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This week's “shooting rampage” in the gUn-happy States of America

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #450 on: October 03, 2017, 06:39:18 pm »



NEW   PAGE



from the Los Angeles Times....

More than 50 dead and 400 injured in shooting on
Las Vegas Strip; police say lone suspect is dead


By DAVID MONTERO and ALENE TCHEKMEDYIAN | 5:40AM PDT - Monday, October 02, 2017



MORE THAN 50 PEOPLE were killed and at least 400 others injured after a gunman opened fire on Sunday night at a country music festival opposite the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip, authorities said.

Police released the updated death toll in the early morning hours after a horrific night of violence that turned a concert into a scene of carnage. Though initial reports put the death toll at 20, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police tweeted later that at least 50 were dead.

Police said the suspect, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, a resident of Mesquite, Nevada, was killed after a SWAT team burst into the hotel room from which he was firing at the crowd.

“Right now we believe it's a solo act, a lone wolf attacker,” Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said. “We are pretty confident there is no longer a threat.” The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is a joint city-county force headed by the sheriff.

Authorities said the gunman appeared to have begun firing at 10:08 p.m. from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel toward the concert venue across the street.

Officers entered the room and engaged the suspect and “he is dead, currently,” Lombardo said, adding that authorities have no evidence of a motive. “We don't know what his belief system was at this time.”

Police said they have succeeded in locating a woman, identified as Marilou Danley, who was believed to be traveling with Paddock and is listed as living at his address in Mesquite, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. “We are confident we have located the female person of interest,” the department said on Twitter.

Mesquite Police Officer Quinn Averett, a spokesman for the department, said about 10 Mesquite officers were at the home early on Monday morning, holding a perimeter.

Authorities found several firearms in the suspect's hotel room, Lombardo said.

One of the dead is an off-duty police officer who was attending the concert, Lombardo said. Several other officers from Nevada and California, both on and off duty, were wounded by gunfire, officials said.

“A tragic and heinous act of violence has shaken the Nevada family,” Governor Brian Sandoval said on Twitter. “Our prayers are with the victims and all affected by this act of cowardice.”

President Trump tweeted his “warmest condolences and sympathies” to the victims and their families.

University Medical Center spokeswoman Danita Cohen said the hospital was treating “many patients” with gunshot wounds in the wake of the shooting. There were so many that citizens were arriving at the emergency room with gunshot victims loaded into their cars, local media reported.

The Clark County Fire Department estimated that approximately 406 people were transported to area hospitals.

Authorities established a command post and triage center, and shut down parts of the Strip in the hours after the shooting. Hotel guests blocked from returning to their hotels were shuttled to a center equipped with metal detectors.

Police initially investigated reports of a “suspicious device” down the street, outside the Luxor Hotel, but said later there appeared to be no explosive devices related to the incident, other than that used by the SWAT team breaching the room where the suspect was.

The three-day Route 91 Harvest country music festival was underway across Las Vegas Boulevard from the Mandalay Bay when the shooting erupted. Concertgoers reported a burst of weapons fire as a Jason Aldean performance was underway.

The shots appeared to be coming from an upper floor of the hotel, some witnesses said.

Video posted on social media showed the open-air concert fully underway when bursts of automatic gunfire rang out in rapid succession. Dozens of people dropped to the ground, screaming, while others ran, some in pairs or in groups with their arms linked.

The shooting went on for more than 30 seconds before the music stopped, and another burst was heard later.

“Get down, stay down,” one woman shouted. “Let's go,” another voice said. Another wave of gunshots followed soon after.

Seth Bayles, of West Hollywood, said Aldean had been performing for about 20 minutes when he heard shots.

“I thought it was like bottle rockets going off,” Bayles said. “Then we saw people dropping. We saw someone get hit and then we started running.”

Bayles said he was probably 50 feet from the stage when he heard the shots. “We saw people down all over the place.”

Bayles said Aldean was quickly pulled off stage, and soon after the band was brought off as well.

Two men near Mandalay Bay said they heard someone in a helicopter with a bullhorn yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” as the incident unfolded. Others said they saw police and SWAT teams streaming into the hotel.

Bernice Allard, who came to the concert with her husband, Frank Allard, said there was screaming when the shooting began. “Single shot. Single shot, then a lot of shots,” Frank Allard said.

He said he had come to see Eric Church, Sam Hunt and Aldean, who was into his fourth or fifth song when the shooting began. Allard said the crowd began to stampede and that he grabbed a nearby fence, stretched both arms wide and tried to shield his wife from the danger. Then they ran.

“We followed the crowd out,” Bernice Allard said.

Alarm spread up and down the Strip as news of the shootings spread.

Alfonzo Ewing said he had arrived shortly before midnight for an overnight shift as a cook at the White Castle at the Best Western Plus Casino Royale on the northern side of the Strip, a little more than two miles from Mandalay Bay.

“We heard reports of gunshots and customers rushed to jump the counter for safety. Everyone just took off running from the White Castle and the hotel,” said Ewing, 37. “Employees and customers went downstairs to hide in the break room. We’re here now, 15 of us, with customers. We're safe but we don’t know what's happening.”

