|
Featured image: Stephen Paddock (Source: WFTV.com)
“Turn down the music. You know uncle Stephen goes berserk when one disturbs his sleep.” /snark
One Stephen Paddock rented a room on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel. Over three days, he brought some ten guns into it. The room was chosen to overlook the space of on upcoming open air concert.
Last night Paddock waited for the concert to start and then fired his automatic weapons into the crowd. At least fifty-eight people died and some 400 were wounded. The murderer later killed himself.
Paddock is portrait as a reclusive, well-off retiree and is thought to be a professional gambler. There is no hint yet of the man’s motive. He is white and has a Christian name. Thus, according to U.S. standards, his killing spree was not terrorism.
The state of Nevada allows about anyone to buy and own automatic rifles. With one pull of the trigger one can fire off a full 30 round magazine within a few seconds. The use of such machine guns leave the victims in an attack like this no time to escape. With a bit of training, a change of magazines takes less than five seconds. The man must have had more than a thousand rounds to cause such a number of casualties.
The statistics paint a horrible picture of gun violence in the U.S. There is now one mass shooting, with more than four victims, per day:
First 9 months of 2017:
-11,572 gun deaths
-23,365 gun injuries
-271 mass shootings
-1,508 unintentional shootings
-2,971 kids/teens shot
The Onion headlined: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens . It was the fifths time in the last three years that the Onion used the same headline and story. They only switched the photo, the name of the city and the body count.
The gun lobby will again say, “Let’s not politicize this tragedy by talking gun control.”
Sure, let’s wait a few months, at which time there will be another mass shooting.
Every gun massacre is an advertisement for guns. The stocks of gun manufacturers soared today, casino stocks fell.
|
