STAY TRUE TO GUN LAWS

LAS Vegas has often been described as a Disneyland for adults.

Without doubt the famed “Strip’’ in Nevada’s Mojave Desert has been a fantasyland of gaming, entertainment and Elvis-celebrant weddings.

And until this week, Vegas was a lot safer than many people might have realised.

Gold Coasters who have gone there and partied – and there are plenty of them – have returned with stories of how safe they have felt.

They have seen little if any grog-fuelled aggression in the streets, which is in contrast to the sweaty mix of alcohol, drugs and testosterone that occasionally breaks out in violence in our clubs or bars.

In many ways Las Vegas and the Gold Coast have been sister cities. Both are holiday destinations, built for pleasure, a dream and a promise of good times.

These have been the ties that bind as legions of Gold Coasters have gone there to party, with many staying to chance their arm in the entertainment sector and the gambling industry. Those links have been evident in the pages of this newspaper.

Until this week, we would report about people in our own entertainment and restaurant industries enjoying close links with shows or celebrities over there.

But this week the focus is on a lone gunman, the victims and how a huge, unfathomable crime has tainted that desert holiday mecca with blood.

Whether the US can stomach it or not, the focus also is on America’s ridiculous gun laws, with politicians and lobbyists mouthing platitudes but hiding behind the Second Amendment, added to their Constitution in 1791 at a time when high-powered automatic weapons just did not exist. That “right to bear arms’’ keeps trumping the rights of slaughtered innocents.

There are many lessons from Vegas. One is that lax regulations that allow deranged people to buy such dangerous weapons must surely be changed.

Another is to hug your loved ones because anything can happen in a world that is increasingly crazy.

We must never allow our Australian gun laws, forged from our own massacre madness, to be eroded by politicians who can’t say no to a gun lobby.