Kevin Daly, 58, of Long Beach, said he had been playing pai gow at the MGM Grand Hotel, down the street from the concert venue, and left to see if he could play a Game of Thrones game near the entry when chaos erupted.

“All these people started running and screaming, and then that stopped for about a minute, and then more people started coming in the other way and ran through where I was,” he said. “There were so many people walking and running and people crying and people saying there's an active shooter on the street, so I finally asked one of the waitresses what's going on and she said the shooter is outside of the casino.”

Daly said the entire area was put on lockdown so he went upstairs to his room. “Out the windows, we can see Mandalay Bay, we can see all the police cars and all the lights and there are helicopters all over the place.”

Several off-duty Bakersfield police officers were attending the concert when the gunfire began, officials said. Bakersfield Police Lieutenant Jeff Burdick said they were not in a position to return fire.

One Bakersfield officer was wounded during the gunfire and was taken to a hospital for treatment, but is expected to survive, Burdick said.

“Our officers were actually attending the concert as civilians,” Burdick said, adding that the agency has accounted for every officer known to be there.

Officials at McCarran International Airport reported that some flights were diverted in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. “Expect delays,” the airport said on Twitter.

Hospital personnel across Las Vegas were paged to work, local media reported.

Parts of Interstate 15 near the Strip were also shut down, and hotel guests across the city were being ordered to shelter in place. The freeway reopened later, but offramps near the Strip remained closed through much of the night.

Aldean was the final act of the Route 91 Harvest festival, while dozens of others had played over the course of the weekend, including Church, Hunt and Maren Morris. In numerous tweets, artists communicated with fans and followers, expressing their sorrow and prayers for anyone injured and telling loved ones that they were safe.

Jake Owen, who played the main stage before Aldean, tweeted: “Praying for everyone here in Vegas. I witnessed the most unimaginable event tonight. We are okay. Others aren't. Please pray.”

Aldean himself responded on Instagram:

“Tonight has been beyond horrific,” he wrote. “I still don't know what to say but wanted to let everyone know that Me and my Crew are safe. My Thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved tonight. It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night. #heartbroken #stopthehate.”

Former broadcast journalist Dan Ball, 42, of Palm Desert, had been backstage as a friend of the country duo Big & Rich when they performed, then went to John Rich's bar “Redneck Riviera” nearby as Aldean took the stage.

“The tour manager came over to us and said shots were fired and people were down. We were locked down in the bar and hunkered down,” Ball said.

When he had been backstage during the performance, he said, he had marveled as he looked at the crowd and thought, “Isn't it great to look out there? We saw white, black, straight, gay, males, females, everyone out there having a good time. Moments later, these cowards commit a heinous act like this. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable.”


David Montero reported from Las Vegas and Alene Tchekmedyian from Los Angeles. L.A. Times staff writers Jaweed Kaleem, Seema Mehta and Jevon Phillips in Los Angeles; and Rong Gong Lin II in San Francisco contributed.

• David Montero is a national correspondent based in Las Vegas, primarily covering Nevada and the West for the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked at the Orange County Register, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Rocky Mountain News. He is a Southern California native and graduated from Cal State Fullerton.

• Alene Tchekmedyian is a Metpro trainee at the Los Angeles Times. She previously covered Glendale and Burbank police for Times Community News. She received her master's in journalism from Columbia University after graduating from UCLA, where she worked at the student-run Daily Bruin. She currently serves on the UCLA Communications Board, which oversees the university's student-run media publications. She grew up in Huntington Beach.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic (the Los Angeles Times has lifted its paywall from all stories about the Las Vegas shooting):

 • PHOTOGRAPH GALLERY: Shooting at country music festival on Las Vegas Strip

 • ‘We saw people dropping’: This is what eyewitnesses saw as a gunman opened fire on Las Vegas concert

 • Islamic State claims responsibility for Las Vegas massacre

 • Las Vegas casualty count rises: At least 58 killed, 515 injured

 • Fake news stories circulate after Las Vegas mass shooting

 • Her family has been affected by two mass shootings. She asks: After Las Vegas, will America finally act?

 • Las Vegas shooter wasn't known to be violent, his family says: ‘We are completely dumbfounded’

 • From the 32nd floor, Las Vegas gunman caused mass carnage despite security measures at concert

 • L.A. Times readers react: Now is exactly the right time to talk about gun control

 • L.A. firefighter in Las Vegas: ‘With 30,000 people … it was kind of like shooting goldfish’.

