Shooting at Las Vegas casino

The younger daughter of one of my closest friends died last week. I'm so glad I didn't insult him by offering "thoughts and prayers."

 

Yes. "Thoughts and prayers" from those who support the NRA matter less. From them those words here are disingenuous tripe.

 

I know ... very strange.

 

PC, shooter went there to kill as many congresspeople as possible. He was stopped by rapid police action. How is that not a terrorist act? If somebody chucked a bomb at the Capitol, we'd call it terrorism.

 

Retired white guy living in a $300k Sun City home in a no kids retirement complex does not fit the usual profile. I guess we'll need more than a few hours to find out. The FBI will get into his computer or something and more will come out.

The first quote I saw from his brother in the headline made me sympathetic... "It's like an asteroid fell on our family." Can you imagine getting up, turning on the morning news and seeing that your brother did this, and then the phone starts ringing off the wall?

And yes, of course I am much more sympathetic for the people who were shot and their families. I also thought about the Sam Hunt concert here the night before the first UAB football game, as it was held in a parking lot across from a couple of highrise downtown hotels. "There but for the grace of God..."

 

It's not terrorism because he's targeting congressmen. They are a political target. The goal is not to instill fear in the general population; the goal is to kill congressmen.

Opening fire on people at a ballgame is likely terrorism. Opening fire on congresspeople is not. (That's not intended to minimize the crime, of course.)

 

58 confirmed dead. Jesus.

 

To quote Senator Phil Graham. He had all the guns he needed but not all the guns he wanted

 

"Thoughts and Prayers" on Las Vegas Mass Shooting Offered by Ohio Republicans Who Oppose Gun Control

 

I don't know, most would probably think that the Washington, D.C. area is one of the most secure places in the United States and that politicians are a typically secure group of people. If an opportunist can gun them down doing something simple like playing baseball, who's to think they'd be more safe playing a ball game themselves? It may have been a political act, but I would say it promotes enough fear among the general population to fit the definition of terrorism.

 

At some point, we and our people in DC will need to start looking at mass shootings through the lens of national security (regardless of who is pulling the trigger or their reason for doing so). What good is it to build a wall to keep potential bad hombres out if you can't go to a concert or send your kids to schools without risking being shot by a fellow American?

 

An Ariana Grande concert in the UK. Tourists congregated outside in Nice, France. An open-air country concert in Las Vegas.

Mass killings with bombs, trucks, automatic weapons.

I agree with DW — while we absolutely should be re-examining gun laws in the U.S., there's more to it than that. Attacking and killing civilians has become the new M.O. for both terrorist groups and lone-wolf madmen.