Okay, now that there is a little clearer picture of the events at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, I have a few things to say about the event, the coverage and the people who jumped on to speak about things they know nothing about.
First off,I shouldn’t even have to say this, but if you don’t, some people think that it means you don’t feel this way. I, like everyone else I know, feel that this was a horrible, tragic event. I wish it had never happened. I frequent Las Vegas, I am familiar with the hotel, I have friends that happened to be at the concert the night before and I can’t possibly imagine the terror and heartbreak that so many were forced to endure either there at the show or in the time since. All of the attendees, their friends and loved ones have had to and continue to endure what I would certainly hope no person ever had to deal with.
So,”Why did this happen?”. The man obviously planned this very well and was very patient in his preparation. In our current society, trying to balance security with freedoms and convenience, I can’t imagine a policy that would have prevented this. Dumb luck might have prevented this though. Someone may have noticed the bags being brought in and raised an alarm of some type that might have prevented this. While he was out of the room, a random housekeeping employee may have gone in to check on towels or trash (not likely in a city that caters so well to their customers, especially those in the suites.), something like that. Without using TSA type security to enter the hotel, I just can’t come to any recommendations that would have impacted this. You can’t feasibly add the security to all of the entrances, there are just too many in each hotel. Besides the fact that these businesses want people to come in. One of the allures of the strip in Vegas is being able to walk from Hotel to Hotel and check them all out, this type of checkpoints would put an end to that. Can you imagine adding ten to fifteen minutes at a minimum to each building? Do you put some type of checkpoint at the elevators to check bags going to the room? That’s got it’s challenges as well, but it’s probably the best change that could help. The hotels would have to commit to giving up some expensive casino floor space to make room for the scanners, which is a pretty big challenge. Plus retro-fitting these areas isn’t an easy task, there is not a lot of space unaccounted for on a Vegs casino floor. They already have staff at the elevators in most of the hotels, so that wouldn’t be much of a problem, but I just see too many challenges to make it work.
Now to my favorite, “How can one man have that many weapons and/or ammunition”? This is one that generally comes from someone that doesn’t believe in the guns rights as they are in this country now. I am a guns rights supporter, so that usually puts me at odds with these people right off. I am by no means a “gun guy”, I own a few firearms, but not anything like this guy. If I had the money, I’d probably have more, but I have other things that use up my discretionary income. I point that out because I have no problem with him owning the firearms, they were collected over a long period of time, over 20 years by some accounts. The ammunition argument is one that no one will ever win with me. I have burned through 200 rounds of various ammunition at the range by myself, if you enjoy that type of thing, it goes quickly. High capacity magazines? Doesn’t even come in to play here. With the finances he had and the time he had, lower capacity would not have done much to mitigate the casualties. It doesn’t take any time at all to reload and he had the planning time and financing to purchase and load as many magazines as he wanted.
“We need to ban automatic weapons!” This one bothers me more than any that ever come up in these discussions. Let’s see if I can make this clear – automatic and select-fire weapons are by and large already illegal in the U.S. They were not used in this incident or any of the others in recent memory in the U.S. I don’t think I can say anything else on that.
Now, for the one argument that I agree with, bump stocks and trigger cranks are a problem. I don’t know what the solution is, because bump stocks in particular are relatively easy to legally make on your own. In addition, they are so rarely used, I don’t think there is a true fix here. They are just plain not feasible unless you have a large gathering, unaware and you don’t have a specific target, which is exactly what happened here. You give up so much accuracy that this was really the only scenario where one could be used to any advantage. Having said that, for the same reasons, I don’t think that there is any reason to manufacture or sell them. They are not defensible for any purpose at all, including recreational. Maybe there can be an argument made that they are only good in a recreational capacity, but I don’t see it.
As always, thanks for reading and I’ll be back soon when something hits me hard enough to feel the need.