 • Fully automatic weapons found in gunman's hotel room in Las Vegas

 • Gunmaker stocks climb in aftermath of Las Vegas shooting

 • Southern California police, deputies and firefighters among the wounded in Las Vegas

 • Congressman briefed on Las Vegas shooting probe says no motive has emerged for the attack

 • Trump calls for unity in the face of ‘pure evil’ while resisting talk of gun control

 • MGM Resorts shares sink after shooting in Las Vegas

 • Las Vegas, headquarters of American escapism, offers no shelter from a madman with guns

 • Las Vegas shooting, no matter how horrific, won't bow music fans; we don't break like that

 • Las Vegas shooting victims: Portraits of the fallen

 • When the shooting stopped, 59 distant lives ended together at a Vegas country music concert


http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-las-vegas-mandalay-bay-20171001-story.html
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« Reply #451 on: October 03, 2017, 06:41:56 pm »


Wait for it.....another load of verbal shit from Reality/Donald............
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« Reply #452 on: October 03, 2017, 06:42:15 pm »

Ok...par for the course...get beaten in a debate....and go into a cut and paste multiple posts fetish as some kind of demented defense...good on ya buddy...if you Eva get sick of NZ you'd make a really good Aussie battler😉

( no offence to most aussie battlers)
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« Reply #453 on: October 03, 2017, 06:56:45 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

EDITORIAL: The slaughter in Las Vegas is all too familiar,
yet Americans refuse to stop it


By the LOS ANGELES TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD | 9:25AM PDT - Monday, October 02, 2017



THE NATION awakened on Monday morning to yet another pointless, blood-filled tragedy that stupefied, saddened and appalled us all. But if history is any guide, it will not propel us to meaningful action.

Once again a man — and it's almost always a man — has committed what by now is the most American of acts, in this case wielding fully automatic military-style firearms to mow down a staggering number of innocent people. Not in self-defense, not in the heat of battle, not, as far as we can tell, in pursuit of any clearly defined objective, but simply to satisfy some inchoate rage, frustration or alienation. As of now, 58 are dead and more than 500 are wounded in Las Vegas, where police say 64-year-old Stephen Paddock rained bullets from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel into a crowd of 22,000 people attending an outdoor country music festival.

No motivation can possibly make such a barbaric act comprehensible, nor can it lessen the pain and grief that will be shared by hundreds of families. Our hearts go out to them.

But let's be honest with ourselves: This has become an almost Pavlovian national ritual. In the days ahead, some will argue — indeed, some have already argued — that this is not the right time to talk about gun control or our armed-to-the-teeth culture, that it is too soon to dilute our grief with tawdry politics. But this is exactly the right time to denounce the scourge of gun violence. As it will be tomorrow, next week, next month and, most important, on election day. It was stunning to read the flash news updates when the death toll reached 50 that the Vegas mass shooting had broken an American record, out-slaughtering the Pulse nightclub rampage last year in Orlando, Florida. Does Las Vegas get a medal for that? Is this a challenge to the deranged in other cities to do even better?

The National Rifle Association, which has spent decades fighting to put more guns into the hands of Americans with as few restrictions as possible, is as bloodstained today as the concert grounds in Las Vegas. As are the self-serving politicians who cynically support that organization, in thrall to its massive campaign contributions and its unrivaled political influence. The NRA's undue sway over Congress, along with delusions on the part of some lawmakers about what the 2nd Amendment really means, have landed us in these straits.

The gun lobby argues that military-style weapons are necessary for hunting, and for sport shooting. But on Sunday night, we saw such weapons used for their real purpose — to kill large numbers of people in a very short time. Anyone who watched the videos of the shootings and heard the rat-tat-tat of rapid-fire guns will recognize immediately that these are weapons of war, not of sport, and that to argue otherwise is to either lie, or to not understand the difference. Neither is acceptable.

As our Pavlovian ritual plays out in the days ahead, we will again hear the canard that if the people who showed up to dance to country music under the stars on Sunday had been carrying firearms themselves, the death toll would have been smaller. But even had more of them been armed, how would they have fought back against a man shooting a much more powerful weapon out of a distant 32nd floor window? They couldn't have.

One of the questions police will try to answer, and which will frame the ensuing debate, is whether Paddock obtained his firearms legally. But the question that really needs addressing is why we allow such weapons in the hands of civilians in the first place. The simple answer is that we lack the political will to stop it. Our nation is awash in firearms — by some estimates, the U.S. has more guns than people, and Wall Street investors on Monday drove up the stock prices of gunmakers. According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 273 mass shootings — defined as four or more people shot in one incident, not including the shooter — in the last 275 days. According to a BBC report last year, the number of gun murders per capita in the U.S. in 2012 — the most recent year for comparable statistics — was nearly 30 times that in the U.K., at 2.9 per 100,000 compared with just 0.1.

We may not be able to control the violent impulses of our fellow Americans, but we must limit the weapons available to them and we must better enforce the controls that we have. Failing to do so is political cowardice, moral abdication. That we have continued to accept such weapons among us for so long means that this is who we, as a nation, have chosen to be: armed and dangerous.


__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • 5 arguments against gun control — and why they are all wrong

 • Gun and self-defense statistics that might surprise you — and the NRA


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-las-vegas-shooting-20171002-story.html
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« Reply #454 on: October 03, 2017, 06:59:29 pm »

😴...so have ya made up ya mind....😴...is it good........or bad. ....🤡
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« Reply #455 on: October 03, 2017, 07:01:34 pm »


Ah, yes....American lawmakers' solution to their country's gun-massacre problem: “Pray to thin air and offer thoughts!”

What a bunch of useless wankers, eh?



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« Reply #456 on: October 03, 2017, 07:14:34 pm »

...jeeezzzz.....is this your default position when losing an argument...just keep reposting the stuff that you have already posted..

...can I just ask you what class you got to in school?

