Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . . . Unfortunately, Very Literally · 7:56pm Oct 2nd, 2017
You know, I find it eerily ironic that I went to a concert last night. I went to KATTFest and had a great time. At its largest, we had over 8,000 people and yelling, screaming, sweating, and rocking our hearts out. Yet, on the exact same night, right about when I was going to sleep having come back from the concert, the worst mass shooting on US soil happened . . . at a concert.
I find it awful that I even, for a passing thought, imagined how terribly devastating it would have been if that happened, and I thought about it while I was at KATTFest. Either way, here is a break down of what is known:
There are, currently, 58 pronounced dead, and the Chief of Police said that number can only increase due to the huge number of injured, which is currently said to be 515, but since there were 22,000 people attending that concert, there are most likely more. The shooter's name is Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old retired man. He was positioned on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and began his rampage at 10:08 PM PST. James Aldean was actually onstage and can be seen running of stage after the shooter unloaded one magazine and began his second go. The shooting lasted 15 to 20 minutes before he was found dead in his hotel room.
This was, unfortunately, the worst mass shooting in history, and a big factor of it was the fact he used automatic weapons from a high vantage point with no deterrent. It was said, as well, that when the officers finally breached his room, they found ten weapons, the majority of the rifles and all of them legal. Somehow, the suspect was able to manufacture these weapons into automatic guns, and that would explain the odd and inconsistent rate of fire. If you listen, it honestly sounds like there are two different rates of fire, but that's a combination of the sputtering automatic fire and the echo of the gun fire bouncing off the hotel.
It is extremely sad that this happened, and I have a major feeling that people are going to attempt to make a big deal about gun laws and such, but let me explain things about this. He used and automatic gun, and if you want to obtain one legally, you need to go through a long process of legal authorization and permits, and you also need a tax stamp and lots of money. Funny enough, this guy had the money, but he obviously couldn't pass the permit tests (or never tried, who knows). Instead of doing that, however, he made his own automatic weapons. That is beyond illegal, and obviously the law didn't stop him. Do you think more laws will stop someone from creating their own automatic weapons? No, it won't.
But I will tell you this: guns are a problem, but that is because we are a problem. Human nature really fucks up good things for good people. As long as we have instruments of death that help us become savages faster and more efficiently, this world will never know what it's like to not have events like this happen. However, there is no right answer either, so don't think you know how to handle weapons.
Take them away? Those with them have power. Give them to everyone? The wrong people get guns, and the problem continues. Make the police more powerful? Yeah, no, they hardly need guns anyway. Increase legislation? That makes it harder for the right people to get guns that could help us out, and this is another path towards no guns.
There are no right answers, and it's a sad fact of life. I believe, however, that crime will only become less and less prominent, but these things will happen every once in a while. I hope that it can get to the point where we just have to deal with the fact that bad things happen, and there is no ways of preventing them from happening.
Like the Las Vegas shooting. My thoughts and heart reach out to the families and victims; I hope that the power of friendship and love can push past this awful event and allow those people to heal.
Shit's insane.
We actually had two reporters and a cameraman from Channel 7 staying in the Mandalay Hotel because they were already there covering the OJ Simpson situation (apparently he's due to be paroled). They were woken up by the gunfire and immediately started covering the drama; as a result we found out about this almost instantly. When I went to bed the death toll was at 20 and the injured at 200. To wake up to this is horrific.
I don't know what the USA can or is willing to do about this but the only thing that our own higher-ups and news anchors and radio hosts keep saying is, to effect, "If it (Port Arthur Referendum) worked for us, it can work for them. Why do they keep looking for excuses and being afraid to enact real change?"
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I don't know if one size fits all problems, and I would be wary to say that the NFA for you guys would work for us. With the amount of weapons we have, the amount of people we have, the amount of crime we have, and just who we are as a country to many of our enemies, I cannot say that we have as easy of an answer as you guys. I looked into the NFA, and it seems to have done a lot of good, but this man took regular guns and converted them into automatic weapons. If anything, I believe that is what made him deadly, more so than whether or not he had a high-capacity weapon, which is what the NFA was limiting. There is also the amount of ammunition he had, the position he was in and, therefore, the angle as well. It was the perfect placement for a terrible massacre.
