possibly guard against the risks of such people snapping and taking out their fears and frustrations on literally hundreds of innocent people? What do we do when an entire political party is dedicated to needlessly stoking the fears and resentments of the people most likely to own these stockpiles?.

Clearly, “do nothing” is not an option, because this chart from the BBC (which horrifically has to disclaim that it still may not yet fully account for the death toll) shows that things are getting worse, not better:

The fact that this happened in Nevada, where there are virtually no obstructions to gun ownership whatsoever, is also proof that de-regulating the problem will not solve it, and that “more guns” and “eliminate gun-free zones” are not solutions.

Two years ago, my approach to gun control was to institute corrective measures that, while imperfect, would at least hopefully work to address the more egregious pain points in this epidemic. Now, I’d rather just melt down every single god-damned gun in the country, because people have demonstrated over and over and over again that they can’t be trusted with the fucking things. The utter absence of any attempts to do anything about this uniquely American problem have exhausted me to the point that I’m no longer interested in playing nice or meeting people half-way here. Every gun owner who defensively shouted “but we’re not the problem, don’t make it harder for us to own single-purpose death machines!” is complicit in this fucking bullshit, and I have absolutely no interest in listening to anything you have to say anymore.

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I was waiting for another “warm regards” tweet. I wasn’t disappointed.

What a characteristically tepid response.

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There is no way to change the status quo that doesn’t kill or inconvenience somebody.

My person preference is that people be inconvenienced instead of killed. But I seem to be out-spent and out-voted on this particular issue.

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Since 1991, what? We’ve had more than that.

I’m reading that and talk of it being a “lone wolf” attack as them having solid evidence that Stephen Paddock is right wing to far right.

I don’t want to be right about this. I want to go to bed and wake up tomorrow to find it was just a bad dream.

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But it’s a nod-and-a-wink kind of illegal. It’s legal to sell weapons that are easily modified to be automatic, and the kit (or DIY instructions) to make them automatic is readily available. There is no superficial way of telling a legal weapon from an illegal one short of disassembly by someone who knows what they are looking for. And good luck getting someone who has illegally modified their AR15 to hand it over for dissassembly inspection.

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We need one of those government programs to solve all these goddamned problems.

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And as some on social media have pointed out, our cherished 2nd Amendment was crafted in a time when guns held one bullet. The concept of a solitary man being able to freely purchase, arm, and utilize a firearm that can cause mass destruction and death on this level wasn’t conceived of by our founding fathers. I think any reasonable human being can see that that needs to be revisited immediately.

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Being able to see the diagram really shows how little anyone at the target area could have done anything about it. My first thought was someone walking up to the venue at ground level. Shooting from across the street from an elevated position pretty much beyond visible distance is way worse.

In any case guess we’re going through this song and dance again. Now with a jarbled singer in the white house.

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We could just ban gun ownership by men. That would drop the number of mass shootings right down.

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Completely agree…unfortunately “reasonable human beings” are in short supply in Washington DC.

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Wait, they’re liars? Oh my goodness, who would have expected such perfidy from them

Well many of 'em just reduce the muzzle blast without slowing the bullet to subsonic. Which means that the noise that people hear is just the supersonic crack of the bullet passing, making localizing the shooter more difficult. We were speculating this morning that there were probably hotel guests calling in to report that somebody was shooting a gun from the room next door. Because guns firing close to you are LOUD. If it has been just bullets from on high into the crowd it would have been much more difficult to tell exactly where they were coming from. Even if you could figure out the building, which room is important.

Of course the Right wing doesn’t think that mental health should be a required part of health insurance.

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They’re not claiming it’s fake, but that the shooters was a liberal/Muslim. Shooting children is so awful that it has to be made fake, but mass shooting of adults can be warped into a narrative about terrorists - so now the problem is those guys rather than guns.

Doesn’t need to be. Under Nevada law, the legal definition of “terrorism” covers simply randomly attacking a mass of people, regardless of why they did it. So this was, under the law, terrorism.

I’m pretty sure that carrying a gun makes you bulletproof. Or at least I assume so, because that’s the only way that all that talk about how carrying a gun would protect you from a mass shooting would actually make any sense.

Most people in this country get shot with handguns. Because most gun violence is perpetrated by someone known to the victim. Whenever we focus on mass shooting like this, we miss the fact that we could eliminate them and it would have little to no effect on murder rates in this country or even on the “typical” mass shootings that we have almost every day, which are guys with handguns angry at their wives/ex-wives/girlfriends/objects of desire and the people around them.

The “warmest condolences” is really weird. It seems like the response of someone who’s been told that his responses are emotionally inappropriate, so he’s trying really hard, but he’s a sociopath who doesn’t understand what the appropriate response would be, so he still is slightly off.

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Oh for sure there’ve been more. I should point out, though, that the BBC’s chart shows the worst ones since 1991, and while the Wikipedia list does have a few higher-casualty shootings since 1991 not included on the chart, it also includes countries other than the US. Wikipedia’s list is also quick to point out that it doesn’t include mass shootings in a number of other categories, because we’ve had this happen so often we have to start putting them into categories to keep track of them. Assuming the BBC’s cut-off was 13 people dead, there’s only one incident in this particular Wikipedia list that they didn’t include: Binghamton, New York in 2009 (I’m assuming their cut-off was 13, because the Aurora shooting that left 12 dead also isn’t listed). Realistically, you’d need a lot more column inches if you wanted to produce a comprehensive list of every mass shooting in the US, even just in the past year, let alone 26.

I should also also point out that of the 125 entries in that Wikipedia list stretching back to the middle of the Civil War, the US accounts for all but 31 of them, and those 31 other entries are divided among 15 other nations. This is absolutely a singularly American problem, and nobody is doing anything to fix it.

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Just going for some levity.

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