..I really do want to help you overcome your issues..don't be afraid to ask for help😉
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« Reply #457 on: October 03, 2017, 07:15:03 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

The GOP's message on guns: It's not our problem, it's God's

By DOYLE McMANUS | 9:55AM PDT - Monday, October 02, 2017

People assist a wounded woman at the Tropicana during an active shooter situation on the Las Vegas Stirp on October 1st. — Photograph: Chase Stevens/Associated Press.
People assist a wounded woman at the Tropicana during an active shooter situation on the Las Vegas Stirp on October 1st.
 — Photograph: Chase Stevens/Associated Press.


IN THE AFTERMATH of Sunday's massacre in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, the House of Representatives will soon pass a bill that would make mass shootings easier. That's an unfair way to frame the issue, but it's not inaccurate.

The House is preparing to take up the Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, which not only loosens restrictions on hunting and shooting on public lands, but also includes two provisions that don't exactly seem essential to sport shooters. One would legalize the sale of armor-piercing bullets as long as the manufacturer declares that the ammunition is intended for sporting purposes. The other would loosen longstanding federal regulations on silencers.

There is little question that the bill, strongly supported by the National Rifle Association, will pass in the Republican-majority House. After that, the House will take up a separate bill that would allow people whose states permit them to carry concealed weapons to take their guns into other states, regardless of local regulations.

And that's where we are on federal gun control legislation: not paralyzed, but worse. Congress is moving to make powerful weapons and ammunition easier to obtain, transport and use as quickly as the NRA can find regulations to undo.

The carnage in Las Vegas won't change that. The last time Congress came close to passing tougher restrictions on gun sales was after Sandy Hook in 2012, when the Senate had a Democratic majority. The effort failed, however. If it couldn't happen after Sandy Hook, the Connecticut elementary school where 20 children died, it's not going to happen now.

Instead, gun control has become just another tool to mobilize partisans on each side.

As recently as 2007, gun control was a bipartisan issue. In that year, a Pew Research poll found that 45% of Republicans thought it was more important to regulate guns than protect gun owernship. This year, that number has fallen to 17%.

In 2013, two gun-owning senators, Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, collaborated on legislation that sought to tighten the leaky federal requirements for background checks on gun buyers. Now, gun control is a bright line dividing one party from the other: Democrats for, Republicans against, with only a very few impotent exceptions.

In raw electoral terms, the GOP's ownership of the gun issue has turned out to be a disadvantage for Democrats. Many gun owners in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin once voted Democratic; all four states went for Barack Obama in 2008. In 2016, with the two parties' difference on gun issues sharper than ever, all four went for Donald Trump. Guns aren't the only reason for the shift, but one lesson to Republicans is: Don't even think about defying the NRA.

In his brief remarks on Tuesday, Trump called the Las Vegas shooting “an act of pure evil.” That's what opponents of gun control often say when this happens, as it does with tragic frequency. Their real message is: “The problem of evil is insoluble, so don't expect the government to solve it. It's God’s problem, not ours.”

That logic is flawed, of course. Yes, evil exists in the world, and it cannot be eliminated. But the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens from evil as best it can. That's why we have laws, and police departments that enforce them.

In his inaugural address, Trump decried the violent crimes “that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”

But the carnage hasn't stopped. When it comes to mass shootings, the president's party hasn't done anything to stop it.


• Doyle McManus has reported from the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and Washington, D.C. for 35 years, covering wars, revolutions and presidential campaigns. He has worked as a foreign correspondent, a White House correspondent and (briefly) a sportswriter. His column is published twice a week on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times and syndicated to other newspapers worldwide. He appears frequently on PBS's ‘‘Washington Week” and on National Public Radio. McManus is a four-time winner of the National Press Club's Hood Award for reporting on foreign policy. He is co-author of three books, including the 1988 bestseller Landslide: The Unmaking of the President.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-las-vegas-shooting-20171002-story.html
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« Reply #458 on: October 03, 2017, 07:15:44 pm »


Hahaha....whenever rightie idiots bring god into it, they have lost the argument.

'cause they haven't yet provided PROOF that their god even exists.
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« Reply #459 on: October 03, 2017, 07:20:00 pm »

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh.......yyeeeeaaahhhhh...shit is that the time gotta go😳
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« Reply #460 on: October 03, 2017, 07:25:51 pm »


Yep....run away....like a frightened rat.
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« Reply #461 on: October 03, 2017, 08:18:26 pm »


Yep....America is full of stupid kooks & idiots....









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« Reply #462 on: October 03, 2017, 08:30:01 pm »


Hahaha.....and then there is that stupid zero-brained fuckwit, Alex Jones, of InfoWars.com spouting his conspiracy-theory drivel....






....yep, America is full of stupid kooks and dumbfucks, alright!
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« Reply #463 on: October 03, 2017, 08:37:32 pm »


Yet more stupid rightie drivel from that moron Alex Jones....





....faaaaaark, you'd have to be mentally-impaired to believe anything spouted by that stupid clown.
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« Reply #464 on: October 03, 2017, 08:45:38 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

Las Vegas: The harvest of unspeakably lax gun laws

“Banning this or that gun would not have prevented this. Even carrying for self-defense
would not make a difference. Those poor people were sitting ducks.”


