A "crazed lunatic" turned an outdoor concert into a bloodbath, killing 58 people in what is now the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.
Thousands of country music fans ran for cover Sunday night as a gunman fired hundreds of bullets at them from a hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, officials said.
At least 515 people were hurt in the gunfire and ensuing stampede at the Jason Aldean concert, police said.
One lunatic killed 58 people and wounded 515, go ahead and tell us that US gun laws protect Americans.
The only way for ANY US citizens to be safe now is if they wore full level III body armor any time they were out in public and lived in fortified homes. Even if all those people in the concert were heavily armed many would still have been killed or wounded before they could have taken out this insane fuck who just murdered 58 people and wounded 515 and traumatized thousands for life.
The way the US gun industry and it's astro-turf lobby arm the NRA demand the 2nd Amendment be applied turns the entire US into a war zone.
Here’s why US gun laws as are being applied as a result of the demands of the gun industry are insane and won’t ever work.
The claim is that Americans need free access to guns to protect themselves.
And who do they need these guns to protect themselves from?
Americans with free access to guns.
It’s a fundamental paradox that makes billions of dollars for US gun manufacturers every year and kills thousands of Americans every year.
Can you imagine what it would have been like for someone at that concert. One moment you’re sitting there enjoying music and the next a bullet goes through your heart. Some people probably never even heard the super-sonic projectile that killed them, they were dead before the sound ever got there. For others the first thing that let you know that something was insanely wrong was your wife’s head blowing off, then the utter chaos of thousands of people running for their lives as the sound of the incoming fire finally reached them and more and more people were dropping. 58 will never get up again and over 500 will have permanent injuries and scars. For everyone there, there will be psychic wounds that will never completely go away and a significant proportion will have PTSD which will likely result in the deaths of even more in coming years.
If it sounds like a scene from a battlefield that’s because that’s exactly what Las Vegas was turned into. All courtesy of Wayne Lapierre and the pieces of shit in the gun industry who pay him to make sure there will be no effective laws passed in the US that protect the general public from people who lack the mental and emotional capacity to own and use deadly weapons.
He did nothing illegal until he pulled the trigger. Nothing that the police could do anything about anyway. Think about that. His actions were premeditated, but I haven’t heard anything yet about a website or a manifesto, so he’s probably not a terrorist. We can’t prevent this kind of situation without changing gun laws, which wouldn’t be hard, or changing how we deal with mental health, which would be extremely hard.
The majority of people want some kind of restrictions on gun ownership, but we have people in congress who were elected by a minority. This is due to the level of money allowed in politics. We’re working on changing these things, but they are going to take time and meanwhile, people are going to die.
It’s an obscene situation, Wayne Lapierre has taken over the NRA and turned into a lobbyist firm for the gun manufacturers which means they are setting gun policy in the US not the voters.
Lapierre is living a millionaire lifestyle all so that thousands of Americans are killed a year and everybody else gets to live in constant fear of the tiny minority that have no rational reason to be in possession of deadly weapons.
If you're a transparency fan like me, you appreciate knowing what kind of skin public people have in the game during episodes like this. So what did the NRA pay Lapierre to say that the best way to stop school shootings is to have the government put every mentally ill person in the nation on a watch list and arm school personnel to defend schools like banks?
Just under a million bucks.
If people want to own guns they should first be screened to show they do not have a criminal background, everyone should be required to take a safe gun handling and storage course and anyone with mental conditions that makes them a danger to themselves and others should be prevented from buying or owning guns.
This idea that just being American makes someone safe to own and used is disproved thousands of times every year, this is just the most deadly and traumatizing example of this insane policy of allowing virtually anyone to own and use guns in the US.
Here’s an idea, how about the US declare the NRA a terrorist organization.
They prevent the rule of law by making it not just possible but easy for the lunatic fringe in the country to enact their desire to take out as many other Americans as possible by blocking rational gun laws.
There’s also spokespersons for the NRA who advocate such insane things as North Korea nuking California instead of Guam.
Then go nuts when anyone refers to guns as weapons.
The far right in the US is insane whether it’s Rush Limbaugh claiming that hurricanes are fake news to this idiot claiming that guns aren’t weapons.
But don’t worry America, you’ve got a Congress that is there to represent your interests and protect you and this issue has been around for decades. Surely the republican dominted Congress has something in the works to solve this deadly issue.
