Maybe it’s because I’m a creature of Washington, but it occurs to me that if 60 people were killed as a result of:

— Terrorism
— A Coal Mine Collapse
— An Ebola outbreak
— Food poisoning
— Faulty brakes
— A chemical plant explosion
— A high rise fire
— Altered drugs
— Sharks

Everyone — including Congress and the White House — would be talking about immediate public policy responses. Investigations would be launched; hearings scheduled.

So what can we expect over the next few weeks from Congress or the White House?

Prayers and warmest condolences.

6 thoughts on “Las Vegas”
  1. Jordan —
    You might not get comments from this White House even in all the situations you listed….
    Call me cynical about this crowd, but they deserve it.
    Mark Gruenberg
    Press Associates Union News Service

  2. And please make sure that the gun control legislation is “sensible” because we wouldn’t want to go off the deep end or anything.

  3. No one is addressing the real cause of the incidents, do you blame a press for cutting one’s hand off, do you find fault with the car when a drunk driver kills a child and do we blame the phone for all of the distracted driving deaths?

    Look at Chicago, they hold a news conference saying, they reduced deaths in September by almost 3%. They should be having hearings and developing solutions on why September saw 57 homicides, bringing this years totals to 501 shooting deaths, according to data kept by the Chicago Sun-Times. How many drunk drivers killed people? Was it the car’s fault? How many industrial deaths occurred? It was the tools fault. Distracted driver related deaths? Phone’s fault. Two of the most deadly attacks on people were the result of a plane and a U-haul truck, what is at fault in those two cases, the plane, the pilots or the ideology? If the Stephen Paddock drove a gasoline tanker down the street and set it off as an explosion, is the driver, the muffler(silencer) or the gasoline fault. Just like most incomplete investigations, people jump on contributory factor as the cause and not the root cause because it makes us uncomfortable. The real cause is hidden and overlooked. We have a people problem not a gun problem, approximately 300 million guns in the US did not kill anyone, yesterday.

    Just fuel for the conversation.

  4. To Jeff:
    If I want to fly a jumbo jet I would need a pilots license…..hours of training with a professional. Because if I messed up and was not skilled enough I might crash that jumbo into an stadium and kill 30,000 people in a blink of an eye.
    If I want to drive a semi tractor trailer I would need to get a commercial drivers license and periodically pee into a cup to prove that I am not on heroin or crack. If I mishandled that truck I could kill hundreds in a multicar pile up on an expressway.
    Why is it in Nevada I don’t need anything to carry or buy a handgun, no permit to purchase a AR-15 or a high powered elephant hunting rifle. Its legal to open carry a handgun in Vegas. I am not blaming the equipment , just saying some equipment capable of hospitalizing over 500 people in 15 minutes should require some level of training and registration and oversight. What do you say about that.

    1. Agreed. A federal buy back option should also be included to lessen theft of unwanted guns.

      1. The reason we all have to register our cars and take a periodic vision test and take a hands on driving test is that cars have been used in interstate crimes that have killed and endangered people. An AR-15, or an M-4 does not. I can buy one for about 300$ at any gun show by private sale that is run every weekend in Las Vegas, and I can also buy unlimited amounts of ammunition, no questions asked, no ID, no permits, no registration. I can be on the no fly list, I can be a phycho path or just out of a drug rehabilitation, doesn’t matter. And since no one asks anything except cash or credit card I could very well have been just released from prison for armed robbery, although technically that would be illegal. I can take that AR-15 and buy a bump stock kit for under 100$ and turn it into a fully automatic rifle firing 9 rounds per second, perfectly legal. This is why mass shootings will continue. My condolences to those who die next.

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