By MICHAEL HILTZIK | 10:15AM PDT - Monday, October 02, 2017

Even President Trump looked stunned in speaking about the Las Vegas massacre on Monday. But his words signaled that there will be no legislative action to keep it from happening again. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.
Even President Trump looked stunned in speaking about the Las Vegas massacre on Monday. But his words signaled that there
will be no legislative action to keep it from happening again. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.


“THE ANSWERS do not come easy,” President Trump said on Monday in the aftermath of the worst mass shooting in American history, with at least 58 dead in a massacre on the Las Vegas Strip.

He's wrong. Every other civilized country has found answers to gun violence, and none of them faces the daily toll of the United States. What doesn't come easy is the political will to respond to the public's call for tighter gun laws. Nevada is virtually a laboratory for what can happen when gun laws are loosened, not tightened.

Clark County, the scene of Sunday night's calamity, used to be the only county in Nevada that had the authority to require registration of handguns. They had to be registered within 60 days of moving into the county or within 72 hours of purchase or transfer. Private sales had to be completed at a police station. Some cities required a three-day waiting period for some purchases.

Clark County's authority to enforce those local laws was revoked by the state legislature in 2015. The county's registration records were all destroyed under the state law by the following June.

Mesquite, Nevada, where the apparent shooter, Stephen Paddock, lived, is in Clark County.

None of this means that Paddock would have been unable to perpetrate his crime if not for the 2015 law, since he seems to have relied on a high-caliber automatic weapon in his attack, not handguns. But it's a window into the lax approach to firearms throughout Nevada, one of the more gun-friendly states in the union.

In Nevada, concealed weapon permits are “shall-issue,” according to NevadaCarry.org, a pro-gun group. That means that sheriffs must hand them out to any qualified person, meaning anyone who is not a felon, drug addict or illegal immigrant or has never been judged mentally ill or committed of been convicted of a crime of domestic violence. Open carry is legal without a permit. NevadaCarry.org reports that the state doesn't ban assault weapons or impose a magazine capacity limit. No purchase permits, gun registration, waiting period or owner licensing is required. Private gun sales are legal and, as Clark County knows, Local gun laws are banned.

It's legal to carry a gun openly in Nevada anywhere except in federal buildings and schools. You can carry a gun openly even on private property where “no gun” signs are posted; they don't have the force of law. You can carry a gun openly or (with a permit) concealed even in bars while drinking alcohol. You can carry a gun openly or concealed in a casino. “Most casinos will ask you to leave or disarm if they observe you carrying firearms,” according to NevadaCarry, but all that can happen if you refuse to leave to comply is that you can be charged with trespassing.

It appears that the tide of public opinion may turning in Nevada. Question 1, a ballot measure that required that all firearm transfers except for those between members of an immediate family go through a licensed dealer and be subject to background checks, passed narrowly in the November election. Clark County, which as the home of Las Vegas is the state's most populous and cosmopolitan county, put the measure over the top with 56.7% of voters in favor, but it trailed in Reno and lost badly in the state's rural districts.

The measure was supported by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a vociferous gun-control advocate, who contributed $3.5 million directly to the election campaign. It was opposed by the National Rifle Association, which contributed $6.5 million to defeat it. Governor Brian Sandoval and Attorney General Adam Laxalt, both Republicans, opposed Question 1. After the election, Laxalt ruled the measure invalid. The measure required that gun dealers were required to perform their background checks directly through an FBI database; but the FBI has refused to make the database available to private parties. As a result, Laxalt ruled, the measure can't be enforced.

Nevada rated a C-minus score this year from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to tightening firearms restrictions. The center ranked the state's laws the 18th strongest in the nation, but that was only because of the passage of Question 1; before that vote, the center placed Nevada 27th. The center calculated the state's gun death rate at 14.9 per 100,000 residents, or 14th highest among the 50 states.


Nevada has a middle-of-the-pack C-minus rating from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence — but it's that high only because of the passage of Question 1 last November — and the gun licensing measure has been invalidated.
Nevada has a middle-of-the-pack C-minus rating from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence — but it's that high
only because of the passage of Question 1 last November — and the gun licensing measure has been invalidated.


The Las Vegas massacre will again occasion the kind of political hand-wringing that presages an utter lack of legislative action. A surfeit of “thoughts and prayers” already is emanating from Washington, with Trump's early-morning tweet offering his “warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting” leading the way. Trump followed the gun lobby playbook for the aftermath of a mass shooting, declaring it “an act of pure evil,” as though to absolve policy-makers and legislators of any responsibility. On its website, Nevadacarry took up the task of defending the state's legislative laxity, branding the attack a “terrorist” act.

“Banning this or that gun would not have prevented this,” the organization said. “Even carrying for self-defense would not make a difference. Those poor people were sitting ducks.”

The event will underscore the biggest vacuum in American firearms policy — the lack of hard research about the causes and consequences of gun violence, the product of the NRA's 20-year blockade of research.

But the carnage will underscore a few aspects of mass shootings that we do know. One is that, even though they comprise a small percentage of all gun deaths in America (and the toll from Las Vegas won't change that much), they have an outsized effect on public opinion because the victims are so random. Unlike most gun deaths, mass shootings can happen to anyone, anywhere, heightening anxieties about life in our public spaces.