In the wake of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, advocates of stricter gun control are criticizing a Republican bill to make it easier to buy silencers.
As news still trickled in about the Sunday night's shooting at Route 91 Harvest Festival at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was one of a number of gun control supporters who raised concerns about the proposed legislation.
"The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots," she tweeted on Monday morning. "Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer."
In case anyone wonders what it’s like to be a victim of one of these mass shootings;
Guns don’t kill people, Wayne Lapierre, the NRA and US gun manufacturers with the assistance of the republican party kill people.
Once again, the congressional republican response to the ongoing carnage in the US is to make it easier to buy silencers. They are clearly on the side of the murderers not the victims.
If people want to own guns they should first be screened to show they do not have a criminal background, everyone should be required to take a safe gun handling and storage course and anyone with mental conditions that makes them a danger to themselves and others should be prevented from buying or owning guns.
This idea that just being American makes someone safe to own and used is disproved thousands of times every year, this is just the most deadly and traumatizing example of this insane policy of allowing virtually anyone to own and use guns in the US.
Nobody has that idea, that's why we already have a system in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Background_Check_System
Nobody has that idea, that's why we already have a system in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Background_Check_System
How the hell would you know, you're not even American...
And there is no effective system of gun control in America, watch the video you pathetic troll, the asshole that blew 59 people away and wounded over 500 more some of which will also likely die had 20 guns with him and an automatic weapon that he burned through clip after clip with.
It was a war zone in Las Vegas and it remains one across the US as long as insane lobby groups like the NRA are allowed to dictate gun laws through their pets the republicans.
Why there’s no real gun control in America right now.
Q: Where do you get an illegal firearm?
A: From someplace where it's legal.
A new report from the Trace, a Michael Bloomberg-backed media organization seeking to resolve the roots of gun violence across the United States, sheds further light on the "apparent paradox" of Chicago's consistently high rates of shootings despite the city boasting some of the country's strictest gun laws.
In 2014, Chicago saw 390 murders and more than 2,500 shootings, adding to its reputation as one of the U.S. cities with the highest absolute numbers of shootings and killings (though not when adjusted for population). Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy blamed the city's epidemic of violence on the widespread availability of guns. "If these guys [were] throwing rocks at each other we wouldn't have this problem," McCarthy told the Chicago Tribune (paywall).
Gun-rights supporters often point to Chicago's endemic violence as evidence that gun control doesn't work. But the Trace's investigation suggests the real problem is the lax gun laws everywhere else.
Citing Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives data — which shows that approximately 60% of guns used in crimes across Illinois came from out of state — the Trace built an infographic demonstrating just how many guns flow into the city from states with less restrictive gun laws.
America is an exceptional country when it comes to guns. It’s one of the few countries in which the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected. But America’s relationship with guns is unique in another crucial way: Among developed nations, the US is far and away the most violent — in large part due to the easy access many Americans have to firearms. These charts and maps show what that violence looks like compared with the rest of the world, why it happens, and why it’s such a tough problem to fix.
It's a very simple equation, countries with fewer guns have fewer gun deaths. Canada with much more effective guns laws has 5 gun deaths per 1 million people. The US with extremely lax gun laws has 30.
States with fewer guns have fewer gun deaths, the suicide rate in states with fewer guns is less and on and on. Guns kill that's what they're designed for, they're not toys, they're not tools, they're not a way for people to seek vengeance outside the law which they are commonly used for in the US.
How the Las Vegas shooter may have got a fully automatic weapon or a device that turned a semi-automatic rifle like an AR-15 into a nearly fully automatic weapon.
One of the easiest, and a leading theory among gun experts speculating about the shooter's weapons, is a so-called "hellfire trigger," or "gat crank": A simple device bolted to an AR-15's trigger well can allow anyone to fire their semi-automatic by turning a rotary crank, firing several shots with every rotation. That can allow a shooter to easily fire hundreds of rounds a minute, compared to the 80 or 100 shots or so the average shooter could manage with normal trigger squeezes. Though that rate of fire would no doubt overheat a normal AR-15, the shooter reportedly had 19 rifles in his hotel room, potentially making it possible to swap a new one in as needed.
