Let’s start with what we know:
– this is the worst mass shooting in history.
– the shooter is dead, and started Sunday as a retired boomer with a lot of money (and apparently, a lot of guns), an Asian girlfriend, and a gambling problem.
– he was not adjudicated mentally unfit.
– he had no criminal background.
What we’re speculating on (as far as I know):
– motive
– how he got the guns.
I’m guessing the answer to the latter is pretty straightforward: illegally. Or he illegally modified legal guns. But either way, the man had resources and was not prohibited from owning a firearm, and yet he still had guns that were illegal to own. Let’s start with the claims being made (most before the bodies were all counted):
– Machine guns aren’t illegal in Nevada.
Technically true but misleading as hell — federally, they are highly regulated. No guns made after 1986 are legal for a citizen to own, and guns owned before that are legal under highly restricted circumstances: one must apply and wait, pay a tax, pass a background check. At no point can you legally own a machine gun without a license, there is no “gun show” loophole here.
Further, modifying a semi-automatic to be fully automatic (which rumors say he did, or had done), is illegal everywhere in the United States. Finally, someone with his resources could buy some machinery and make guns from scratch if he was so inclined and that would be totally untraceable. Guns are not all that complex.
A change to Nevada state law would not make a difference here.
– This would be worse if he had a silencer.
False. A silencer slows the bullet down and does not actually prevent the gun from making a noise. Movies lied to you. The act of slowing the bullet down, and absorbing the energy from an exiting bullet, heats a silencer. A fully-automated gun would wreck a silencer in short order.
The change to how a silencer is treated by the law would have zero impact on this guy. If he’d wanted to silence those guns he had the resources to do it.
– Most Americans support background checks! We need background checks!
False, because this guy would have passed any background check. He passed the checks required to get a pilot’s license. A rich, white boomer with no legal trouble or mental illness passes a background check 100% of the time.
Background checks would not have made a difference.
– Trump let the mentally ill get guns!
False, he removed a weird tie in between social security disability and the right to own guns that didn’t exist until last year.
Further, this man was at no point legally declared mentally unfit.
What Trump changed would not have made a difference here.
So far, the gun control arguments are 0-4 on “would it make a difference.”
Then what is the next argument? What do we need to do here? Nobody on the left has proposed anything that would have stopped what just happened, except for confiscation and complete banning. Good luck with trying to get that without a civil war.
Further stupid things I’ve seen:
– The shooter was a Trump supporter.
Unlikely.
– The shooter was a white supremacist.
False. I don’t know much about the white supremacist movement other than they like attention, but I do know that there’s no white supremacist in the world with an Asian girlfriend — those people stick to themselves. Further, what white supremacist (with an Asian girlfriend) is going to shoot up a country music concert?
– This is about race and gender. (So Sayeth the Dunham Horror.)
False. A white dude shooting a mostly white crowd? Not about race to anyone except you sick weirdos who live for racial strife. There’s no indication at this moment he targeted women more than men — so again, this argument is only for people like the Dunham Horror who live for gender strife.
– The people deserved it because country music fans are likely Trump supporters.
I’ve seen several people saying things along this line, including a now fired CBS employee. If this is how you feel about a tragedy I suggest you seek professional help because that’s fucked up. This is the exact moral equivalent to the Westboro Baptist church being gleeful about Orlando — and if that’s your view on the lives of others, left, right, or center, then you are as sick and demented as the Westboro Baptists.
I’m sick of politics, I’m sick of all the hate, but on every article about this that allows comments there are just a host of idiots making claims. Celebrities with less than high school educations are spouting stupid opinions about things that wouldn’t have prevented this. Jimmy Kimmel is blaming Republicans, and offering up… nada. But then, he’s turned into a radical lunatic quite rapidly.
Understand that you callous motherfuckers are dancing in the blood of victims and people like me aren’t going to forget, and we aren’t going to forgive. I will not take part in any entertainment product that might send a red cent to these shitbags, and I am not alone.
I don’t give my money to monsters.