As UC Davis gun policy expert Garen Wintemute told me this sunmmer, “For large segments of the population, firearm violence occurs to people who aren’t like them and in places they know not to be. Mass shootings happen not to people who aren't like me, but to people just like me who are doing just the kind of things I do, wherever I happen to be.” The Las Vegas shootings fit that pattern to a T — the victims were attending a crowded open-air concert in a Las Vegas park when the gunman opened fire from a high floor of the nearby Mandalay Bay Hotel.

Wintemute also pointed to one possible warning sign suggested by an examination of mass shootings in California: “Aberrant patterns of firearm purchases” prior to an attack, such as the rapid acquisition of lots of guns in a short period of time. The chronology of Paddock's gun purchases hasn't yet been publicly disclosed, but he's reported to have had an arsenal of automatic weapons in his Mandalay Bay room.

Research such as that being conducted by Wintemute's newly-established program at UC Davis may help explain what drives an individual to cause the death and destruction seen in Las Vegas. But one can't assume that a lax approach to gun sales and gun possession, such as Nevada's, has nothing to do with it. It seems as though the voters of Clark County almost had a premonition that something bad was coming.


• Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik writes for the daily blog The Economy Hub for the Los Angeles Times. His business column appears every Sunday and Wednesday. As a member of the L.A. Times staff, he has been a financial and technology writer and a foreign correspondent. He is the author of five books, including Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age and The New Deal: A Modern History. Hiltzik and colleague Chuck Philips shared the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for articles exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • On gun violence research, California again fills a void left by the federal government

 • Don't let Representative Scalise's injury cow us into silence about the need for gun control and universal healthcare

 • The NRA has blocked gun violence research for 20 years. Let's end its stranglehold on science.


http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-las-vegas-shooting-20171002-story.html
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« Reply #465 on: October 03, 2017, 08:55:26 pm »

Another case of "the orange goblin made it happen"?

Might pay to get the full facts in before following the left wing diarrhoea stream 🙃
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« Reply #466 on: October 03, 2017, 09:08:50 pm »


Now what was that about “only government employees should have access to firearms”?

You remember? You posted that on multiple occasions.

I'll ask Caprox next time he posts at the group....he'll remember that piece of drivel from you.
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« Reply #467 on: October 03, 2017, 09:29:52 pm »

I think that might have been in relation to gun happy fucktards mowing down innocent hikers and also other retards using firearms to inflict cruelty on animals.
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« Reply #468 on: October 04, 2017, 09:45:01 am »

Just a hunch, but I'd put money on this guy using very bad drugs (like Meth) or he was a schizophrenic off his meds who should have been in a mental institution.
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« Reply #469 on: October 04, 2017, 09:46:21 am »

Or, he had a serious brain injury at some point in his life.
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« Reply #470 on: October 05, 2017, 09:45:09 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

We don't need your prayers in Sin City. We need gun control.

“God hasn't seen fit to give us sensible gun regulations, but your representatives can.”

By C. MOON REED | 4:00AM PDT - Wednesday, October 04, 2017

Casinos line the Las Vegas Strip on October 20th, 2009. — Photograph: Isaac Brekken/Associated Press.
Casinos line the Las Vegas Strip on October 20th, 2009. — Photograph: Isaac Brekken/Associated Press.

I WAS one of the first to arrive at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on Sunday because I was there to review the concert for the Las Vegas Weekly. I passed through the metal detector without thinking about it. But security would not protect against a threat that never entered the concert grounds. Everybody was all smiles. This was a happy, chill day. Fortunately for me, I left before sundown.

Since the September 11 attacks, I've understood that some catastrophe might eventually befall my city. After the shooting at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in 2015, I pictured being trapped in one of my favorite casinos, unable to escape.

But I also told myself it couldn't happen here. I fostered an idea, a fantasy, that terrorists may hint at attacking Vegas, but they'd never actually follow through, because even fundamentalists secretly love Sin City and don't want to ruin it. Silly, I know.

Vegas is the Wild West. It's the only state where prostitution is legal, where gambling isn't a secret but a recognized and celebrated part of the mainstream culture. For many, owning guns is part of that culture, too. Firearms are all tied up, somehow, with freedom. Now we're going to have to think about which freedoms matter to us the most.

The freedom to live? The freedom of movement? The freedom to travel around the state and country (and check into hotels) without being scanned, searched and prodded? Or the freedom to amass arsenals of war? It's our choice. Which ones are sacred to us as a state, and as a country? This is a question of identity. Right now, it's clear who we are. Right now, we are willing to give up everything in exchange for unlimited gun access. Is that who we want to be?

My heart breaks for all who were touched by this tragedy. The victims first, but also the woman in St. George, Utah, who woke up on Monday morning to discover that her husband sold a shotgun to that lunatic, Stephen Paddock. My heart breaks for the gun sellers, too. At some level they must know that they're part of the problem. They are also just one link in a supply chain that starts in a metal mine and ends with the undertaker.