All I can say is that gun control here, in America, isn't as easy to pass because we have a LOT of gun control, trust me. We just have way too many guns, both legal and illegal, and that's what causes these things to happen.
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That's the real issue isn't it, this time? The killer made his own weapons effectively, had no criminal history, set off no alarm bells for the gun shop owner who sold him merchandise, and prepared this over a number of days. The Australian woman who was his girlfriend isn't even in the USA right now but he was still able to use some of her identification to purchase additional paraphernalia, likely so as to not arouse suspicion regarding his purchase quantities.
Everyone always says to look at the individual circumstances regarding the shooter, instead of how easy they make it look to attain weapons of war. But truly, how many "individual circumstances" must we dismiss as acts of madness or depression or revenge or what-have-you before true action is taken?
I can only ever speak as an outsider, but I grew up in a world where guns are illegal. I'm barely old enough to remember the Port Arthur Referendum, but I've always felt safe in this country, even walking alone at night to get the train back from an event. Many Americans may scoff at this next statement but the thing I was most afraid of when I went to the USA last year was being gunned down in a random drive-by, or have someone pull a pistol on me because we had a disagreement. That is honestly how I perceive the nation at large, and I considered it a small miracle that I made it through my holiday unscathed, particularly because every time I got off a plane and landed in another state, there always seemed to be breaking news of a shooting: it was either a cop who was killed in the line of duty, or an innocent man being gunned down in a car with his kid in the back seat, or a massacre in an Orlando gay nightclub, or massive riots in Baltimore (which incidentally I was only a couple of miles away from at the time they happened).
My biggest question is, "What will it take? What arbitrary number of people must die together in one place before guns are banned? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand?"
P.S. I was watching the news a few minutes ago and the anchor flat out said, to millions of viewers, "While I sympathise with the victims of this horrible tragedy, there's another part of me that just thinks Americans are... well, stupid, to allow this to continue happening." So yeah, the overwhelming response from Australia, based on what I've seen, seems to be, "When will they wake up?"
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You were that scared, huh? I mean, to be honest with you, I don't scoff at that, but logistically, that's very unlikely to happen. You still had a bigger risk of dying in the car that took you to and from place to place in an accident than being gunned down, and that's even in the most deadly of cities.
That's also another thing you must take into account. I am sure there are "dangerous" parts of Australia too, but nothing like we have, and that once again comes down to how many weapons we have, how many people we have, and then we can start talking about how we deal with crime and how that exacerbates crime rates as well. There are too many factors to include. Either way, the nation and the world are generally peaceful. You only see drivebys in bad cities, and even then, those are specific neighborhoods of those cities, and I can tell you now that we have come a very long way from the Wild Wild West, and no one is going to pull out a pistol on you over a disagreement. I think that is the most ludicrous thing, to me.
But you know what? At the end of the day, we can still say, even for you guys, that crime wasn't too much deterred by the Referendum, which is called the Nation Rifle Agreement. I looked into it, and many sources say it did, and some say otherwise. Either way, we're not talking about you guys; we're talking about us.
And you cannot ban buns. The moment that you do, do you know what will happen? Because how we deter crime is by making sure people can defend themselves. Most robbers aren't trying to die or kill, but we are willing to protect our own lives and possessions if we need to. I won't ever rob a house for that matter specifically. If a robber knows that there is no one armed in that house, then guess what? They're going into that house, and the crime rate increases because we have one of the largest black markets for guns.
You take it away from law-abiding citizens, then you give power to those who aren't going to follow the law anyway. I would love if we could just make a law like you guys did, but once again, we have a very particular problem.
But I bet something will come of this, don't you worry. I just hope that the people are going to allow it because in my state, people would revolt and start a new Civil War in order to protect their right to bare arms. I don't know if you guys have that as basic, protected right of the people through constitution, but we do and people are very willing to throw their lives on the line over it.
I just hope that those people didn't die for nothing . . . that something will come of this. It is necessary, otherwise we may only continue down a downward path.