I’ve held back in commenting on the Las Vegas massacre until I’d had some time to think it over. Plainly the shooter, a gun collector, wasn’t angry at the people he killed and wounded. Like them, he was very likely a conservative. Like them, he probably even liked country music.
No, they were just targets of opportunity. A huge gathering beneath his sniper’s nest in the hotel, easy pickins for a deranged maniac. You’d have to be mentally ill to want to kill and wound hundreds of innocent people you didn’t even know. Unless your motive was political, religious or social. None of which seem to apply here.
The country really is sick in many ways. The news media/entertainment industries, particularly, stoke it with their daily fixations on violence. The crazy politicos who immediately talk of seizing guns from the law-abiding as a solution to mental illness. The 59 dead (so far) just about equal the shooting dead in Chicago in one month, a place where guns are strictly regulated for the law-abiding. Criminals can get anything, including guns.
No, mental illness seems to be the issue here, but no politico and few public figures are talking about it. Even President Trump, a non-politician if there ever was one, fell back on Judaeo-Christian, debatable, “pure evil” as an explanation.
UPDATE: J.D. has a sensible explanation for Paddock’s multiple rifles I haven’t seen elsewhere: “Full auto and more than about twenty rounds would definitely lead to overheating and jamming of these sorts of weapons…A rifle, being more tightly bored relative to the projectile(s) going down it, is significantly more susceptible to heat, and distortion, and eventual rupture. That’s probably why this Vegas dipshit supplied himself with multiple weapons, planning for that eventuality.”
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 