Two Party Opera by Brian Carroll for October 02, 2017

Strange that this ran the same day the Mandalay Bay shooter killed all those folks.

Sadly, NOTHING will be done about it until "Con"gress grows some cajones, and tells the N.R.A. to SHOVE IT, and passes some sensible firearms control laws! Why is it even considered anywhere CLOSE to acceptable that ANY Unhinged Loon or Random Crackpot Nutcase should have relatively easy access to MILITARY-GRADE firepower??

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I believe in the 2nd Amendment with guidelines…..GUIDELINES…. No one should have an arsenal along the lines that this man had and that other mentally unhinged Shooters have had. If we do not have strong sensible gun control we are going to continue to have unhinged Shooters. Our forefathers believed that every man, every household should be able to have a gun, a pistol or a rifle for protection, for furnishing a meal for the table, and they put the second amendment in the Bill of Rights. They did not have in mind that people should have semi-automatic rifles, sure you can say they didn’t have semi-automatic high powered high frequency rifles in those days or you can be darn sure our forefathers would have made sure that they specified what would be allowed. The second amendment has become corrupted by greed and avarice and it’s a shame. Do I think that Congress will initiate stronger gun control? I can wish, but no I don’t think they will. They are too corrupt to risk offending their source of income.

Well said. The 2nd Amendment was intended to allow personal weapons for a well regulated militia. As a retired Army veteran, I can never understand why automatic weapons are allowed into the hands of ordinary citizens, even those with military training.There are those who argue that it is to prevent any Government dominance of citizens but I believe that is just so much B.S.

If you study the early history of America, you will find that each inhabitant was required to possess military arms and ammunition. This did not change until after Reconstruction when the white ruling class wanted to disarm their former slaves so they would stop harming the KKK nightriders.

Wish I had an answer. Trump Disciples believe that murders and mass shootings in Chicago proves that gun laws don’t work.

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They also believe that no one in dry counties drinks alcohol.

It looks like the shooter used a legal modification to an AR-15 to mimic auto-fire.

http://www.denverpost.com/2017/10/03/las-vegas-shooting-gunman-used-bump-stock-device-to-speed-fire/

Video of device:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gWrthH2OK4

Nevada has been going out of its way to make it easier for its visitors and residents to kill and maim its fellow citizens for a while, now. The massacre was merely the end result of that long-range strategy. This was desired – if it weren’t, there’d be controls in place to stop or at least mitigate the killing, and there isn’t. Bottom line; you reap what you sow. And EVERYONE who plans to visit Nevada should be aware of this! My sympathies to the victims; they got caught up in what is a long-term desire for blood by the Right-Wing Nut Job base – a desire for weapons of the nature that killed in Las Vegas is a desire to kill – pure and simple!

807 people died on Illinois highways so far in 2017. That’s just Illinois. I don’t know how many were injured. One at a time, families mourning, loved ones gone. Suffering a horrible death by blunt force trauma and being pierced by sharp objects. Witnessing their kids, parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers dead and dying beside them. Senseless but real. Just not news anymore, because it happens so much. When shootings aren’t news anymore, you know we have all become numb to it as much as the carnage on the roads.

I read in my morning paper that there are some 15,000 people killed by gunfire in the United States each year (many being accidents and suicides, of course), whereas some 32,000 people are killed each year in motor vehicle accidents. The individual shootings became “non-news” long ago, except for local reporting of local shootings in local newspapers and television stations: there are just too many. I somehow doubt that large-scale mass shootings will ever become “non-news”, although Congress is never likely to pass any common sense (which is all I’m asking for) laws—until there are completely different people in Congress.

By the way, I hope I didn’t offend anybody with my post last week that the Boston Massacre might more properly be called the Boston Riot. Sadly, plenty of riots in are nation’s history have caused more carnage than what happened that day. (Not to excuse the redcoats and certainly not to be any less patriotic than John Adams himself.) It’s just that, when I think of a “massacre”, I think of things like Sandy Hook, Orlando, Vegas, and others far too many (and far too depressing) to mention.