Another mass shooting - largest in a good while, by a few victims

[iolo]

For those who like Americans, nothing can be more depressing than this obsession with playing cowboys with bang-bangs to save themselves from George 111 - or something, because trained troops would wipe out the nutters in no time flat. Are these people unutterably thick or just possessed by the devil?

 

[Keith&Co.]

1. Who do you Yanks hate each other so much?

Do you mean 'why?'
Everything about us is Us vs. Them. Our sports, our politics, our budget, our fashions, our traffic laws... We can't define ourselves without listing who we're not, and fuck the not.

2. Why do you yanks use guns as a first resort rather than the last resort. Or why let your anger get that far that guns seems a plausible solution?

When you have a hammer, either 1) all your problems come to resemble nails or 2) you only pay attention to those problems you can solve with a hammer.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Don't know what you're getting at. All I'm saying it seems like a long time between end of firing and the cops getting in, assuming those are accurate facts.

I was paraphrasing Trump today about his comments in Puerto Rico, that it wasn't as bad as Katrina.

Damn, should've caught that...got the sarcasm but not the reference.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

For those who like Americans, nothing can be more depressing than this obsession with playing cowboys with bang-bangs to save themselves from George 111 - or something, because trained troops would wipe out the nutters in no time flat. Are these people unutterably thick or just possessed by the devil?

They're paranoid. They want all the armaments they can possess, even SAMs in their back yards to shoot down black helicopters. They all hanker to be their own little warlords basically.

 

[Horatio Parker]

For those who like Americans, nothing can be more depressing than this obsession with playing cowboys with bang-bangs to save themselves from George 111 - or something, because trained troops would wipe out the nutters in no time flat. Are these people unutterably thick or just possessed by the devil?

It's minuteman myth, mixed with cowboy/indians frontier myth. Add a heavy dose of paranoia...

Somewhere reading about wwii, I remember reading that people don't realize how many of the combat deaths the bodies were in pieces. You'd think such combat minded people would follow stories of fighting in Mosul, where the narrower the streets, the greater difficulty getting at the enemy, the more the city was destroyed...

 

[ZiprHead]

For your moment of cringe...
http://leftwingnation.org/watch-this-commercial-for-bump-stocks-is-everything-that-is-wrong-with-gun-culture-in-america/

 

[Horatio Parker]

Many of the injuries were likely caused by the panic. In war, kias usually make up a third of casualties. That would suggest +-180 wounded by gunfire.

The smoke from the shooting set off the smoke alarms, which led security to his room. That might've thrown off his planning.

We'll see...I saw one headline today about "descending into madness", still my theory.

 

[blastula]

Looking at video of the shooting, especially the footage without cuts... he fires off six long bursts of fire in the first four minutes of the attack, each lasting about ten seconds. Call it 6 to 10 rounds per second. So firing off a drum magazine from a fully automatic rifle like a modified AR-15. So call it 600 rounds in the first three minutes, by which point the place is in chaos and everyone is already running.

LVPD is saying that around 500 people were injured and 56 were killed... which would seem to suggest that this guy, from a range of like 300+ meters, fired off an automatic weapon under uncertain wind conditions spray-and-pray style, apparently with no real combat training or experience, and managed to achieve a better than 90% hit rate.

The injury count may not be all due to gunshot. People were trampled.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Making guns illegal won't disarm the criminals. Thus I would not expect to see much change there. Making guns illegal does keep the crazies from engaging in mass shootings but that's about it. Just look at Australia--graph the murder rate before and after, you can't see the point where they did their big gun ban.

The thing is you are focusing on guns. I don't care, I'm looking at dead innocents regardless of method. You may feel better by saving that shooting victim but if it comes at the cost of a couple of people stabbed to death it's not worth it.

Making guns illegal will make less guns available for criminals and make illegal guns more expensive.

It will not make the world perfectly safe.

Only safer.

Despite all the hype it didn't work in Australia.

1) The murder rate was already going down, the gun-banners are taking credit for this. All you actually see is noise around the trend line, just what you would expect to see if nothing were changed. Gun bans simply disarm the law-abiding.

2) They've had mass shootings since.

3) Given their population many years between crazies would be expected anyway. We simply don't have enough data.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Making guns illegal won't disarm the criminals. Thus I would not expect to see much change there. Making guns illegal does keep the crazies from engaging in mass shootings but that's about it.

Umm... isn't that like.... umm... what we are going for?

Yeah, you're going for your objective with no regard for the cost.

Just look at Australia--graph the murder rate before and after, you can't see the point where they did their big gun ban.

The thing is you are focusing on guns. I don't care, I'm looking at dead innocents regardless of method.

Well that seems really fucking stupid. Wait... make that extraordinarily fucking stupid. Method doesn't matter? I don't believe in seat belt laws. How a person dies is irrelevant.

The thing is you are refusing to see that there's a downside to a gun ban. The self-defense cases vastly outnumber the mass shootings and you're going to throw those out in your quest to disarm the nuts. (And don't be sure that disarming the nuts has that much benefit, anyway--he probably would have been more effective had he rented a U-haul and loaded it to maximum weight.)

