It's not terrorism if your skin is a lighter shade

50 dead in Las Vegas now. Guy was in his 60s.

Gun ownership weeping ahead but it won't change anything. A reasonable person would think a ban, or at least strict control, on the type of weapon that empowers one to do this would be called for. I can see personal protection being something people want - but having access to battlefield weapons is overdoing it.

Gun shops are probably going to be the busiest they've been since Trump won the election. The suggestion that easy access to semi-auto rifles might be a bad idea will cause some panic buying.

CNBC saying automatic rifles are illegal. That's something. Surprised at that.

davyK wrote:

CNBC saying automatic rifles are illegal. That's something. Surprised at that.

Unless it was registered before 1986.

And in Nevada you can buy pretty much anything else (including semi-automatics) without a permit.  (You only need a permit if you plan to conceal the weapon)  Apparently Nevada does, technically, even allow possession of machine guns - it's just that they're banned under federal law.

RedDave2 wrote:

Just because the guns are available doesn't mean that this type of thing is the logical follow through.

It is when the guns are as freely available as they are in America, and every opposition is put in front of even the most cursory background checks, and those checks that are done are prohibited from being computerised.

“I know we are searching for some kind of meaning in the chaos, some kind of light in the darkness. The answers do not come easy... We can take solace that even in the darkest space can be brightened by a single light, and even the most terrible despair can be lightened by a single ray of hope... We pray for the day when evil is banished and when the innocent are safe from hatred and from fear. May God bless the souls of the lives that are lost. May God give us the grace to heal, and may God provide the grieving families with the strength to carry on. Thank you, and God bless America"

The emptiest of words.

I stubbed my toe last week, ISIS claimed responsibility for that too.

Diluted Dante wrote:

RedDave2 wrote:

Just because the guns are available doesn't mean that this type of thing is the logical follow through.

It is when the guns are as freely available as they are in America, and every opposition is put in front of even the most cursory background checks, and those checks that are done are prohibited from being computerised.

Surely that's not the case here as the guy used an illegal military grade gun? There wouldn't be a background check.

Liveinadive wrote:

stonechalice wrote:

Jesus just seen a video and it's fucking awful. I had no idea an automatic weapon could have that kind of range. He was just spraying into the crowd.

Fucking horrendous and truly terrifying.

I should imagine accuracy is terrible at that range but that isn't a factor here.

Truly awful. While not a terrorist incident you have to ask how hard it would be for someone radicalised to do the same thing.
If you can buy an automatic rifle like you can buy a TV then at what stage does a known nutter get flagged as tooling up?

Not that this is the point I want to linger on on this topic, but an assault rifle will be fairly accurate out to about 300 meters.

Trump's studied and stilted attempts to appear presidential and statesmanlike will never not be hilarious to me. You can almost read the thoughts swirling around his demented mind just from his subtlety-free facial expressions. "Squint meaningfully", "appear sincere", "that's it Don, pour that grief all over it..."

Dignity will always elude him, but yet he tries manfully to attain it - which is what makes him so fundamentally amusing (until he destroys us all on a whim). There's also a feint sense that at any moment he might go totally off piste and begin ranting and raving about the NFL, Puerto Rica or whatever else has pissed him off in the last five minutes.

I know it's not a staggeringly original sentiment to express but it genuinely amazes me that this useless, fat, braindead mess is somehow leader of the free world.

Re the gun argument - it is people who pull trigger - and I try hard to realise just how much the culture of ownership is built into the psyche of many in the US. This is how I understand it:-

There is the means to protect oneself - no doubt hailing back to frontier times.

Then there is the right of a population to overthrow a government - means what is available to the army should be available to the population. Or at least a population should be able to arm itself effectively enough to overthrow the government. No doubt harking back to the War of Independence.

The first one isn't an issue - by all means own a weapon for protecting yourself/family/home. If I could I would consider owning one. And I think I would enjoy target shooting in a gun club.

The second one is trickier as arms technology is now far beyond what the founding fathers could have possibly foreseen.

These shootings are a symptom of something that so far hasn't even identified - and guns most certainly are not part of the root cause. There is something insidious and toxic in the culture of the US that shows itself in this way. France seems to have got over the fact that it had a revolution without insisting everyone can own an automatic assault rifle. But then France is soaked in blood from European wars whilst the US isn't.

It's tricky. But then one hears about popular polls expressing a desire for more control which doesn't seem to happen - so their political system must have flaws if it can't express the desire of the people on big issues like this due to lobbyists and block voting.

RedDave2 wrote:

I'm probably not making my point clear here. I'm not in any way defending the huge ownership of guns in the states or the control gun companies wield, and I dont doubt that more guns is partly to blame. But what is it about the american society that creates people who so want to kill their fellow countrymen for little to no reason? I mean, if it was racist based that would be appalling but it would be motive. The US seems to breath a special type of killer who is indiscriminate. Again not to defend the gun situation in any way in the States but the line of 'guns dont kill people, people kill people' feels apt for this kind of madness.

If you want to kill a lot of people in a short space of time, a gun is the best way to do that. In America, they are freely available, relatively cheap, and require very little expertise to use. Your only other option really is a bomb, but that requires a certain level of expertise, and quite often goes wrong.

Which means that America is one of the few places where if you do want to kill indiscriminately, you can do with ease.

But why do Americans want to do that?

America not-so-secretly believes arseholes are vital and is too lazy to calibrate their definitions.