Another easy add-on that transforms a semi-automatic rifle to a virtually automatic one is a so-called "slide fire," or "bump" stock. That device adds a spring mechanism to the part of the rifle that presses into a shooter's shoulder, so that the entire rifle bounces forward with every detonation of a round of ammunition. The shooter merely holds his or her trigger finger in place, and that bouncing pulls the trigger again and again at a rate that approximates machine gun fire, as shown in this slow motion video:
Although gat cranks and bump stocks turn AR-15s and AK-47s into functionally automatic rifles, they're not clearly illegal. While automatic weapons have been banned in the US since 1986, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms only considers a gun to be automatic if a single pull of its trigger results in a multiple rounds being fired. The bump stock does in fact pull the rifle's trigger with every shot. The gat crank doesn't involve pulling a trigger at all, leaving it in a more legally murky realm that hasn't stopped the devices from being widely sold.
But for anyone willing to simply break the law, converting a semi-automatic AR-15 to a full-fledged automatic weapon isn't hard, says Defense Distributed's Sullivan. An automatic rifle uses a tiny component in its trigger assembly called an "auto sear". That key piece of metal catches the rifle's hammer after every round's explosion, when the expanding gases inside the gun's chamber propel the bullet out the barrel, and push the bolt back to pick up another round from the gun's magazine. When the bolt hits a spring in the gun's stock and bounces forward again, it releases the hammer to hit the gun's firing pin, without any interaction with the trigger, as shown in the video below:
With just a hand drill, a drill press, or a computer-controlled milling machine, anyone can drill a few holes and also widen the cavity inside an AR-15's frame, Sullivan says. That way, it can accept an M16 auto-sear, available for sale online, giving a semi-automatic rifle a fully automatic firing mechanism. "It's about four minutes of work, and it's exceptionally easy to do," says Sullivan. That resulting homemade automatic rifle is also highly illegal, with penalties of hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and years in prison, for simply possessing it.
There are over 5 million AR-15s in civilian hands in the US and with the right parts and tools available online they can be turned into fully automatic weapons comparable to the military M-16 in 5 minutes.
Nobody has that idea, that's why we already have a system in place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Background_Check_System
How the hell would you know, you're not even American...Well, even here at KGB hq, I can look up relevant information.
And there is no effective system of gun control in America, watch the video you pathetic troll, the asshole that blew 59 people away and wounded over 500 more some of which will also likely die had 20 guns with him and an automatic weapon that he burned through clip after clip with.
It was a war zone in Las Vegas and it remains one across the US as long as insane lobby groups like the NRA are allowed to dictate gun laws through their pets the republicans.
Incorrect.
Gun control is effective in America, the problem is that its impossible to tell when someone might snap.
The raw numbers say it all, it doesn’t matter what the NRA, the republicans or the gun industry claims.
America has 4.4% of the world’s population.
It has 40% of the domestic guns.
It has the highest rate of gun deaths of any developed nation.
6 times that of Canada.
16 times that of Germany.
About 30,000 Americans are killed by guns each year, that’s a Vietnam war every two years.
About 2/3s are suicides.
People who attempt suicide by cutting are “successful” 5% of the time, 7.4% with poison. People who attempt suicide with a gun kill themselves 96.5 % of the time.
Any idiot could see that guns are in fact deadly and that gun control actually prevents violent death it doesn’t increase it. And that requires federal gun control, as they’ve found in Chicago and other places local gun control does nothing to prevent gun deaths. People just bring in guns from other cities and states.
It’s time to end this bloody war on the US population by the gun industry.
Though I have never been a “fan” of the Second Amendment I have supported it because I have always feared the possible consequences in changing our constitution. That being said, I will no longer support the Second Amendment as written.
Gun control is effective in America, the problem is that its impossible to tell when someone might snap.
For that to be true, there must be a lot less mental illness in the rest of the world. For that to be true, you would have to alter our understanding of the human mind.
There are so many loopholes in US federal gun control that it is meaningless. Control is patchwork across the nation which means you can have very tight gun control in some areas and still have incredible rates of gun violence.
This isn’t a situation of “someone snapping” as our resident troll is belching from under the bridge. This is a constant level of violence only made possible by the widespread availability of firearms of all kinds across the US. The claim that gun ownership makes Americans safe, which is clearly the claim of the gun industry through its lobbying body the NRA, is completely refuted by the facts. The largest ownership of guns in civilian hands in the world makes Americans far more unsafe than they would be otherwise.
