Another fucking spree shooting. Great.

lotta pieces of garbage saying "but what if this guy was antifa?"

You can thank the cunt Alex Jones for that.

I mean, shit, why is such a thing even for sale?

There's a whole range of stuff like this that the gun lobby bullies the ATF into letting pass.

SIG sells "arm braces" that just so happen to function like a stock so anyone can have a short-barreled rifle without the ATF paperwork. Completely legal with a wink-wink nod-nod to only use it correctly.

$100 will get a [bump fire stock](https://youtu.be/zrqSno35faU?t=1m44s).

hearing a lot about "expanded background checks." as if that would've done anything in this scenario

teh way this shit rewires your brain is just crazy too.

I went to a show at a local seedy metal club in Winter Park, that was clearly oversold (Fire depts woulda shut the shit down). and in addition to Great White spinning in my head, I kept thinking to myself "where are the exits if a shooter comes in" and trying to identify them. I do this all the time.

we shouldn't even be focused on what would have stopped *this* shooting in particular, but what will stop "most shootings". otherwise it plays into the curious thought-calculus that gun fetishists love where "if you can't stop all shootings, might as well not try"

I do the same thing in movie theaters, ever since 2012. It fucking sucks. xp

yeah you're right, i'm just disheartened by the compromising already going on by many democrats & liberals. fucking ban assault rifles

I agree there. fuck middle ground on this

I kept thinking to myself "where are the exits if

my career "choices" make me weird about this, perhaps, but frankly everyone should always spend a little time thinking about where the egress routes are whenever they enter a crowded space. it's not just a rote practice to ignore at the beginning of every airplane ride. I would be the lamest live musician ever because every show would start with me asking people where their exit door is.

https://www.dhs.gov/active-shooter-preparedness

you cant live your life in terror. anything could happen to you at any time. best to make the best of it and not be paranoid.

imo this is what drives edge cases like these, the Pop Paranoia, the PR arm of the Defense Industry. the US has long been the world's Gun Show Loophole in practice for both parties. we need to take disarmament seriously. the people at the top need to lead by example, not by simply upholding the status quo.

The War on Terror isn't helping. of course it makes people paranoid. what do you think it does to edge cases?

for the rest of us, it numbs us to death, thus we enable it on a global scale. this is what happens in a world where blowing up a hospital is dismissed as an accident. you cant put that kind of violence out in the world without it coming back.

knowing where the exits are in case something bad happens is not paranoia

Yeah that's just common sense

srsly like it takes me fuckin 5 minutes and I go about my night wtf is this mentalism

tbf that wasn't the impression your metal club post, which I can relate to, gave

not only is his every post trenchworthy, so is every sentence within, it's extraordinary

A sad but needed thread.

Rest In Peace:

Christopher Royal, vet who served in Afghanistan
Jenny Parks, Kindergarten teacher
Sonny Melton, died saving his wife's life pic.twitter.com/4YmFCnHUSR

— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) October 3, 2017

How did this guy become this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruYeBXudsds

Kimmel grew up in Las Vegas, and this is clearly very close to him.

trump broke kimmel

Good on him for being human of course

I don't watch his show, so I'm still trying to wrap my head around how a guy who used to co-host a show with Adam Carolla has become one of the most respected men in American all of a sudden, but he's obviously got his finger on the pulse of things these days.

American dude on the Today programme saying this guy broke every law in the book, new laws not needed, then he literally said "with great freedom comes great responsibility"

let's just give everyone tactical nukes why not

Is 59/500 the figures from just ('just') the shooting, or does it include people crushed / trampled? One of the things that occurred to me from that first video was that it looked very dangerous once they found somewhere to shelter.

I have a hunch that the number of injuries includes trampling and the like. As it kept growing throughout the day I couldn’t imagine they were talking about people still straggling in with GSWs but rather the folks on the better end of triage getting processed. I don’t really know how the counting works though.

Does it actually matter? People were trampled because some lunatic was running around shooting people. Splitting hairs over who was actually killed or injured with a bullet rather than the fear of one seems spectacularly irrelevant. (If only people had more decorum when people were running round with automatic weapons indiscriminately shooting people then less people would be injured)

Syed Saquib, a surgeon on duty Sunday night at University Medical Center, said the hospital treated 104 patients, most of whom had gunshot wounds.

“Those that could be saved, were saved,” Saquib said. “There were a few that came in with devastating, non-survivable injuries.”

I’m disclaiming my educated guess, not dismissing trampling.

Does it actually matter?

