Mass Shooting in Vegas

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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby CarrieVS » Mon Oct 02, 2017 5:26 pm

Reports are now up to 58 dead, over 500 injured. Getting close to 600 casualties in total, from an attack by one guy. This just sucks so badly.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Lindvaettr » Mon Oct 02, 2017 5:30 pm

The tiny shred of a silver lining here is that he had the courtesy to kill himself, rather than forcing some unfortunate police officer to kill him. I can't imagine that even killing a man who just murdered 58 people would be an easy thing to mentally handle. So it's nice no one else had to kill anyone, I guess.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Marcuse » Mon Oct 02, 2017 6:26 pm

To clarify a point, the woman the police were looking for has been found and interviewed but has been released and is now considered to have not been involved with the incident. She was apparently not in the US when the attack happened, and the confusion is because Paddock used her ID at some point when acquiring the hotel room.

Paddock himself appears to be exceedingly normal. The only prior encounter with law enforcement was a driving citation. He once sued a casino alongside his brother for tripping on a carpet but dropped it in 2014. He was a retired accountant who made money renting apartments with his mother, who lives in Florida. The only slight concern is that he appears to have placed large bets in Vegas casinos recently, though this isn't clear whether he won or lost these. His gambling does seem to put paid to the ISIS claim though, not sure a convert would be indulging in such a way.

While they found guns and ammo at his house, they said that it was above all a normal "lived in" house. There just seems to be nothing specific that would make this man do something so violent and deliberately against people he didn't even know. The loss of life is horrific, but the lack of an adequate reason is baffling and bothering me almost even more than that.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Anglerphobe » Mon Oct 02, 2017 8:24 pm

Without any intent to bury the tragedy in paper, I wonder whether casualties due to secondary factors (trampling and crush being likely in this case) are tallied as equal alongside the direct gunshot victims in calculating this as the deadliest attack of its kind in history. More people may have been shot dead in other atrocities, though the eventual death toll of this may end up higher because of those effects.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Mon Oct 02, 2017 8:36 pm

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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby DamianaRaven » Mon Oct 02, 2017 8:40 pm

D-LOGAN wrote:Not that if it had stayed at 2 it would have been less tragic or anything ... but ... fuck!


I disagree. *checks the math* 2 dead people is 96% less tragic than 50 dead people!
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Crimson847 » Mon Oct 02, 2017 9:09 pm

Posted this on Facebook, in response to a conservative friend of mine getting dogpiled in a comment thread about how the solution is obviously to ban automatics and semi-automatics.

"Australia has strict gun control laws... and hasn’t had a mass shooting in almost 30 years..."

Just for the record, they've had a couple.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hectorville_siege
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monash_ ... y_shooting

They've also had a few mass murders committed with other weapons, most recently this one just this year:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Melbourne_car_attack

That said, overall the mass murder situation in Australia seems to be roughly comparable to the situation in Canada, which has substantially more permissive gun laws (though tighter than in the US), and where around half of all households have a gun in the home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... _Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... _in_Canada

Of course, neither compares to the US with respect to massacres, mass shootings, or even gun deaths in general, despite Canada having about 7 million guns in 10 million civilian households. That isn't a new observation, nor is it unique to conservatives like [name withheld]-- Michael Moore made the same point in Bowling for Columbine 15 years ago. After noting the high rate of gun ownership in Canada, he examined various other commonly hypothesized causes of the US mass shooting epidemic, from family breakdown to poverty to violent media. The result was this highly effective scene:

https://youtu.be/2Yub7Lc-lnU?t=142

Ultimately, if we're going to find a solution to this problem, we need to give it some serious thought and refrain from indulging snarky one-liners or automatically slapping down anyone who criticizes our pet theories, because none of the easy answers that we all reflexively point to really make sense on closer examination. We don't have this problem figured out yet, and figuring it out is going to require all of us to think harder, consider more possibilities that we would ordinarily dismiss, and overall be *better people* than we currently are.

As a longtime friend of [name withheld], I can assure you that he hates seeing people get murdered senselessly; we all do. Motivation to solve the problem isn't the issue here--the issue is firstly that it's a really hard problem, and secondly that we Americans spend more time bickering with each other than working together to solve problems these days. Until that changes, people will keep dying from fundamentally solvable problems, including this problem and so many other major problems that we've neglected for so long.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Pseudoman » Mon Oct 02, 2017 11:49 pm

This comment being more or less a response to Marcuse and wanting to share a perspective "why" he did what he did. Paddock was a man, who lived an uneventful career, who wanted to make it big but never did, probably not religious and thinking there's no accountability whatever he did good or bad, after he died. What's really interesting his father Benjamin Hoskins Paddock was a bank robber and believed to be on FBI's most wanted list.

I think he went through an existential crisis realizing that he didn't matter and no one would take notice if he was alive or dead and he desperately wanted to change that and now the rest is history.

He's at the moment the largest mass shooter in the US. Like it or not because of this he's going to get a Wikipedia page that will chronicle his life or at the very least this incident. Like it or not he'll be more remembered than his victims. Even if we outright hate all of this, he got what he wanted, being noticed in the world. That or he really hated country music.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby ghijkmnop » Tue Oct 03, 2017 12:15 am

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Thu Mar 14, 2019 5:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Irishjava » Tue Oct 03, 2017 1:35 am

There's a particularly upsetting quote making the rounds today:
"Worst mass shooting in American history" sounds just like "Hottest Year on Record"... neither really means much any more.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Aquila89 » Tue Oct 03, 2017 7:58 am

Pseudoman wrote:I think he went through an existential crisis realizing that he didn't matter and no one would take notice if he was alive or dead and he desperately wanted to change that and now the rest is history.

He's at the moment the largest mass shooter in the US. Like it or not because of this he's going to get a Wikipedia page that will chronicle his life or at the very least this incident. Like it or not he'll be more remembered than his victims. Even if we outright hate all of this, he got what he wanted, being noticed in the world. That or he really hated country music.


I don't know, should we speculate when we know nothing about his mental state? Yeah, maybe he wanted to be infamous. Or maybe he thought the people he killed were evil aliens in human disguise. Maybe he thought he's on a mission from God to eradicate sinners. Or maybe he had irrational violent impulses even he couldn't really make sense of, like Charles Whitman. Nobody knows at this point.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby tinyrick » Tue Oct 03, 2017 8:41 am

I want my representatives in Congress to point out this is not a gun issue, but a mental health issue, then cut funding to mental health related services.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Tue Oct 03, 2017 9:05 am

tinyrick wrote:I want my representatives in Congress to point out this is not a gun issue, but a mental health issue, then cut funding to mental health related services.


What funding?
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby tinyrick » Tue Oct 03, 2017 9:21 am

Doodle Dee. Snickers wrote:
tinyrick wrote:I want my representatives in Congress to point out this is not a gun issue, but a mental health issue, then cut funding to mental health related services.


What funding?


I've been informed by my friends from High School on Facebook that government fails at everything. They know it's true because all of their underfunded government services suck. I moved to a blue state and the government services that receive funding are actually good for some reason. I can't put my finger on why that is, though.
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Re: Mass Shooting in Vegas

Postby Marcuse » Tue Oct 03, 2017 2:03 pm

Paddock was a legit millionaire. Puts paid to the gambling theory. He did, though, have shitloads of guns and explosives. He had been living in the hotel room he shot from for about four days prior to the shooting.
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