THE COMMON THREAD IS FEAR
Las Vegas survivors agree that limits on making weapons fire automatically are needed, but not much more in gun debate
Like characters in a video game, Valerie Fowler and Kaitlyn Roll were among the targets of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, running for their lives from a sniper whose powerful arsenal is redefining America’s gun debate.
Many survivors with ties to the Bay Area are only beginning to comprehend what happened when a 64-yearold man employed his legally modified semi-automatic rifles to rain rapid-fire terror from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas high rise. But almost a week after the shooter killed 58 of their fellow concertgoers and wounded nearly 500 more, some like Fowler are wishing they, too, had something during the madness Sunday night: a gun of their own.
“If I had a gun on me, I would have felt more safe,” Fowler remembers telling Roll, one of her old high
school friends from Santa Rosa, as they sat on the couch of their Las Vegas rental the next morning, watching the news replaying the traumatic footage.
Roll, who had reached out to help a wounded woman and came home with blood on her hand, quickly disagreed: “If we were all carrying guns in the crowd, it wouldn’t have helped.”
At first glance, their disagreement illustrates how America’s debate over gun control continues to be one of the country’s most divisive and dig-in-your-heels issues. But could we be inching toward a middle ground after more than 20,000 people personally experienced the murder of 58 fellow country music fans — carried out by one man with more than 20 legally obtained weapons.
In a sign of bipartisanship that has been absent from Washington and the gun control debate for decades, Republicans — and even the National Rifle Association — made overtures last week that they were willing to consider restrictions on the accessory that allowed a retiree to turn high-powered rifles essentially into fully automatic combat weapons that fire repeatedly with one squeeze of the trigger.
And that makes perfect sense to both Fowler and Roll — and many of the other concertgoers interviewed for this story, even ones who still count themselves as staunch gun rights advocates.
“No matter what they change, there’s no way the bad guys aren’t going to be able to get guns,” said Brett Eastwood, of Discovery Bay, who took cover under bleachers when the gunfire began Sunday. At the same time, though, he added this: “Maybe this guy shouldn’t have been able to buy 20 or 30 of them.”
Even so, Eastwood said he would have felt safer if he had a handgun that night.
“I didn’t know if there was one shooter or five shooters,” he said. “You’re huddling under this bleacher. You’re hearing people screaming and crying and with blood on their faces. You think, all I have is my cellphone and I’m in flip-flops. I’m totally defenseless.”
He had no idea if they were enduring a “full-on terrorist attack or one guy at Mandalay Bay. All you heard is loud gunshots. I kept honestly thinking, ‘Wow, is this really how I’m going out? Am I down to my last five seconds, one second? Will they realize we’re hiding under the bleachers? Will they get us?’ ”
Fowler, 31, was so certain she would be killed that night, she texted an “I love you. Gun shots. We’re hiding for our lives” to her husband while she and her friends crouched behind a festival booth freezer filled with Dippin Dots.
She grew up with guns for target-shooting safely locked in her house and now lives in the small south Texas town of Ganado, where most people are Republicans and gun rights advocates. She was so annoyed at late night television host Jimmy Kimmel’s gun control monologue last week that she turned it off.
Still, she said she believes common-sense rules need to be applied to gun ownership. “I definitely think there needs to be restrictions and background checks. I’m 100 percent behind that,” Fowler said. “Some people say if bad guys have them we should be able to. But I don’t fully believe that. Even if a bad guy can get a weapon of mass destruction, I don’t think every Joe Schmoe needs to have one just in case.”
Guns have never been part of Roll’s life — she grew up in Sonoma County and has never hunted or considered buying a handgun for safety. She’s never spent much time even debating the gun control issue — until she came under fire herself and talked briefly with Fowler about it.
“I don’t know who has the better answer, but I do believe that something has to change,” Roll said. And talking about it more with her own friend might help. “Thinking back, she’s someone I feel having conversations with about that would be helpful, understanding the other point of view.”
For years, the gun control debate has been interpreted as all or nothing: Either you support the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms or you want to ban gun ownership from every law-abiding citizen. But after Sunday night — after the music and dancing stopped, after they felt the whoosh of bullets whip past their heads, dragged bloody bodies and knelt over the dead — their reflections were more thoughtful and nuanced.
“I think that you can’t really know how you would feel about this until you go through it,” said Victoria Stamper, of Phoenix, who was shielded from bullets by her boyfriend, Christian Kirleis, 24, who grew up in Benicia.
“Now that we’re seeing that people can get their hands on these types of guns more easily, something should be done about it.”
Kirleis, who now lives in Tempe, Arizona, said he believes “people should have the right to own” a firearm. However, “I would encourage people to be open to more strict gun laws based on recent events. I totally understand they like their liberty and stuff, but I would ask that they be open to the possibility.”
That’s a tall order, given the tortured history of gun violence, Congress and the National Rifle Association.
After the 2011 shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the 2012 massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, the Obama administration’s efforts to ban assault weapons and expand background checks still failed in 2013.
The debate that ignited after 14 people were killed in the 2015 San Bernardino shooting and 49 were gunned down at the Orlando nightclub in 2016 centered on the Americanborn extremists inspired by foreign terrorist groups, not access to semi-automatic weapons.
Opposition to most gun restrictions by the NRA repeats familiar themes: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people; stricter gun laws are a slippery slope that will lead to disarming Americans; gun ownership is a birthright. And some swept up in the Las Vegas tragedy echo those ideas. A 2017 survey by the Pew Research Center found nearly 6 out of 10 rural Americans said there was a gun in their household, and 75 percent of those had more than one firearm.
After Sunday’s shootings, authorities found more than a dozen guns in Stephen Paddock’s hotel suite, many equipped with the socalled bump-stock device that is now the focus of a bill proposed by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
To the surprise of many, the National Rifle Association on Thursday agreed that bump stocks should be subject to regulation. (In the same statement, the NRA also called for expanded “right-to-carry” legislation.)
That the NRA and Republicans in Congress are open to making some change in the law is remarkable, experts say.
“I don’t think that what’s being discussed is particularly far reaching or significant in terms of gun control legislation, but I think it’s a move the GOP has not been willing to make in at least 15 years,” said David M. Studdert, a Stanford law professor and expert on gun violence. However, he said, “a cynical view is that this is just a strategic move to preempt or forestall any effort to get any more far-reaching gun control legislation.”
But it’s futile to think any legislation enacted to stop mass shootings will have a meaningful effect on gun violence in general, Studdert said.
“It’s a bit like designing financial regulations around Bernie Madoff’s behavior,” he said. “Ninetynine percent of gun-related deaths in the U.S. are unrelated to mass shootings.”
Survivors of Sunday’s carnage — like Misha Usunov, of Danville, a staunch Second Amendment advocate — agree that banning bump stocks is a commonsense fix everyone should be able to live with. Still, he said he doesn’t want his experience to compel politicians to try to restrict his right to own a gun.
“Even though gunfire was raining down on us,” Usunov said, “the only bit of safety I felt was because I saw those police officers running toward the gunfire — with their guns drawn.”
“I didn’t know if there was one shooter or five shooters. You’re huddling under this bleacher. You’re hearing people screaming and crying and with blood on their faces. You think, all I have is my cellphone and I’m in flipflops. I’m totally defenseless.”
— Brett Eastwood, of Discovery Bay