8/2/2017: Las Vegas Shooting At Mandalay Bay

[Malsua]

Apparently they've backed off of that now. heh.

[Ryan Ruck]

I was going to say, this is reaching levels beyond stupid if it's gone that far.

[Ryan Ruck]

It's clearly time to ban Jerry Miculek...

[Ryan Ruck]

The NRA must be feeling the heat from it's membership.

Funny how they're trying to play in the middle of the road now. Better realize if they play in the middle of the road you still get run over by traffic going both ways.

They'd have been so much better off if they'd have kept their mouth shut and given the same line they gave after every other shooting when Obama was in office, focusing on mental health.

NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre Won’t Commit To Backing Bump Stock Bill, Tells ATF To "Do Its Job"

October 8, 2017

National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday that in the wake of the deadly Las Vegas shooting, the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) needs to now "look at" current laws on bump stock laws and "do its job" amid calls for stronger gun legislation.

"On bump stocks, let me say this, the fact is that the Obama administration a couple years ago legalized a device, their ATF, that fuzzed the line between semiautomatics and fully automatics. And if we're able to fuzz that line, all semiautomatics are at risk," said LaPierre.

He addd,"If you fuzz the line, they're all at risk. And we're not going to let that happen."

Numerous lawmakers, both Democratic and Republican, have made calls for the rapid-fire devices to be regulated and many calling for their banning altogether.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said it was up to House Speaker Paul Ryan to bring legislation to the floor that bans bump stocks, something Ryan himself said he was open to considering.

However, Ryan called for more information on the devices before making regulatory decisions.

Amid the growing pressure on Capitol Hill, the NRA announced that bump stocks -- the device the Las Vegas shooter used to convert his semi-automatic weapons to fire automatic -- should be subject to additional regulations.

The White House has since said that it would be "open" to conversations about those kind of regulations, with Mr. Trump telling reporters late Thursday in a meeting with military leaders that he would be "looking into that over the next short period of time."

While he wouldn't commit to backing proposed bump stock legislation, LaPierre repeated his calls on Sunday for stronger enforcement of existing laws.

"I mean, if we're going to do something, let's do something meaningful. I mean, the outrage they're trying to stir against the NRA, they ought to be stirring against the mental health system, which has completely collapsed," said LaPierre.

The NRA CEO also suggested that "elites" were at fault for furthering irresponsible use of guns, saying many were trying to politicize the aftermath of the shooting.

"To the people that are trying to politicize this tragedy, I would say this. There are monsters like this monster out there every day. There are menaces out there every day. People want to be able to protect themselves. That's why they support this freedom. All the elites that have been speaking out this past week, they all want to protect themselves," claimed LaPierre.

He added, "The number one person teaching irresponsible use of firearms is all these elites' employer, the Hollywood, television, gaming industry. We spend millions teaching responsible use of firearms. They make billions every single day, John, teaching irresponsible use of firearms. They're so hypocritical, it's unbelievable."

When asked about the idea of reciprocity and allowing gun owners to carry across state lines, LaPierre said 42 states that have "good carry laws" don't have a "problem with people protecting themselves."

"Nobody should be forced to face evil with empty hands. And the fact is we don't want the honest people crossing a state line, somebody that ought to be in jail inflicting evil on them, and then the honest person going, "Oh no. Not me." That's their last words," he said

When asked about the ease of getting a lethal weapon, LaPierre said: "Accessibility is about accessibility for the good guys. That's what the Second Amendment's all about. And as I've said all along, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

[Ryan Ruck]

I Think Mark Steyn’s Correspondent Has The Las Vegas Massacre Figured Out

October 9, 2017

If you didn’t hear about this over the weekend let’s change that – Mark Steyn had an interesting post at his site talking about the obvious theory for the motive of the Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock nobody else has offered.

And when you see this, you’ll likely agree this is what makes sense out of that entire horrific scenario.

Here’s Steyn, introducing a correspondent of his who propounded the theory Friday…

Among the many emails I’ve received is this one, from a gentleman at a London think tank whose job is to focus on “the analysis of economic and political issues and outcomes”. Make of this what you will, but he writes:

And here’s the Las Vegas theory…

Today we turned our collective minds to the the shooting in Las Vegas as a test case since the event is extraordinary in that thus far no one appears to have identified a cause behind the carnage. This is our reasoning:

The fact pattern in this event is striking for not fitting any known profile. In particular:

The gentleman concerned had no known political or religious affiliations.

The level of premeditation is unusual and crystal clear from his mass buying of guns and the cautious systematic smuggling operation to ferry them to his room together with the illegal modifications and the position of the room he chose and occupied for several days beforehand.

This denotes a deeply serious commitment to his act. And one which leaves no doubt that act was conceived to generate the maximum possible publicity.

The question then is: ‘publicity’ for what exactly?

And the answer would appear to be ‘nothing that can be identified’.