The St. George gun seller, Chris Michel of Dixie GunWorx, told the local news that there were no warning signs. That Paddock was just an “average, everyday Joe Blow” no different from any of his other customers. But what if the desire to own a bunch of military-grade weaponry is in and of itself a warning sign?

Guns play into Vegas fantasies. In Vegas, you can pay good money to shoot fake zombies with a machine gun.

But this was not a Vegas crime. Paddock was not one of us, and from what we know so far he wasn't even out to punish us for the crime of living in a city of excess. He wasn't a religious nut who thought God wanted him to teach us a lesson.

We were singled out. But we're just one of many. The shooting could have happened anywhere. Next time, it will happen somewhere else.

If the crime wasn't “Vegas,” then the recovery and response have been. We're a family town with about a quarter of us working in the hospitality industry. Blood donors have overwhelmed the blood banks. My friends in the culinary industry have opened their kitchens and co-ordinated truly heroic operations for cooking and delivering food.

We're the helpers, and all the victims are our guests. We wish they didn't have to take their pain home.

I've heard from friends elsewhere that they'd like to “do something” for Las Vegas.

Here's one idea: In addition to donating money, you can put to rest the “good guy with a gun” narrative. This festival was full of good guys with guns; one of the concessions sold concealed-weapon purses made out of leather. But the good guys couldn’t take out the bad guy spraying bullets from a hotel window 32 flights up.

Here's another: You can come to Vegas.

But whatever you do, please don't pray for Vegas. We're proud of the Sin City label and would rather you saved your breath for calls to your representatives. God hasn't seen fit to give us sensible gun regulations, but your representatives can.


C. Moon Reed is a staff writer for the Las Vegas Weekly.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reed-las-vegas-shooting-20171004-story.html
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« Reply #471 on: October 05, 2017, 10:51:09 pm »

So Says The Communist Nazi Scum Parrot Media
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« Reply #472 on: October 05, 2017, 11:47:26 pm »


from the Los Angeles Times....

From the 32nd floor, Stephen Paddock became a killing machine,
showing the power of a sniper


By RICHARD WINTON, GEOFFREY MOHAN, SARAH PARVINI and CORINA KNOLL | 3:00AM PDT - Thursday, October 05, 2017

A gunman opened fire from the Mandalay Bay hotel on a country music festival across the street on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday night, leaving at least 59 people dead and more than 480 others injured. — Photograph: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times.
A gunman opened fire from the Mandalay Bay hotel on a country music festival across the street on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday night,
leaving at least 59 people dead and more than 480 others injured. — Photograph: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times.


HE WAS a quarter of a mile away and a few hundred feet high — the smallest of specks in a boisterous landscape.

They were 22,000 targets in an open field, dodging gunfire on a night when music turned to madness.

Some staked their lives on the shelter of a beer cart, a food truck, a cooler. Those who ran had little sense of direction. Were they racing toward the shots? Would a car, a restaurant, a hotel closet, become refuge or a trap?

The mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival would leave nearly 60 people dead and hundreds more injured.

It would also highlight the vulnerability of those in the focus of a sniper as well as the chilling limitations of responding officers.

Authorities have long discussed the threat of terrorism by a sniper in a crowded area and the reality that there are relatively few tools to prevent or quickly stop such an attack.

Los Angeles police have tried different tactics, including placing sharpshooters on rooftops during the Academy Awards. Earlier this year and for the first time, the LAPD had a police officer in a helicopter shoot a suspect who was firing from the top of a hill.

But replicating those tactics more commonly at open-air events would be costly and in some cases impractical.

Stephen Paddock's position — a window on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel — gave him “commanding terrain,” said Charles Heal, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff's commander and special weapons leader.

“There were so many people in his line of fire, he didn't need to target anyone,” Heal said. He noted that the complexity of a high-rise hotel created a maze for police attempting to track Paddock.

“If you don't find cover, given his position, he is likely to hit you.”

The scene was sustained by what could be called the trigonometry of terror.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Arthur B. Alphin said Paddock was a patient, well-trained gunner who did not pick and choose his targets, but held to a steady kill zone centered in the middle of thousands of concertgoers.

“He had a huge area of three, four or five football fields with people standing shoulder to shoulder,” said Alphin, who has a mechanical engineering degree and specialized in ballistics.

“He was not aiming at any individual person. He was just throwing bullets in a huge ‘beaten zone’.”

Beaten zone is an infantry term dating to World War I. Shaped like the area a searchlight casts across a flat surface, it refers to where bullets can strike. It can move substantially with tiny changes in the tilt of the gun.

From his perch, Paddock was firing down the hypotenuse of a right triangle and would have to adjust his aim for the arc of the bullet — a skill that would require training.

At least one of the 23 weapons found in his hotel room had a bipod stand to hold it steady, authorities said.

Officers on the ground would be virtually ineffective when combating a sniper so far away, said San Marino Police Chief John Incontro, a former LAPD SWAT captain.

“Even if you see the muzzle flash, we are talking officers with pistols,” Incontro said. “Even with rifles, you have a prospect of missing and harming others.”

Experts believe the Las Vegas massacre will force a shift in the paradigm for policing outdoor events. Locations will be vetted for quick escape routes for large crowds. Event organizers might be asked to have materials on hand that could become a makeshift fence. Tactical plans could be drawn up for areas such as L.A. Live where skyscrapers loom.