You may feel better by saving that shooting victim but if it comes at the cost of a couple of people stabbed to death it's not worth it.

It'd been harder to kill and harm those people throwing a box of knives out the window at that hotel. I mean yeah, people would have been hurt, but... probably not quite as bad.

I meant at the cost of a couple of people stabbed by knife-wielding assailants they couldn't defend against. I'm looking at the big picture, not just the shootings.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And I suppose 2 + 2 = 3 is also a fact?

Reality:

1) The range was long and he was firing into a very noisy environment. The shots weren't identified at first anyway--suppressing a noise that isn't heard anyway means nothing.

2) At the range he was shooting a subsonic round isn't going to do much and a suppressor does nothing about the CRACK! of the supersonic flight of the bullet. People in the hotel would hear him no matter what.

3) Once the fact that there was a shooter was known it would be much easier to locate him by the muzzle flash and by the broken window than to locate him by sound.

"Reality" is not the same thing as whatever opinion you pulled from your ass. In EVERY video from the scene, the sounds of the gunshots are very audible - so much so that even you - Mr. Self-Appointed Expert of Everything - claimed he couldn't possibly have had a fully-automatic gun because the spacing between shots wasn't perfectly even.

It may have taken people a few seconds to realize the sounds they heard were gunshots and not fireworks, but the fact they could hear the sounds allowed them to react quicker than if people simply started dropping and bleeding with no discernable reason.

It's apparent you aren't paying attention to the actual evidence.

1) The people being shot at didn't realize it until they started noticing the hits. The shots were drowned out by the music.

2) Check what the police are saying. A whole bunch of rifles with bumpfire stocks. No mentions of any full auto weapons.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I read today that it was 72 minutes from the first 911 call to the cops entering the room.

I think he was located at 20 minutes. Then they called SWAT. A very big question is going to be, were the Police holding their lives over the public's well being.

72 minutes, I presume you can only maintain a psychotic high for so long.

A cop located him but didn't enter--but didn't need to as he wasn't shooting anymore at that point. The guy had a camera in the hall, for the cop to have entered would be suicide--and perhaps counterproductive besides. Watching the cop in the hall would keep him from shooting, if the cop in the hall was dead he could have gone back to shooting if there still were people who hadn't reached safety.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

The guy had a camera in the hall, for the cop to have entered would be suicide--and perhaps counterproductive besides.

Why not break the camera or otherwise disable its function?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Actually, if he had used a truck or bus he could have killed many more. There were over 20,000 people crammed in shoulder to shoulder with no place to run. From the videos I saw of the area there was nothing in place to stop a large truck, only fences that confined the audience. If he had stolen a large truck and drove through the fence at 50mph, he could have probably killed four or five hundred of them and wounded many more.

Well yeah, there should be some licensing and registration/insurance requirements around driving a large truck. I mean it's not exactly safe, people might use it to kill someone.

aa

A 27' U-haul would be just about as effective and has no special licensing requirements. The extra licensing for the heavies is because they're so long, normal driver training isn't enough.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Looking at video of the shooting, especially the footage without cuts... he fires off six long bursts of fire in the first four minutes of the attack, each lasting about ten seconds. Call it 6 to 10 rounds per second. So firing off a drum magazine from a fully automatic rifle like a modified AR-15. So call it 600 rounds in the first three minutes, by which point the place is in chaos and everyone is already running.

LVPD is saying that around 500 people were injured and 56 were killed... which would seem to suggest that this guy, from a range of like 300+ meters, fired off an automatic weapon under uncertain wind conditions spray-and-pray style, apparently with no real combat training or experience, and managed to achieve a better than 90% hit rate.

No. He only hit 128. The rest of the injuries were due to the stampede.

So I feel like there something really weird about the reporting so far and we're missing a huge part of it. Maybe more of the injuries or even deaths were caused by the crowd panicking and trampling people than the actual gunfire? I'm ALMOST willing to buy the "second shooter" theory, as weird as that sounds.

It's no secret that most of them were trampling. I'm actually surprised at only 500. I rather suspect there are a lot of lesser injuries that weren't reported at the time. (Medical capabilities were swamped, those whose injuries didn't need immediate attention would be doing a public service by getting care elsewhere.)

What seems weird to me is the fact that he still had thousands of rounds of ammunition laying around at the time he shot himself. Doesn't seem to me like spraying bullets into a huge crowd of people naturally progresses to a "Welp... my work is done here!" moment where you just kind of give up and kill yourself. One would think that if you have gone so deep into the moral event horizon that you're in the process of committing a mass murder, you're probably only going to kill YOURSELF as a last resort to escape punishment. But with that kind of arsenal sitting on his lap, his not wanting to shoot it out with the SWAT team is probably the strangest thing we've been told about him so far.

A security guard showed up, then a cop showed up. While neither entered they were a distraction--he was watching his six (he had a camera hidden in the hall) rather than shooting. At some point during the standoff he killed himself. (No surprise--most of these guys either kill themselves or go at the cops and get killed.)