Chicago which has some of the strictest gun control laws in North America - tighter than any Canadian city - has some of the highest levels of gun violence in the world. The guns come in from across the country, there is a ring of gun dealers all around the county limits.
And this idea that automatic weapons are being controlled in America is also complete BS. If you can buy a semi-automatic AR-15 which is the civilian version of an M-16 you can easily own a weapon that can fire almost as many rounds as an M-16 as Jerry Miculek demonstrates on a video on this page.
You can get a “hellfire trigger”, or a “bump” stock and turn your semi-auto AR-15 or AK-47 into a full auto military grade weapon with easy. Or an online kit that transforms an AR-15 into an M-16.
Any sane gun control policy doesn’t need to know if someone is going to snap or not, it makes sure most of the weapons aren’t there in the first place. Why do some US citizens need to be armed like there is a looming war, the British aren’t coming anymore. This idea that the 2nd Amendment protects Americans is from the 18th not 21st century. It is stuck over 200 years in the past. It was created at a time when most Americans lived in the country where the nearest neighbor could be miles away and the entire nation was under the threat of British invasion which did occur in 1814. At a time when all weapons were muzzle-loaders and had poor accuracy even the rifled muzzle-loaders which struggled to hit human sized targets at more than a couple hundred yards.
If you know what you’re doing with a handgun you can hit a target at 1,000 yards with a handgun now as Jerry Miculek demonstrates here.
In the 1780s when the 2nd Amendment was enacted it took a rifleman up to a minute to load his weapon that was often so inaccurate that it couldn’t reliably hit a target at 100 yards, it’s why soldiers went into combat in large organized lines that stood facing each other and shot volley after volley.
As we just saw in Las Vegas, one man had enough firepower to kill 59 and wound over 500 in minutes. It would take a company of 1780s US militia to do that and they had actual enemies to face. All we have now in the US is US civilians attacking US civilians. Or police who are so paranoid about being shot by armed civilians that they kill thousands a year.
There have been over 1,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook, the question isn’t if there will be another mass shooting, it is when and they are almost daily events now somewhere in the US. If they’re not large enough they aren’t even reported.
This is what the kind of lax gun laws that the US gun manufacturers are imposing on the US through the NRA lobby is creating. The equivalent of a Vietnam War for the US every two years.
People can still commit violent crimes without firearms, but it is almost impossible to do something like the Las Vegas killer did without firearms. It makes it very easy for someone to kill and maim a huge number of people very easily. He probably had something like a gat trigger, or a full auto M-16 mod and high capacity mags of up to 100 rounds. That was sustained gunfire coming from that hotel window on the level of a military action and the casualties reflect this.
The US is never going to be safe from rampant gun violence as long as the gun industry through the NRA is allowed to dictate to Congress and the Oval Office exactly what the gun control laws are. The head of the NRA is paid millions of dollars to lobby for the gun industry, clearly the NRA is no longer a organization that protects citizens rights, it is a private sector lobby group.
The US needs effective gun control laws that actually get millions of guns that are not needed for anything off the streets. Canada has effective gun control laws, but if you are a hunter, a farmer, work in the bush in bear country or more you can still acquire almost any weapon you need.
I hunted decades ago. I took a hunter and gun safety course when I was 16 which was required to get a hunting license. When I turned 18 I applied for and got a firearms acquisition certificate from the RCMP that took 6 weeks after a background check. I eventually owned a high powered scoped .308 for hunting large game like moose and deer, a semi-auto 12 gauge for migratory wildfowl, a scoped .22 caliber for grouse and other upland gamebirds and for recreation I had a replica of an 1800s muzzle-loader.
I had friends that had .357 or .44 handguns because they were prospectors or did timber cruising for the forest industry and needed bear protection, but there were strict conditions attached people didn’t carry them around everywhere for “safety” creating a risk for everyone else. We could get all these weapons and still can, but they are tightly controlled. For a time here all firearms were supposed to be part of a national registry that the police could use to determine if anyone they might be interacting with had a weapon. The conservatives didn’t like it and killed the law over the protests of the police across the country because it saved lives.
