Stephen Paddock, the man police say killed at least 58 people on the Las Vegas Strip, was a retired accountant who enjoyed playing $100-a-hand poker, his brother says. http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/02/us/las-vegas-attack-stephen-paddock-trnd/index.html
Looks like that Ben Affleck movie was right about accountants. When they aren't doing your taxes, they are some of the deadliest people in the world.
I thought this was interesting from one of the performers. Although, I'm not sure if he'll feel the same way once the impact wears off in a few weeks.
lol at redneck Republicans at a country music festival suddenly being in favor of gun control when they're the ones being shot at by a psychopath with assault weapons.
He apparently also had a supply of ammonium nitrate used in the Oklahoma City bombing. We need bomb control laws immediately! We also need to outlaw the automatic weapon the Vegas shooter used to massacre people. Oh, wait, it is illegal to make bombs or shoot up people. Automatic weapons are already banned. Yet shockingly mass murderers tend to not follow these laws.
I'm pretty sure he had a $500 semi-auto gun with a $20 mod on it to make it near full auto. Real automatic weapons can run about $15,000 and have a serious vetting process that many wont pass. It's the easy to do mods are what will be scrutinized. My local gun store sells 20 and 50 round clips which are illegal in my state. They get around the law by selling them as bags of dissembled parts. Of course these days people can buy a $300 3D printer and make their own clips.
Modding semi-automatic weapons to near full auto is easy, cheap, and legal. He may have had a bump stock. So trivially easy to install that a ditzy looking chick (who doesn't even know to remove the magazine when working with a gun) has no trouble installing one. The perfect thing for when you get bored with life and decide to hunt people for sport from your hotel room.
I've read he was a multimillionaire. If this is true, I don't see these figures as prohibitive for him, and regardless the cheap modding variant is also already illegal.
That is not necessarily true. You can pretty inexpensively float an LLC, and register it as a FLL. The pseudo-business can hold almost any weapon as "inventory".
Everyone is demanding gun control again. What possible gun control could have prevented this from happening? The only thing I can think of is making bump stocks illegal. But that wouldn't have prevented this, in fact, the bump stock may have saved people's lives by making the gun an inaccurate mess.
I don't think accuracy mattered much. He was firing into a tightly clustered crowd of 22,000 people. Almost anywhere he fired, he was going to hit someone.
If these bump stocks are circumventing existing laws, I'm fine with banning them. However, I think many criminals would probably find ways to construct them anyway.
Bump stocks seem like they're just a ridiculous work around to move the mechanism to fire in full auto back into the stock. I have no idea why this is legal. Dude sounds manic. Would stay up all night gambling insane amounts of money away like it was nothing. http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/09/us/las-vegas-stephen-paddock-deposition/index.html
Bump stocks seem to be a blatant hack regulated at the state level but should be part of the federal ban. Full auto is dumb anyway... it has 0 civilian purpose and damn near 0 military purpose. It's only really good for suppression fire. If you need that in suburbia we done goofed already.