Fatal attraction: America must end its toxic love affair with guns
In the long night of its soul, America must finally repudiate its rapture with guns. The obsession is killing them. In ones and twos and massacres. By deranged individuals, the lone wolf — lone hyena — outlier with a grudge and an automatic rifle. Or 23 of them: The number of weapons, police say, that Stephen Paddock, a former accountant, had in his room at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, strafing from different windows upon a large happy crowd enjoying a country music concert below, the shooter darting from one vantage point to another, apparently never needing to stop and reload.
It appears to have been that methodically planned and indiscriminately executed.
Another stockpile of 19 firearms later discovered at Paddock’s home in a quiet retirement community about 110 kilometres from the raucous Strip.
Far less often, such mayhem in the United States has been inflicted by radicalized cells. That’s terrorism — at its stony heart, violence wrought for a political purpose. A legal definition for domestic terrorism when there’s someone to actually prosecute.
But what unfolded in Vegas late Sunday night certainly feels like terrorism — at least 59 killed and upwards of 520 wounded in one of the deadliest mass murders in American history. Some 22,000 people fleeing, trampling over each other in the pandemonium, diving for cover behind bleachers in what must have felt like an eternity in that less than five-minute barrage of gunfire.
No motive for the carnage has been identified.
“We’re lost,” Paddock’s brother, Eric Hudson Paddock, told reporters in Orlando on Monday, in utter disbelief. “I don’t understand. The fact that he had those kinds of weapons . . . where the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background or anything like that. He’s a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite, drove down to gamble in Vegas.”
How did this 64-year-old retired accountant, son of a bank robber who was once on the FBI most wanted list, manage to get an arsenal of weapons through the rigorous security of a Vegas resort? He checked in on Sept. 28. Do not disturb?
The why of it is, at this point, unknown and probably will still be unfathomable if ever deduced. “Steve had nothing to do with any political organization,” his brother insisted.
“No white supremacists or nothing, as far as I know.”
Paddock may have selected the event to go down in a blaze of demented glory — the Route 91 Harvest Festival — but he certainly didn’t target anyone in particular, firing randomly into the revellers, like shooting fish in a barrel.
More would have been slain had the SWAT squad not so quickly determined precisely where the gunfire was coming from.
And that is knowledge which they possibly will not have, in the future — because there will assuredly be another time, another slaughter — if a Republican bill before the House is passed, as expected. The benignsounding Sportsmen’s Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act (SHARE), includes provisions that will abbreviate the costly background checks currently required to buy suppressors — popularly referred to as “silencers.”
To shoot — and kill — more quietly, more clandestinely. A pet project of Rep. Jeff Duncan, a Republican from South Carolina, allegedly intended to protect hunters from hearing loss.
State and local taxes and registration on these devices would also be nullified.
Debate on the legislation was halted on the day that House Ma- jority Whip Steve Scalise was gravely wounded in a shooting at a congressional baseball game in June. But it resumed last month, passed out of a House committee and was expected to win full House approval as early as this very week.
Despite all the warnings from anti-gun proponents aghast over the potential consequences.
“Law enforcement and military experts have told the American people and Congress they oppose the bill, and that there are very effective hearing protection devices available on the open market,” Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement after the bill passed at Committee.
“Keeping guns out of dangerous hands and stopping school shootings, ambushes of police and other mass shootings before they can start is the priority for the American people — not making it harder to detect a shooting once it starts.”
Yet too many Americans, in distorted thrall to the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — the right to bear arms as precious as the air they breathe — will not be weaned off their love of guns, though surely this is not what the authors had in mind for a “wellregulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State.”
Politicians who go up against the National Rifle Association do so at their own peril. So far in 2017 alone, the NRA lobby has pumped some $3,200,000 into anti-gun measures, no matter how modest the restrictions.
When will ordinary Americans say enough is enough?
The 2016 mass shooting at an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub, 50 killed, wasn’t enough.
The 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, 32 killed, wasn’t enough.
The 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook, 20 six-and-seven-year-olds and six adult staff, wasn’t enough.
San Bernardino in 2015, 14 killed, not enough.
Fort Hood in 2009, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist shot and killed 13, not enough.
Columbine high school in 1999, 13 killed, not enough.
On and on and on. While we all passively accept severe curtailment of liberties to thwart international terrorism.
It seems Americans, for all their grieving and consoling, are nevertheless prepared to accept increasing levels of horror, regardless of a shooter’s motivation.
As if this is just the way it is. And every atrocity numbs rather than enrages.
Not take away the guns, not make it harder to get guns, but gimme a gun.
It is an obscene American pathology. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.