No, “feel good” remedies won’t solve the problem. As noted over there, an attempt to confiscate Americans’ guns would be tantamount to the government making war on its own people. It would not end well.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, there were not 273 “mass shootings” by any sane definition. There were nine.
I think we should simply amend the constitution to allow Congress to completely ban guns. This is a tried and true approach that worked well in solving the “abuse of alcoholic beverages” problem a few generations ago. And if we had banned heroin, LSD, HIV, STD and similar narcotics via constitutional amendment rather than the hodge podge of lesser approaches now being attempted, those problems would be solved by now, too.
Really you need to use the /sarc modifier.
Decades ago, I knew a libertarian survivalist who also advocated a complete ban on firearms. His reason? “Because it would precipitate armed revolt.” he said with a smile.
I’m guessing if he were serious, he later re-thought his position when he became a follower of Robert LeFevre.
An attempt to seriously disarm the American People is definitely on my list of events that would result in large scale armed resistance.
I’m not so sure that fantasy is true? The problem is those that would fight back would be isolated and destroyed piecemeal while at the same time demonized to discourage others.
We already have police arresting people for open carry (in Texas!) When I was a kid in AZ having a holstered hand gun or rifle/shotgun on a sling didn’t bother anyone.
I have a hard time telling Reason apart for SJW’s these days.
Its the conservatives war on terror? Whether you like the measures taken or not, it is a bipartisan effort to address a problem that is real and affects the entire country. The author fails to note not only the Democrat’s embrace of these measures but a President other than Bush that not only expanded them but used them against domestic political opponents.
Whatever, the main problem with this article is that after complaining about the security apparatus currently in place, the author call for it to be expanded to hotels. The author also calls for presumably banning bump stocks while linking to an article about expanding gun rights.
I could see bump stocks being banned but we don’t need new laws. The ATF could just revisit it’s decision to allow them and instead conclude that they violate current laws regarding automatic weapons so should be treated like other automatic weapons. This would make them as legal/illegal as automatic weapons and prevent any poorly written legislation being used as a backdoor way to take away more rights.
TSA style checks on entering hotels is a stupid idea. We are fast getting to the point where the cops come in and toss your house a couple times a month.
Let’s see. An English girl suffers 3 sexual attacks while walking home and has no means of defending herself. The government is incompetent and cannot keep its citizens safe. A Girl Mini by Bond Arms would be an excellent means of protection.
Unfortunately, the English would rather stick their noses in the business of Americans and berate us for a lack of gun control instead of protecting their fellow citizens.
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/10/13/17-year-old-girl-suffers-three-sex-attacks-one-hour-walk-home-east-london/
Why solve your own problems when you can have moral superiority just by telling others how to solve theirs? That a suggestion or law doesn’t work has no downside. Just bloviating the nonsense is a sure win.
The article didn’t really go very far in terms of how to increase security. Obviously, universal concealed carry would bring about an immense psychological change — on the part of criminals, or aspiring criminals. No longer would they be constrained to furtively checking for the presence of “official” security manifested by uniformed persons. Every person over the age of 18 around him/her would be a potential security element. That would be too overwhelming. I believe the era of the mass shooter in America would end at that point.
Of course, politicians would have to curb their power-lust, given the fact that suppressing the masses could no longer be accomplished. The armed forces would be in the same position as prospective criminals: significantly outnumbered everywhere they went by people who might be armed.
It’s the perfect way to preserve a free State.
No longer would they be constrained to furtively checking for the presence of “official” security manifested by uniformed persons.
I never see any media reports that describe robberies like, “Young man tries to mug a couple on the street. Doesn’t he know either one of them could be armed? Our state does have a lot of concealed carry permits and records show there are more guns in our state than people. Tune in after the break to see what happens.”
Would crime drop if the media worked on building awareness that anyone might be armed and you could never guess who? It would be a multiplier effect. You wouldn’t actually need to have everyone armed.
And I think we Americans should go on the offensive at this particular time, starting with the statement that the right to keep and bear arms precedes the Constitution, which merely recognizes it. We should be standing firmly on the ground that our rights, as a whole, precede the Bill of Rights, and do not depend on the Constitution. It is just that the Constitution recognizes them, and the Progs do not. They are anti-American in a very deep sense. They are the subversives who seek to overturn our Republic.
Nothing much would stop such an attack except accurate return fire, of which there was none. A psycho multi-millionaire could launch an attack with just about anything. If Elon Musk spent ten years secretly planning to wipe out scores of people, does anyone think he couldn’t do something so dramatic that people would be talking about it a hundred years from now?
But some suggestions, given that most security measures have been aimed at keeping weapons or bombs from entering venues, while nothing much as been done about people launching attacks from far outside the secured areas.
1) Get major concert organizers, or their insurers, to decide that there needs to be a way to kill all the lights at a night event. It would also be great if there were some bullet-resistant high-power spotlights to shine toward an attackers suspected location, doubly blinding him even if he has night-vision equipment.