Los Angeles police currently station counter-snipers at open-air events, but the tactic is used sparingly and only for major affairs, such as award shows. A counter-sniper would have to be positioned higher than the shooter.

After a five-hour standoff with a gunman in Sunland, Los Angeles police were ordered to fire from a helicopter. The man was at the top of the hill in a house and had been difficult for responding officers to reach. Chief Charlie Beck said the decision to employ the tactics was made at the highest levels of the department.

It's not clear if that approach would have been effective in a situation like Las Vegas.

“You have to get pretty close for that shot,” said Incontro, adding that a sniper could also be compelled to shoot at the helicopter, possibly forcing it into the ground.

Paddock's plan of attack was similar to that of Charles Whitman, a former Marine sharpshooter who opened fire from a tower at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.

Whitman, who lost his scholarship to the school a few years earlier, had taken an elevator to the 27th floor, where he hauled rifles up two flights of stairs to the observation deck. Sixteen people were killed.

Paddock was at an even higher distance and armed with weapons modified to rapidly fire when he began his relentless attack on the crowd below.

He was able to create a setting similar to that of a battlefield, said James Allen Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist who researches mass killings.

Those watching country singer Jason Aldean perform on Sunday night dismissed the initial gunshots as firecrackers.

Then bodies began to drop.

“We've got to go!” Jared Birnbaum heard his girlfriend say before she disappeared in the chaos.

He scrambled to an exit only to be stopped by a police officer redirecting the mob. Birnbaum then dove under nearby bleachers, joining hundreds of others.

By then, the 30-year-old was covered in blood — most of it from other people — and hearing talk of multiple shooters. He feared being taken hostage in what felt like a fishbowl of raining bullets.

“All you could do is duck and put your hands behind your head,” he said, “and hope you're not one of the ones to go.”


Los Angeles Times staff writer Kate Mather contributed to this report from Las Vegas.

• Richard Winton is a crime writer for the Los Angeles Times and part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2011. Known as @lacrimes on Twitter, during 20 years at the L.A. Times he also been part of the breaking news staff that won Pulitzers in 1998 and 2004. He won the ASNE Deadline News award in 2006. A native of England, after getting degrees from University of Kent at Canterbury and University of Wisconsin-Madison, he began covering politics but chose a life of crime because it was less dirty.

• Geoff joined the Los Angeles Times in 2001 from Newsday, where he was a Latin American correspondent in Mexico City. He was hired as a statewide roamer, but was quickly drafted into coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Soon after returning, he was sent out to the front lines of the California wildfires, and was part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning breaking news team in 2003. Looking for a break from the action, he took refuge behind the editing desks in foreign and metro, serving as the environment editor and later, the state editor. He returned to reporting two years ago in Science, where he's been writing about Ebola, African-clawed frogs and mathematicians who can predict NCAA winners. Now he's coming full circle, back to roaming the state in search of stories about farmers, drought and innovation in agriculture and food science.

• Sarah Parvini is a reporter on the Los Angeles Times' Metro desk covering breaking news and stories throughout the state (but sometimes, you'll catch her somewhere like Iowa reporting on infectious diseases). She was part of the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. A San Diego native, she defected from the Padres' camp and found refuge in Dodger Stadium.

• Corina Knoll writes for the Metro section of the Los Angeles Times. She was on the team that investigated corruption in Bell — which led to the paper's 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service — and went on to cover the trials of the city's former officials. She later contributed to the paper's coverage of the San Bernardino terror attack that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. As a regional reporter, she wrote features about the San Gabriel Valley and the Westside. During her courts beat, she covered high-profile criminal cases and civil disputes, including the Jackson family versus AEG and Bryan Stow versus LA Dodgers. Her current rewrite gig involves pulling together major breaking news stories for online as well as narratives for print. Raised in the Midwest, she is a graduate of Macalester College.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • Las Vegas shooting victims: Portraits of the fallen

 • The frantic, bloody hours in a Las Vegas hospital as doctors rushed to save lives


http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-sniper-tactics-police-20171005-story.html
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« Reply #473 on: October 06, 2017, 02:19:51 am »

something smells strange about the whole story line

It's been said he had a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of guns

I wouldn't call him a sniper more it's like spray and pray with an automatic
he was just murdering innocent people fenced in like fish in a barrel

The feds are holding back the motive i wonder why

Leftist are the new nazi's and they are much worse than the old ones
I could make a killing selling paddock statues to the left they seem to think he's some sort of hero
for killing country and western fans who they believe are white trump supporters how fucked up is that?

The world's gone crazy it's going to hell in a handbasket
i will wait and see what the motive is shit maybe he's a mad leftist or an isis sleeper cell or both who the fuck knows.

meanwhile ktj why dont you keep on posting your hateful parrot fake news you seem to have copy and paste all figured out
at least while you're keeping busy you are not out there frightening the children.

ktj you are a mental commie nazi motherfucker arseclown.
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« Reply #474 on: October 06, 2017, 01:57:48 pm »


He was a WHITE MAN with a shitload of guns.

And that sums up America's gun problem.....WHITIE MALES.
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