 

[Alcoholic Actuary]

Well yeah, there should be some licensing and registration/insurance requirements around driving a large truck. I mean it's not exactly safe, people might use it to kill someone.

aa

A 27' U-haul would be just about as effective and has no special licensing requirements. The extra licensing for the heavies is because they're so long, normal driver training isn't enough.

I'd love to see you try to rent a u-haul without a license. But you digress. Why would anyone go through the trouble of renting a u-haul and driving it into a crowd - possibly endangering themselves in the process - when acquiring fully automatic weapons is so much easier?

aa

 

[Horatio Parker]

The guy had a camera in the hall, for the cop to have entered would be suicide--and perhaps counterproductive besides.

Why not break the camera or otherwise disable its function?

It, or one of them, was on a room service tray or cart. In the moment it may not have been noticed.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

A couple of my friends actually told me that they intend to buy separate parts of an AR-15 and assemble them together to avoid having it registered by the government and therefore tracked for fear of future confiscation by the government. They have no particular exceptional gunsmithing skills or abilities.

Assembling your own gun from parts doesn't stop it from being traced. For ATF purposes the lower receiver is the gun, sales are subject to the same rules as for complete guns.

The only way to make your own is to buy the rest of the parts and buy a chunk of metal that looks rather like the lower receiver. You have to mill it yourself--and to stay legal you must do all the work yourself, nobody can help you. This requires machinist skills, or these days you can go buy a gadget called a Ghost Gunner that's a CNC machine that does all the work. Put in the blank, do what it tells you () and it produces a lower receiver.

The result is a legal gun with no serial number. However, it is permanently yours--to transfer it by any means (other than giving it to the cops) is illegal. When you die it must be destroyed.

 

[bilby]

Making guns illegal will make less guns available for criminals and make illegal guns more expensive.

It will not make the world perfectly safe.

Only safer.

Despite all the hype it didn't work in Australia.

1) The murder rate was already going down, the gun-banners are taking credit for this. All you actually see is noise around the trend line, just what you would expect to see if nothing were changed. Gun bans simply disarm the law-abiding.

Murder rate is not the issue. Mass shootings are the issue.

Guns are not banned in Australia; they are heavily regulated.

Your goalposts are not where they started.

2) They've had mass shootings since.

But FAR fewer than before. The objective is to massively reduce the problem, and that has been achieved. Failure to completely eliminate the problem doesn't make a massive reduction in it undesirable; perfect cannot be the enemy of good.

3) Given their population many years between crazies would be expected anyway. We simply don't have enough data.

Sure we do. (And by the way, if we didn't, then you would have no possible basis for your claims that the reforms were ineffective). There was almost one mass shooting per annum before the Howard reforms; There is less than one per decade since.

A 90% decline is well above any statistical noise.

I understand that you would prefer that the Australian approach had failed; but fallacious arguments, goalpost shifting, and statistics abuse don't constitute evidence that your preferences match reality.

Every one of your three points having (yet again) been called out as the nonsense that they are, I hope that you will stop repeating them. To do so would be dishonest. Again.

 

[Opoponax]

Making guns illegal will make less guns available for criminals and make illegal guns more expensive.

It will not make the world perfectly safe.

Only safer.

Despite all the hype it didn't work in Australia.

1) The murder rate was already going down, the gun-banners are taking credit for this. All you actually see is noise around the trend line, just what you would expect to see if nothing were changed. Gun bans simply disarm the law-abiding.

2) They've had mass shootings since.

3) Given their population many years between crazies would be expected anyway. We simply don't have enough data.

Bilby's already done the heavy lifting response-wise to this^ post, but I'll point out a couple of other loosely philosophical things.

We outlaw and regulate things because they represent a danger to the public at large. Now, for the moment, put aside how you may feel about the following issue. The point is what matters, not the specific topic I'm about to discuss. Take cocaine or heroin for example. They're illegal because of the damage they do to the individual and society. The fact is that the vast majority of people who try drugs don't get addicted because they can use casually with nothing worse to show for it than a bad hangover and possibly some regrettable behavior. However, the ones that do become addicted are a huge fucking problem. Crime, blight, plunging property values, and huge resources are expended because of these people's behavior. And because of that, society has overwhelmingly agreed that such substances should not be legal.

The same should apply to semi-auto weapons. I'm mechanically fucking incompetent, but it's something that even I could do. I'm not talking about bump-stocks or cranks either; I mean fully automatic fire with a few simple adjustments. And believe it or not, I own what's generally known as an AK-47. I sure as hell wouldn't convert it because I happen to value my freedom, but if I wanted to, I could be sending 500+ rounds a minute downrange by next week. I won't do that though and I certainly wouldn't go gunning down people under any circumstances. But here's the thing: there are obviously people who do.

Is my freedom to own a semi-auto combat rifle more important than all of the lives of those people in Vegas combined? Of course not. It's not worth a single goddamn injury. And I'd give that rifle up in a minute if the law called for it because I really do believe in that whole silly "common good" thing. My desire to have fun at the range with my muthafukkin Ay-kay yo, is outweighed by the overall needs and rights of society.

I have an argument as to why bolt-actions and shotguns are different, but that's for a different thread.