With More than 50 Dead in Las Vegas Massacre, Let’s Talk Gun Bans
As America wakes up to news that yet another mass shooting has ended dozens of lives and injured over 500 people, GOP politicians are offering “thoughts and prayers” but no actual answers to the crisis that threatens our nation: gun violence.
At this point, no one is sure yet what motivated 64-year-old white male Stephen Paddock to open fire on country music concertgoers in Nevada. ISIS has claimed that the retiree was a recent Muslim convert, but there’s absolutely no evidence to back up their account.
According to Paddock’s family, he was retired, with no history of mental health issues, no known financial problems, no grudges and no radical religious beliefs of any type — Christian, Muslim or otherwise. His relatives had no clue that Paddock was about commit the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. — an all-too-common phrase over the past several years.
“We have no idea how this happened,” brother Eric Paddock told the Las Vegas Review Journal. “It’s like an asteroid just fell on top of our family….There is no reason we can imagine why Stephen would do something like this. All we can do is send our condolences to the people who died. Just no reason, no warning.”
But there is one warning that Paddock, like most of the other shooters before him, did give. He owned a lot of guns.
According to police reports, he had 10 weapons in his room at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, where he was shot and killed by officers. Paddock was also known to have weapons at his home in a Nevada retirement community about 80 miles away from Las Vegas. And, somewhere along the way, he even picked up a machine gun that was used to kill or injure hundreds in a matter of moments.
“The brother said he knew Stephen Paddock had a couple of handguns and maybe one long rifle but did not know of any automatic weapons,” CNN reports. “Stephen Paddock did not have a machine gun when he moved him from Melbourne to Mesquite, Eric Paddock said.”
Nevada is one of the most lax states in the nation when it comes to gun laws. And unsurprisingly, the National Rifle Association sees absolutely no reason for that to change in light of this massive violent tragedy.
“[Nevada NRA affiliate president Don] Turner described Nevada’s gun laws as ‘libertarian’ and ‘not very restrictive.’ Turner noted that it is perfectly legal for Nevada residents to own assault rifles and that ‘the only restriction on magazine capacity in Nevada is how strong you are,’ meaning if you can physically pick up the magazine it’s legal to carry,” Vice News reported Monday, after calling Turner for comment on the shooting.
According to Vice, Turner was at first unaware of the shooting, but after learning about the tragedy he responded that “when someone has that kind of mentality, it doesn’t matter what kind of laws you have.”
Regardless of what we learn about the shooter, Turner is completely wrong. A country that doesn’t have guns freely available is a country where terrorist attacks – when they do occur – have much smaller death tolls and fewer injuries.
Yet here in the United States, even the most sensible and minimal of gun laws — restricting semi-automatic weapons, limiting the types of ammunition for sale, capping the number of guns one person can own or even just closing gun show loopholes that allow people to purchase weapons without any sort of background check — are all scoffed at and torpedoed by the right.
Yesterday was the second anniversary of the Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon, which claimed the lives of nine people and injured a few dozen more. Today nearly 60 people are dead in Las Vegas and the number is expected to rise. Meanwhile, Congress was supposed to vote on a bill today to make guns even more deadly by eliminating a regulation on gun silencers.
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