It’s true NV is an open carry state. It’s not true that hotels and casinos want or assist open carry. Wynn has put in metal detectors.
I’m sure they are all hoping and praying that a group of gun nuts doesn’t decide to exercise their right to walk up and down the strip with rifles strapped to their backs in the next couple of weeks, but all the ingredients are there now to make that cake a reality.
One pic of that would be disastrous for Vegas. It’s bad enough anyway that this is going to bring a lot of attention to the fact that it’s open carry. Lots of people would never have known or thought about it.
Apparently you either have the intelligence or the intellectual integrity of a three-year old. As I clearly noted, and I’ll quote myself: :…practically that means the CDC has extremely limited funding to do any proper research into gun violence".
This isn’t the Pit, so I’ll keep my response civil. No, you sweet little snowflake, to defeat this claim you would need to show evidence that the government is free to give funding to the CDC for the research of gun violence without it being political suicide due to the NRA. You need to show evidence that the CDC is free to fund studies on gun violence to the extent that it feels appropriate.
Is it possible for the CDC to do research? Theoretically / technically sure. But where’s the money supposed to come from? A tip jar sitting at the CDC reception counter? Can and do they issue grants on its own? Sure - they can do that. The CDC itself isn’t subject to *direct *harassment from the NRA. But again - where is the CDC supposed to get the funds for these studies?
Courtney Lenard of the CDC:
So - to recap. You’re not only wrong, you’re either wrong and too stupid to realize it, or you’re wrong and you know you’re wrong but your too intellectually dishonest or morally corrupt to admit it.
Dude - you do realize we can go back and read stuff you posted, right? You do know we can see what you posted then and what you now claim to have posted and see you’re full of shit, right?
Bolding mine.
Please explain how when you wrote ‘he strapped them to his back and carried them up’ somehow meant “Oh, I didn’t actually think he strapped them to his back and carried them up, I think he got the Bellhop to carry them up”.
Then why do automatic weapons exist? Is there any situation in which they’re more deadly?
That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. Of course automatic weapons are deadlier in many situations. Your assertion is laughable on its face. More bullets into a crowd = more deaths. If you’re hunting a deer, or sniping a single bad guy, then semi-auto is better. But a terrorist attack against a crowd? Of course automatic fire is more deadly!
Anti-gun people sometimes get the facts and logic entirely and absurdly wrong. This is an example of some pro-gun people being absurdly wrong on the facts and logic.
This was the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter in US history. It boggles the mind how anyone could think that the automatic or near-automatic rates of fire weren’t directly related to the fact that it was so deadly.
Bone and Huricaneditkca have both said that they had no problem bringing their guns in to hotels. I don’t know if they said that they concealed them in any way, but did mention that there was no suspicion on their part.
I have not seen anyone make a claim or a cite that hotels in general, or this one specifically, had any sort of policy against open carry.
Even if they did not allow open carry, (which I have not seen claimed) it still would arouse no suspicion if it were obvious that he had dozens of guns in his bags. Even if his bags had come open, and his guns went rolling across the floor, security’s only response would be to make sure that he got his property back.
Rereading my post, I can see how I made it more of claim then I meant to. I shoulda put in a WAG, so my bad. My point in that post was only that there was no one that would have stopped him if they would have seen a gun. I did say that I don’t know how he got the guns up there, just that it was easy, that he could have just carried them on up openly, with no one asking any questions.
I keep thinking that this incident is a real game changer.
There’s been a real focus on the numbers. I think it used to be that a spree killer would take his revenge by shooting some people and getting killed, and that was enough to satisfy him. Now though there has been this huge focus on numbers. In order to be respectable a spree killer needs to wrack up a big number, or… go for the record. All the headlines and all the focus were about the number. That’s a bad emphasis and it’s one that future spree killers are going to focus on, going for the record.
Soft targets. We are at a place now where we need to think twice about concentrating in large groups in unprotected areas. These are soft targets and very attractive to a spree killer.
This guy is not typical. He was a wealthy successful businessman, an accountant. I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that he must have been pretty stable and normal and intelligent to have been successful and accumulated the wealth that he accumulated. We associate spree killers with not being particularly intelligent, or capable of thinking things out, or being particularly stable. It almost seems inherently contradictory to think of a rational intelligent successful person going on a spree kill. The saving grace behind a lot of spree killers is that they are not particularly smart or successful and rational, and therefore they don’t do as good a job on their spree kill as they otherwise might.
This guy is different. This was very carefully considered and thought out and executed, likely over a very long time period. He selected a target, explored venues, considered means, planned ahead, he even brought a hammer to break a window. It doesn’t fit the general meme of an irrational man going on a rampage. This was very intellectualized and considered. The other issue is that I heard this guy had a private plane, and was also in possession of a lot of precursors to homemade high explosives, and or chemical weapons. This is in no way to suggest that his access to miltary grade weapons was excusable, but in this case I don’t think gun controls would have stopped him. He was determined, smart, and used a lot of planning, and it seems pretty clear that he was experimenting with other means of creating a mass killing than just guns. He ultimately chose guns but if couldn’t access them, it’s very likely he would have gone the explosive chemical route and based on the forethought and execution he used, it’s likely we would have achieved a similar result.
