Survivors of the attack meet with police. Reuters.
As you are certainly aware, there was a massive shooting last night in Los Vegas, Nevada. The attack was unprecedented in terms of casualties and deaths. I won't go into the casualties too much because the numbers are still going to change. The numbers as of this post are 50+ dead and 400+ wounded. That is, quite frankly, unbelievable.
I'm not going to waste time summarizing this incident because it will be rapidly out of date as more information becomes available. Reuters has a good summary of the events and the following outlets are providing live updates:
I won't speculate too much right now. We don't have any information on motive at all, so I won't speculate though I think we can rule out Islamic Terrorism for now. It's still possible but extremely unlikely. The suspect, Stephen Paddock, seems to be a mystery.
What we do know is that this was a deliberate and well planned attack. This isn't something that someone just wakes up and decides to do and the circumstances around the case show that it was likely premeditated. From what I understand the attacker had a huge arsenal of rifles and even had set up weapons platforms and cameras on the hotel room door.
Those rifles were very obviously fully automatic that implies a few things. Either he had a class 3 licence and owned these weapons legally, which seems incredibly unlikely, or he illegally modified his own rifles to operate fully automatic. Unlike popular belief, fully automatic weapons are essentially impossible to own unless you have a massive amount of money with individual rifles costing $20,000. And I have heard reports that he had ten of them. That is so prohibitively expensive he either illegally modified his weapons himself or he had some serious connections to purchase illegal weapons.
I have to say that this was a well planned attack. He picked an excellent place to attack from. Mandalay Bay is a large casino and had a great view of the concert venue. With fully automatic weapons all he had to do was hold down the trigger to hit many hundreds of people. At a concert, people are drunk, distracted and packed in tightly. It's about the perfect place to attack.
I recently went to Las Vegas. I took a trip there this May and I briefly visited Mandalay Bay. It's a nice hotel and is located at the far south of The Strip. The concert venue is across the street from Luxor and Mandalay Bay and is usually empty. The south end of the Strip is also very close to McCarren airport, which explains why flights were disrupted.
This is a huge blow to the city and one that hits home for me. Literally a few hours before this happened I was thinking to myself that I wanted to go back and trying to figure out if I could afford to go again this year. MGM had given me some comps and I was actually considering Mandalay Bay as a choice. Had this attack happened earlier in the year or later, I could have been around when this happened. A very sobering thought.
I am going to call this post now. I could talk more but I am exhausted and more than a little upset. With so many unknowns I want to keep the speculation to a minimum. I could post footage from the attack but I don't really want it on my blog. For now I am going to take some mental health time. I may have another post up tonight when we know more, but this one hit way too close to home. I'm really downplaying how much this has effected me and I think I might just need to step away for awhile...
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