2) Against aimed fire, and in daylight, smoke grenades would help obscure the targets. Having police or security personnel have some on hand could be useful.
3) Having some places where people could dive for cover would be nice, though perhaps unworkable at most outdoor events. If we treated concerts like they were being held in Baghdad’s Green Zone, we’d want some areas that offered more protection in case of attacks with mortars or rockets. And given how easily and frequently Islamic insurgents put together improvised mortars, that’s a real threat, especially in Europe.
I should mention the non-assault on a mass murderer whose body was already cold. Many have praised the bravery of the police, while others have said that if they were military they would face an article 99 court martial for cowardice in the face of the enemy because they were huddled in a stair well for an hour. I’ll just skip that question.
To me an as yet unanswered question is the wounded hotel security guy, where he was, and why he’s not dead. I’ve seen layouts of the shooters room but not a layout of the hallway, nor a map showing where the responding police found the security guard. Given the hotel”s shape I suspect a long linear hallway with the shooters nest at the far end from the elevator core more central to the building. The responding police said they came to the aid of the security guard, and (this is now said to be incorrect) assumed that his intervention stopped the shooting. The timeline is all over the place on that one.
But to me more important than the timeline is the position. If the wounded guard was 10 feet outside the shooter’s door then I don’t see why the responding police didn’t barge on in because they had three or four officers against one potential suspect who was steps away, other than standard procedures that said to wait for SWAT. If hundreds of people are being shot then a reasonable person would throw that standard procedure out the window and go all Bluto on the Germans to save Pearl Harbor.
But if the security guard had crawled to the elevator end of the hall, the three or four officers are looking at charging a machine gun nest straight down the barrel down a hundred feet or more of a narrow hallway, which is suicide if the nutcase is waiting for it. The fact that the shooter was not still shooting into the crowd below is an indication that he’s swung his weapons around to face the hallway and await the arrival of law enforcement. The fact that he was no longer shooting is actually a great threat because it might mean he’s switched targets to the more immediate threat.
But let me throw in another curve. The shooter was firing from a pair of busted out windows on the 32nd floor. The police responded by running up to the 32nd floor, after having arrived a floor or two below because it’s hard to do a good floor count from the outside of a building, and because there’s still some unidentified dysfunction between the hotel security guy reporting something to somebody and what the police were told.
The police non-assualt on the 32nd floor is poor tactics. The shooter was ready to defend the 32nd floor. He had it wired with cameras. He shot a security guard. He possibly jammed the stairwell. It’s a potential problem. Instead the police should have rushed to the 33rd floor. Why the wrong floor? Because they have a layout of the building and could have busted out the 33rd floor windows directly above the shooter’s busted out windows.
Just the falling glass would have probably and dramatically shifted his attention away from the crowd below, or refocused it.
Thinks the shooter: “Is all the falling glass from a window above the result of people in the crowd shooting in my general direction? Should I scan the crowd to find whoever might be shooting back? Or is the falling glass the first indication that a SWAT team is about to repel right into my face?”
Both answers are wrong. The guy on floor 33 leans out and tosses a couple flash bangs into 32. Then a couple more. Then maybe leans out and down and fires blindly with his pistol. The mass shooter is no longer free to engage targets. He’s got his own problems to worry about. He cannot focus on the crowd below or the hallway behind him because there’s bad things coming at him from the top of his own window. He can’t watch his back except through his hallway camera. If he responds to motion on the hallway camera he can’t protect himself from police swinging down on floor on a rope, shooting him in the back as he faces the hall.
.
There’s a similar attack that could have been delivered from the 31st floor, breaking out the window below him to toss grenades up and in, but that assault wouldn’t have to option of going on rope and swinging in through the window.
But sadly, it seems that the Las Vegas police and city government were more likely to send in suicide counselors for the shooter than try to kill him.
The flash-bangs from the floor above might be a good tactic. But I can’t be the only one cringing at the suggestion to fire blindly into an area where a suspect might be.
As for an approach down the hall towards a shooter, don’t the police have bullet resistant shields for that?
CC works great for deterring street level gunmen. But, this particular case exposed the problem that a person beyond the range of pistols firing from high ground can wreak just about as much havoc as he pleases. People firing pistols up from below would much more likely hit other rooms, endangering innocents, than hit the gunman.
It’s not really practical to have the populace toting scoped rifles around with them and, with the bullets tracing a ballistic arch, they would have to be well trained to use them at that distance anyway.
Having a trained sniper on the police force would be helpful, unless he lived in the burbs and couldn’t response rapidly.
I can’t see any way to avoid it except to prevent a would-be shooter from ascending to his eerie in the first place. How do we do that? Can’t just require all heavy luggage to be inspected – he could just disassemble the parts and take them up in small loads.
I can’t think of anything but perhaps magnetometers on the entry points to higher floors, and warnings that toting heavy metal objects up by yourself may result in elevators stopping until you can be checked out.