I expected the shooter to have been a white nationalist or a BLM activist--or certainly a home grown Islamic terrorist. No. (ISL, like the nerdy kid at your high school who claimed he had a Canadian girlfriend, claimed responsibility for this old white guy's behavior.) It was a millionaire white senior citizen--who lived in a retirement community--who killed almost 60 people and hospitalized almost 600.
If there were a political or social cause, the massacre at Mandalay Bay would be less terrible. It would've been about something. Instead, as of this writing, it was about a white millionaire with no political ideology killing a bunch of people because he could. A whale of a gambler with no particular grudge against the city of Las Vegas or the country music industry. He left behind no manifesto, no social media writings--and his family thought he was a harmless businessman with an interest in hunting. No, it was not a terrorist attack. (If every murder is a terrorist attack, then no murder is a terrorist attack. Hate crimes are closer to the definition of a terrorist attack.) It is a different kind of disturbing than a terrorist attack.
Banning bump stocks would not have stopped Virginia Tech, Newtown, Columbine or literally any other crime ever. (VT and Newton were done entirely with handguns.) Maybe Congress will thus muster the courage to do that.
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