But consider the moral behind the following joke (I assure you it has a point beyond humour):

A known smuggler crosses the border every day at a particular crossing. Every day his suitcase is searched and nothing is found. After 20 years he crosses for a last time and confides to the policeman who has been searching him all that while that he is retiring.

The policeman asks him ‘Ok – since you’re clean today and will never cross the border again tell me this – you’ve been smuggling – right?’

The man says ‘Right.’.The policeman says ‘Smuggling what?’

The man says ‘Suitcases.’

Hold that ‘hiding in plain sight’ concept as we return to the shooting. This man amassed (rough figures) 24 guns in the hotel and another 19 at his home – 42 guns in total. He spent some $100,000 on buying them. The guns at his home are one thing but he also spent days filling his hotel room with more weapons and ammunition than he could ever conceivably use along with an array of advanced modifications and accessories.

Everything brand new. And very expensive. And mostly entirely redundant. Representing in effect an enormous waste of money and time and risk.

Except that is in the realm of generating massive publicity. Guaranteed massive publicity.

Yet despite having gone to enormous lengths to achieve that goal we are asked to believe this same man never troubled – never took the most elementary steps – to speak to that publicity. Indeed left behind no trace of anything that might demonstrate indicate or even hint at his motive or motives.

That would appear to make very little sense.

We would argue the opposite – that it makes absolute sense.

Because this gentleman did not simply fail to leave behind a motive; He took substantial trouble to ensure that no motive could be found – or attributed to him. All of which can lead us to only one conclusion:

It has been said that ‘the medium is the message’.

In this case that is the literal truth. There is only one plausible motive for what this man did. And here it is:

This man wished to telegraph to America in graphic form the hard irrefutable evidence that guns and gun ownership and the ease of gun purchase in America are an evil and must be controlled. On that hypothesis everything now makes sense. And it must be said his concept has a certain demented genius.

Because even if the public learns and believes that his motive was all about ‘guns’ the horror of the act itself – an act to protest such acts – is in some ways even worse for being plain evidence that there is no limit to the insanity to which guns can be put.

Here then is our argument:

1. His long planned and carefully executed purchase of a virtual armoury of unprecedented scope and scale guaranteed that very armoury would inevitably become the central focus of the media.

2. His assiduous removal of evidence of any tangible motive also removed the possibility that the news cycle might move on from guns – simply the means of the killing – to considering the more interesting issues of motive and message – be it political or economic or environmental or anything else.

3. This man was a highly methodical and systematic thinker. Nothing in the scenario that unfolded was left to chance – even down to positioning cameras to surveil the corridor. It is therefore inconceivable that this was all done in this precise manner for no reason. That there is no message.

But of course there is indeed a message. It only happens to be implicit instead of explicit. That message is ‘guns’. And that message is being trawled over every minute of every day on every network in America. Given the nature of the man and the facts this is not a chance outcome. On the contrary given the known facts it is indeed the only possible outcome. An outcome so obvious that anyone given the full story beforehand would have predicted as inevitable.

4. The people he chose to kill supports the hypothesis on ‘guns’. Country and Western fans are virtually guaranteed to own or at least to defend the ownership of guns. By a certain logic this provides the gunman with two sound moral positions (because it is not beyond possibility he has a conscience):

First – While killing a very large number of innocent people is an horrendous crime it is nonetheless entirely justifiable – in moral terms – if it causes a restriction on guns. Because such a restriction would – it is widely held – save innumerable lives in the long run. There is no evidence for this but it is still a widely and passionately held belief.

Second – Since the people he is shooting are actively or passively defenders of guns and an obstacle to gun control they are by definition responsible in part for all the people who have been and continue to be killed by guns.

Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

To be sure, there are facts uncovered by the investigation into Paddock and his actions in Las Vegas which are not in the public realm, and those may or may not lend credence to this theory. But based on what we know so far, this theory is quite persuasive. Paddock didn’t leave behind a confession, so you don’t have concrete evidence that he was “smuggling suitcases.”

The overabundance of guns and ammunition, though, is a giveaway. So is the angle of his firing – shooting from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Casino, Paddock’s assault on those Las Vegas concert-goers can be considered a rebuttal to the common retort to the gun control crowd after a mass shooting that if any of the victims had been armed the results would have been far less bloody; nobody in that crowd was going to shoot back at him with any success.

And the media coverage of Las Vegas has been precisely what Paddock, under this theory, would have wanted. Things got so bad that the supposedly conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens abandoned the 2nd Amendment late last week in one of the dumbest pieces we’ve ever read. The National Rifle Association even offered to give ground on bump stocks, a modification to an AR-15 rifle which can make it function similarly to an automatic weapon.

So if this was mass murder-as-public-policy-advocacy, it might have some potency. Obviously it’s a level of horror which hasn’t been brought to the public discourse as such so far, but on the other hand this is what societal decline looks like.

Absent any other information about the case than what we know to date – and we’re not persuaded by any of the conspiracy theories about multiple shooters or ISIS or whatever else is bubbling up out of the fever swamps so far – this is what seems to best explain the horror in Las Vegas.