This is mendacious and in extremely poor taste.
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In a one-on-one situation, carrying a firearm might help you. Statistically, it won’t, but you know … maybe? And this was Las Vegas after all, so a belief you can beat the odds is always going to trump logic anyway.
But in a one-on-many situation? Nope. You might (but almost certainly won’t) know who the bad guy is, but as soon as you start running around waving a firearm everyone else is going to reasonably deduct that you are the bad guy, and then they draw a weapon and start pointing it. Now you have a good guy pointing a gun at you while you fearlessly hunt the actual bad guy. Do you shoot the good guy threatening you so you can get the actual bad guy? How do you stop other people assuming you are the bad guy - you are in a crowd under fire waving a weapon around. For all intents and purposes you are the bad guy as far as everyone else is concerned. And meanwhile the chain reaction expanding rapidly and logarithmically around you until you find yourself in the middle of the worst Mexican standoff ever, with everyone facing the same dilemma of which good guys to shoot so they can get on with hunting the bad guy.
Basically, a one-on-many situation requires instantaneous shared perfect knowledge by everyone regarding who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’, but of course that criteria of shared perfect knowledge has already failed catastrophically. Bruce Willis “Die Hard” fantasies only work in movies.
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Yeah, available for a mere 400k! But buying or stealing one of those is a hell of a lot more trouble than just picking up a much more effective rifle at a gun show.
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Especially compared to guns, ammunition is really easy to make.
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Nice.
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Wow. That’s going to cause some major cognitive dissonance for drumpf.
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Response from the White House:
[also works for most GOP Senators and Reps]
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A commercial driver’s license. But these aren’t used in the U.S… obviously there are other large trucks.
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it’s pretty much both. One we can do something about.
[narrator: it’s the guns]
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Wasn’t expecting people to run so far with it, though… it got us off the original topic.
Here’s a promising approach to reducing guns that hardly anybody ever considers. Instead of making millions of new firearms every year and trying to restrict access by a few loonies, why not instead focus upon outlawing the manufacture of firearms in the first place? It’s a lot easier to reduce the stockpile when one isn’t adding more into it every year. Eliminate manufacture, then avenues of distribution are drastically curtailed automatically. There would still be some collectors and enthusiasts under the radar - as there are now - but 90% or more of the firearm business could be gone within a year, without even changing those supposedly sacrosanct existing laws about ownership. Then, maybe after a few years or decades, the lack of pervasive gun culture will reduce the resistance to getting rid of the rest of commerce.
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My wife just called to tell me an acquaintance of ours – a fellow parent from my children’s swim team – was there at the concert and subsequent massacre and is now missing. Hoping she’s OK and just lost in the chaos.
Edited to update: The family confirms she was one of those killed in the attack.
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Welcome to BoingBoing!
I like the debate about the qualifications for renting a truck. I’m imagining a terrorist cell sitting at a card table in a dingy motel room, their faces lit with the flickering light from a secondhand iBook as they scroll through Craigslist ads for trucks:
Praise God, we shall destroy them with this giant truck!
Wait a minute, we need a commercial driver’s license. I only have a learner’s permit.
Curses, foiled again! Well, um, what can we get at Penske or U-Haul?
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Fair enough, I failed to note your “non-weaponized” statement in your original post. RTFP fail.
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Fire.
In the annals of mass killing the highest body counts apparently belong to fire. Bombs and poison. Though I’m not too aware of many non-chemical weapon poison attacks with high body counts. So I think it’s the very rare, and very damaging chemical and biological attacks that put it there.
There’s some evidence that easy access to guns in the US see mass killers here going for lower body count gun attacks over bigger bomb and fire attacks. But there’s pretty much the same evidence that easy access to fire arms here has mass killers picking guns over lower body count approaches like cars knives and bats. So there’s that.
This shooting is really. Really aberrant though. They keep calling it the largest mass shooting in us history. I don’t know if that really captures it though. The body count, and especially the number injured. There aren’t many spree killings of any sort. Anywhere. That have done that sort of damage. That’s bombs and fire level damage. Fewer people die or are injured in your typical military battle these days.
And this wasn’t a guy carefully picking targets from a book depository with a deer rifle. Or a close range couple of weapons raid like columbine. This guy straight up rained a wall of unaimed bullets into a massed crowd. You absolutely can’t and wouldn’t be able to do that without automatic or high cyclic rate weapons. Large magazines. Multiple weapons. Large amounts of ammo. Basically the same check list people call for regulation on after each new shooting.
I mean you could kind of expect this sort of thing to happen eventually. Given the state of things. But I’m flat out shocked at the sheer scale of this.
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It’s. The. Fucking. GUNS.
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That bill is the SHARE Act, exempting lead ammunition and fishing sinkers from dangerous-chemical bans (along with a hodge-podge of only vaguely related other things; but not silencers). It passed last year.
I’m trying to find an active gun-related bill, because I don’t doubt there is one, but it’s slow going.
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Well, I did say possibly… I didn’t think the M16 was really that old. Regardless, an actual Vietnam-era M16 will be 50+ years old and will have gone through the humid jungle a few times, so it probably wouldn’t be as effective as a modern off-the-rack M16. Also, a “collector” who only collects M16 would trigger all sorts of sirens and probably justify some sort of curb. Genuine collectors with WWII-era carabines and the lone M16 would be an acceptable risk.
It’s all academical anyway, there is no point arguing the fine details when we all know the whole subject is off the table.
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