I don’t think we have heard the last of this guy. At some point I think we will receive his manifesto in some form. I think he will have wanted to explain himself.
Anyway the takeaway from that is that it’s very hard to defend against a wealthy, successful, mature intelligent person who is determined to do something like this. In the past I had thought that there was a self-selection process where the fact that you were intelligent, mature, wealthy and successful over a long period of time usually suggested that this is not the kind of thing you would want to do, that the two are mutually exclusive. That seems to have changed and not sure why, have no guess, and don’t know what to do about it.
I think a lot of people don’t relate to the violence in our culture, but it is clearly a legacy of the manner by which this country was settled and formed. The descendants of White (mostly Anglo-European) settlers who conquered the land (and people well beyond our borders) to some degree operate with the belief that when someone gets in between them and what is rightfully theirs, that violence is an option that’s on the table. Look at the people who were solidly behind the invasion of Iraq. Look at the silent majority who refused to give up in Vietnam. Who are the people who embrace capital punishment and harsh treatment in America’s prisons the most? We’re talking about guns, but we could just as easily talking about other issues, such as race and culture because they’re never far from each other. America got its shape on the map through violence. It’s not surprising that a large number of people, particularly those whose American ancestry dates back to the 19th, 18th, or even 17th Century, would view violence as “the price of freedom”. More accurately, it’s the price of preserving the same culture that was passed down to them from one generation to the next. It’s the price of keeping that America alive and well.
On a different tangent, it occurs to me that there are different “Americas”. There’s the America that I just described, the one inherited by mostly White Euro-Americans, and then there’s the America that consists of “other” Americans and other White Americans who desire to see America progress beyond the Frontier nation that we and our parents and grandparents were born into. The impasse in the gun debate essentially comes down to each America’s distrust of the other. The Frontier America believes that the nation of their forebears, regardless of its acknowledged sins, is still a largely just society and that these other Americans ought to just accept and live by the standard we’ve inherited. This Frontier America believes that the problem isn’t the America we were born into, but rather the corruption of this culture by the dangerous “others,” which is why they favor more restrictions on, and surveillance of, “others” coming into the country and harsher punishments for “others” born here who, in their view, can’t function in their America. By contrast, we have these “other” Americans, be they immigrants, the descendants of immigrants, the descendants of slaves, or just plain white dissidents, who see obvious problems with the archaic culture that these descendants of the rugged individualists have maintained and would rather push us all into a new age - hopefully one that relies less on social inequity and dominance and more on cooperation between different rungs of society. When we talk about guns, we’re really talking about a lot of other issues at the same time, as they all eventually come back to these same core issues.
I will say however, that I spend a total of 4 weeks a year in Vegas, and I want to hear the hotels address the carry issue publicly or my own plans may change. It’s not illegal to carry in a hotel/casino, but they don’t have to allow it either.
I don’t think that’s true at all. James Holmes, the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooter, was a doctoral student in neuroscience. The Colombine shooters were more or less normal weird high school kids. The Unibomber was a mathematician. Or look at someone like former CEO John McAfee. He never went on a shooting spree, but he was an extremely successful drug-addled lunatic who may have murdered his neighbor in Belize.
Certainly mental illness is a factor. But I do think there is a bit of a “mad genius” factor in some of these cases as well. I see it a fair amount in finance or tech. You have these guys who absolutely brilliant mathematicians or programmers, but to various degrees they have some sort of personality disorder. It may range from “just being a bit off” to almost sociopathic levels of narcissism, bipolar disorders or schizophrenia. They have few, if any, normal social or societal connections, but they are often placed in positions of great wealth or authority because of what they can do. Because they are a bit disconnected and so analytical, they often draw conclusions that seem amoral, unsympathetic and self serving.
In most cases, they just come across as mildly amoral jerks who think differently from most people. But it’s not hard to imagine in some extreme cases, the combination of high intellect and mental illness leads their strange thought processes to the bizarre conclusion of “I need to shoot all these people”.
This guy may have been a rarity, but he laid out a roadmap for anyone who feels like following in his footsteps. It would not take all that much planning to do what he accomplished. It sounds like he had more planned for later that he never got around to, which is good, but what he did accomplish was devastating enough, and easy enough to replicate.
If we were to take any steps to prevent this from happening again, then maybe we could stop the next mass shooter that is looking to break this guys record, but as long as we follow the advice of the 2A enthusiasts, there is not a thing we can do to stop the next one. Well, except stop gathering in large crowds, so as to not to present a target.
Okay, if you think that he had to go through all sorts of covert cloak and dagger in order to get the guns to his room, tell me what you think that hotel security would have done if they had seen that this guy had guns in his bags?
The question of how he got all those guns to his room is a sideline diversion that’s getting people pissed off about the wrong things. The fact is that it’s easy to get a bunch of guns into any hotel room in the country. Walking through the lobby and up to your room with the guns strapped to your shoulder would attract attention, so I doubt strongly that he did that. It’s very easy to pack guns in luggage, and yes, if he got a bellhop to carry up bags and one fell open with guns and ammo spilling out, the bellhop would have simply offered to help, because until Sunday, there has never been a reason for that to be a suspicious thing to do. A target shooter would want to bring his guns to his room and not leave them in the car.
Can we now move on and stop picking over which words someone used? It’s not a pertinent issue.