I think it matters not only to improve evacuation of large crowds in the future, whether/when this happens again or not, but also I think the more data that demonstrates how damaging these guns are the better for any progress on the regulation front. Yeah, I get that at this point it seems pretty hopeless, but I do think from a debate standpoint it's more dramatic to show that in addition to all the deaths, dozens of additional people were shot and may have been or maybe still are facing life threatening injuries. Not saying a dedicated true believer dickhead like, say, Scalise would ever budge, but certainly he (like Giffords) offers a high profile survivors perspective of the damage of bullet wounds alone. The same could be said of dozens of Las Vegas survivors, should they ever be called to testify in congressional hearings.

Again, not that that stuff isn't obvious, but considering what an inexplicable uphill battle this remains, anything that might advance the debate could be useful.

good news everyone, he passed background checks. Whew.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/las-vegas-shooting/two-nevada-gun-shops-say-stephen-paddock-passed-background-checks-n806921

Most of these mass shooters seem to have led quiet lives outside the purview of law enforcement. Background checks are important but I don't think they'll do much to stop these kinds of people.

I think background checks are mostly to slow down impulse purchases, people who might be trying to get a gun in the heat of the moment. Automatic weapons and methods to convert semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons shouldn't just be illegal, they should be destroyed.

Background checks are to make sure that the gun buyer isn't a felon (or have one of a couple of other disqualifiers). That's it. Gun clerk calls in to NICS, runs name against database, NICS gives thumbs up, thumbs down or a delay if there's a name conflict or something that requires double checking.

It takes 5-10 minutes in laissez-faire gun states, it's not an impediment to crimes of passion.

I honestly want it to be hard to get a gun as it was for me to adopt a child. Background check, fingerprinting, medical exam, elaborate questionnaire, home study, two day seminar, decision finalized by a court of law, etc.

If you want to hunt - and I know a lot of people who love to hunt and want them to be able to do so - you can, you just have to jump through a shitload of hoops over several months to do so.

but then THE GUMMINT decides WHO gets to have A GUN AND WHO DON'T - CONNECT THE DOTS MANNNNN

quite honestly i feel this is a crisis of legitimacy for the US government, both state and federal, because it is evident now that the NRA has tacitly, over decades, undermined the state's claim to a monopoly on violence to the extent that it cannot now be asserted even in the face of events like this

We need a nice, long list of the things people commonly do which are more heavily-regulated and involve more hoop jumping than buying a gun. And that people somehow, against all the odds, manage to trudge their way through as a matter of course without screaming about their rights as a 'Murrican.

i miss the brash old milo z haha

As a non-American with quite a lot of reasonable non-gun-mad American facebook friends I've noticed that they are constantly interacting with with the sort of frothing at the mouth libertarian NRA assholes I'd cross the road to avoid. Is ILX a good place to ask why these very nice people are still still friends with said assholes? Because I'm sure as hell not going to ask on facebook (again)

We owe them money. / They owe us money.

Being friends with incorrigible, unreconstructed, complete and utter assholes is as American as baseball.

iirc we invented baseball

pic.twitter.com/F6KVc6YHPX

— Jane Levy (@jcolburnlevy) October 3, 2017

Family/friends from like high school/workmates. I dunno. I don't interact with those people but then I have a very low tolerance for people who opt for frothing over reasoned and respectful argument/disagreement.

a lot of my family are like this, which is why i don't speak to any of them and have removed most of them from fb.

I see there's been some inter-left debate on twitter about american gun laws but I think just about everyone of sense can at least agree on an assault weapons ban. I think that would be a good place to start.

teh way this shit rewires your brain is just crazy too.

I went to a show at a local seedy metal club in Winter Park, that was clearly oversold (Fire depts woulda shut the shit down). and in addition to Great White spinning in my head, I kept thinking to myself "where are the exits if a shooter comes in" and trying to identify them. I do this all the time.

we were onstage in Scotland when the Bataclan thing happened. Usually my soundman stays out in the house after the show but we came off to find him in the dressing room glued to the laptop - he'd been offered the gig running sound on that tour, but hadn't been able to take it. Three days later we played our continental shows, after a fair bit of debate about what to do; there were soldiers with machine guns strolling the venues, the night after we played Belgium they locked the whole town down, if we'd've left our hotel an hour later we wouldn't have been able to make our next gig.

At the Belgian show, mid-song, somebody entered the hall from the right side of the room and walked pretty fast to the other side. It registered with me & my bassist, we looked at each other: is something up? The soldier were there in the crowd the whole time, you couldn't miss them.

It's true that it's good practices to know: where will I run if something happens, how will I protect myself, am I in touch with my priorities? but it fucking sucks dick to have to be thinking, in places where people gather to share the experience of music: ok, all this great communal energy aside, how will I keep from dying if shit goes south? And it makes you think, wow, we as a species have made a pretty poor show of things, looking at it from several different angles.

fuck - sorry about that - my first post got the "blank screen" thing and I c/p'd too much. if anybody wants to edit plz do