The US can do much, much better, it doesn’t need to have hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands where they kill about 30,000 civilians each year and create the kind of tensions and paranoia that lead people to frequently use those weapons.
Here’s a look at how the NRA now works for the gun industry not Americans and in part why thousands of Americans instead of being taught responsible gun ownership which used to be one of the main goals of the NRA are now being placed in someone else’s cross-hairs to make a few people a lot of money. Including the head of the NRA.
In its early days, the National Rifle Association was a grassroots social club that prided itself on independence from corporate influence.
While that is still part of the organization's core function, today less than half of the NRA's revenues come from program fees and membership dues.
The bulk of the group's money now comes in the form of contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources.
Since 2005, the gun industry and its corporate allies have given between $20 million and $52.6 million to it through the NRA Ring of Freedom sponsor program. Donors include firearm companies like Midway USA, Springfield Armory Inc, Pierce Bullet Seal Target Systems, and Beretta USA Corporation. Other supporters from the gun industry include Cabala's, Sturm Rugar & Co, and Smith & Wesson.
The NRA also made $20.9 million — about 10 percent of its revenue — from selling advertising to industry companies marketing products in its many publications in 2010, according to the IRS Form 990.
Additionally, some companies donate portions of sales directly to the NRA. Crimson Trace, which makes laser sights, donates 10 percent of each sale to the NRA. Taurus buys an NRA membership for everyone who buys one of their guns. Sturm Rugar gives $1 to the NRA for each gun sold, which amounts to millions. The NRA's revenues are intrinsically linked to the success of the gun business.
The NRA Foundation also collects hundreds of thousands of dollars from the industry, which it then gives to local-level organizations for training and equipment purchases.
This shift is key to understanding why a coalition of hunters, collectors and firearm enthusiasts takes the heat for incidents of gun violence, like the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, rather than the companies that manufacture and market assault weapons.
Under Wayne Lapierre the NRA is a front for gun manufacturers and in exchange we get children massacred in schools, people attending church murdered because of color or politics, politicians shot in the head because other politicians pulling the strings of their base and now the worst massacre of US civilians by another civilian apparently for no other reason than it was possible to do it.
And this was only made possible by the freedom in acquiring highly sophisticated and deadly weapons that have no place in the hands of civilians. Anyone who's shot an AR-15 or AK-47 knows how deadly they are even in semi-auto mode and there are millions of these weapons across the US already in civilian hands. They can easily be modified to a level that is equal to a military grade weapon that can turn something like a music concert with 22,000 civilians enjoying their lives to a killing zone that many did not live through and most of those who did will never be the same.
All so that Wayne Lapierre and those he works for can make as much money as possible.
The NRA no longer has a place in the debate because it has willing placed itself in a position of a fundamental conflict of interest. The more guns that are sold the more money the NRA makes and the more money its leadership gets.
And more Americans die violently...
Anyone who thinks there is effective gun control in the US is full of the brown stuff.
In one typical month in 2015 there were about half as many guns sold in the US as there are in circulation in the UK or Australia. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/425272/september-americans-bought-least-176-million-guns-half-many-are-owned-all-australia
About 15 million sold in the US in 2015 alone on top of the already 300 million weapons in circulation in the US. The chances that none of these weapons will not be used in violent crime is effectively zero, the more guns there are in circulation the more people will be killed and wounded by them. People are not perfect, given the opportunity to commit violence some people will, we are not going to change human nature. What we can do is limit the opportunity for people to commit violence on the level that is made entirely possible by weapons that have reached a state of risk clearly not present over 200 years ago when the 2nd Amendment was drafted.
Few Americans live in the same conditions that were present 200 years ago, there are far more people living in densely packed cities. The US does not face the geopolitical situation it did in the 18th century. The main reason the 2nd Amendment is being protected by the NRA is that it allows millions of guns to be sold every year which sends millions of dollars either directly or indirectly to the NRA which is now part of the gun industry at multiple levels. There is no real separation of the NRA and gun makers.
This is what’s at stake for the NRA and gun makers.
$13.5 billion
Annual revenue of gun and ammunition manufacturing industry, with a $1.5 billion profit. (IBIS World)
$3.1 billion
Annual revenue of gun and ammunition stores, with a $478.4 million profit. (IBIS World)
It's about money not lives for both the NRA and gun makers.
