Amerika

A deranged and psychopathic individual has indiscriminately murdered a large number of individuals at a country music concert in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ll start by saying there has been a modicum of honest and accurate reporting from the scene of the incident.

1. Fifty-eight people have been killed and 515 injured after a shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. (As of 2pm EDT 2 Oct 2017).
2. The shooter has been identified as Stephen Craig Paddock, 64.
3. He opened fire from a 32nd floor room of Mandalay Bay Hotel after 10pm Sunday night.
4. The shooter is dead. (Some say by suicide, others by FBI agents raiding his room to make him stop firing).

Now we get into the competitive narrative-driven speculation.

5. ISIS claims he worked for them and went to his death to glorify Allah. The FBI has issued a flat denial. Unless ISIS planned the massacre, they would not have the data to claim the shoot. Unless the FBI had way more information than they do on whether Russia elected Donald Trump President, I question their ability to accurately rule out ISIS involvement. Here’s what Muqtada Al-Rueters had to report. I’m not sure who to disbelieve more, ISIS or the FBI.
   

   Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a shooting that killed at least 50 people and wounded over 400 in Las Vegas early on Monday, and said the attacker had converted to Islam a few months ago. “The Las Vegas attack was carried out by a soldier of the Islamic State and he carried it out in response to calls to target states of the coalition,” the group’s news agency Amaq said in reference to the U.S.-led coalition fighting the group in the Middle East.

6. The shooter was not previously a big gun person.
   

   “Not an avid gun guy at all…where the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background,” gunman’s brother says.

   Looking at a diagram of the shooting prepared by The Daily Mail, the range from the 32nd story window to the center of mass of the crowd is 1,700 ft. That translates to a ballpark 525 Meters for the rounds to travel.

   
   Image Credit: The Daily Mail

   The maximum effective range of an M-16 assault rifle (or its civilian version, the AR-15, with a bump-stock or gat-crank to fake full auto) is 460 meters. This assumes aimed shots, fired one at a time; in semi-automatic mode under decent sight, weather and lighting conditions and from a prone supported firing position. Yet this is not at all what happened during yesterday’s tragedy.

   The weapons were discharged at beyond this range, in a fully-automatic mode. They were fired off at night. They were shot through a hole in the window. My initial reaction (when I believed the shooter was just some retired guy) was to doubt common military grade assault rifles were even used. But the casualty counts of this event, even at the mathematically extreme range on the weaponry are entirely possible under the following conditions.

   1. The weapons were illegally modified. Most people cannot fire that rapidly with any accuracy at all on a semi-automatic weapon unless it is physsically mounted on a stand of some sort that controls the weapon’s aim. The weapon kicks and a steady finger pull on the trigger would be next to impossible if the shooter were having to mechanically trigger every single shot that was fired. Fully automatic weapons have been illegal in every possible form since 1986. The “not a real gun person” had access to firearms that were illegally modified or had the armory skills to perform these modifications himself.
   2. The shots were fired through a busted-out window. He would have limited physical support for the weapon outside of his non-shooting arm and his shoulder. His body is absorbing all the kick, which is cumulative as the weapon repeatedly fires. Even the old 3-round burst option on the M16 would probably give you 2 good shots out of the three. The tendency would be for an unskilled shooter to struggle to prevent the trajectory of the weapon from deflecting upward away from the crowd he was targeting. Something had to be employed to brace the weapon. He either used stocks, a clamp for each of his the weapon or a mechanical brace of some sort behind where he broke out the window. He otherwise would have wasted most his ammunition.
   3. The motel room had to be prepared at least several hours in advance for the shooting. He had to know where the crowd would be and would have to have at least mentally prepared a range card of his selected target area. People who have been trained in standard infantry tactics prepare range cards and manage where they shoot in their field of fire. Not a real gun person just figures you point the evil end of it at them and look through the sites if you want them to fall over dead. The shooter demonstrated a knowledge of his firing position and intended target that suggests at least some level of journeyman sophistication with firearms and how to effectively employ them. This shooter was far from a non-gun person.
7. More gun control would like totally fix this. Umm, excuse me a moment. He brought in ten different weapons. If I were following the NRA’s guidelines to the T on how to legally own guns in any US state and did all paperwork in triplicate, I would set off at least fifty different alarms by registering ten different semi-automatic weapons. I’m not saying I couldn’t own ten different semi-autos if I bought them conscientiously, I’m just guarun-frikken-teeing you that the sheriff of Madison County, Alabama would make it point of knowing me personally and keeping a fairly close eye on my registration papers. This would be particularly true if I acquired these weapons over a short stretch of time.

   Furthermore, the weapons discharged in a way that suggests they’d been illegally modified. Most casual gun owners will know how to clean and maintain a weapon that isn’t seriously broken. A few more will know how to add accessories such as stocks, lighting devices such as Laser Target Designators and more advanced sights. It takes professional training or hours of amateur devotion to modify your own firearms to the point where they subvert manufactured restrictions such as rate and mode of fire. The shooter or one of his buddies (but wait! the FBI sez he was probably a lone wolf) was a skilled armorer. It’s illegal to even make or sell civilian firearms that would allow you to do what The Mandalay Bay Casino shooter did from the 32nd Floor. It has been since 1934, 1968 or 1986 depending upon which gun person you are hearing from on this. No, the ATF will not be approving your application to put the Ma-Duece up on the roof over by the DirecTV dish.

   So this guy knew very well he was going to do something illegal like shoot people. If we assume he didn’t kill himself and acknowledged the possibility of arrest, he probably got the fact that they weren’t going to resurrect him and empty a 2nd poison needle into him for modifying his ridiculously large collection of firearms that nobody apparently knew about. If “Thou shall not kill” is not on the list of laws you plan to respect and abide by, then you’d probably either wipe your ass or roll your doobage with a written copy of a federal gun control statute.

And finally we get to the absolutely cheap and obnoxious bullshit. That pretty much happens when emotions run high enough to trump judgement.

8. Exhibit one involves a teacher who molds impressionable young minds. She also prays “only Trumptards died” in Las Vegas. Because if one poor Bernie Bro accidentally wondered into the crowd, you’d have to spare both Sodom and Gomorrah. Our school tax dollars hard at work!
9. If you needed yet another reason to never watch CBS, we’ve got expert legal advise for you. CBS has opted for better legal representation since this comment became widely known.
   

   A top legal executive at CBS, Hayley Geftman-Gold, said she “is not even sympathetic” for the victims of the shooting at a country music festival at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas Sunday night. “If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” wrote Geftman-Gold on Facebook, perhaps referring to Sandy Hook. “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

   Murphy seems to believe that praying over the victims lacks honesty unless everyone stops being political and immediately enacts his political agenda. Congressman Seth Moulton intends to boycott the House of Representatives moment of silence unless everyone gives him his personal way on gun control. It’s almost as if these guys were ready to make like Leftist James Hodgkinson and shoot anybody who disagreed.

So we know the following about The Mandalay Bay Massacre. The shooter was a 64-year-old white man. He violated several laws other than homicide statutes with regards to his firearms collection. He is now dead. Based upon that, we now are having a politically charged effort to use this tragedy to make large-scale changes in Federal law and to bend social narratives to discriminate and spew hatred towards people who do not conform to elite Leftist social conventions or standards.

The fact of that narrative transfer should be a wake-up call to us all that many of the people who lead the country and that influence mass media care far more how this tragedy can be useful rather than how many people died in Las Vegas. But unlike our genius class on Twitter, you guys already knew a lot of this stuff.

Tags: conspiracy, gun control, las vegas, las vegas massacre, mandalay bay hotel, stephen craig paddock