50+ are dead in Vegas, and a fresh layer of blood is on your hands, Wayne LaPierre

By D.B. Hirsch
October 2, 2017 7:49 am - NewsBehavingBadly.com

America’s big problem with guns? Our gun industry profits from fear and death (salon.com)Tengrain: Wayne LaPierre and the entire NRA can go straight to Hell. (crooksandliars.com)Think Progress: Trump’s reaction to Vegas shooting very different than that to other attacks (thinkprogress.org)

America woke up this morning to news of the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

More than fifty people are dead. More than two hundred are injured, and the death toll is expected to climb.

One shooter, positioned 32 floors above them, is alleged to be behind the horror.

He wasn’t a member of Al Qaeda or ISIS or the New Black Panthers or the Klan.

He wasn’t a loner.

He was angry – very angry, from the little information that law enforcement has been able to assemble – so angry that he killed more than fifty people enjoying a concert of country music at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas strip from a hotel room in Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino with the perfect view of the concert and the very large audience. According to Las Vegas Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, police found at least ten weapons in his hotel room. Video and smartphone recordings captured the sound of a machine gun, a weapon originally designed for one purpose: rapid and efficient killing of other people.

The shooting occurred last night at around 10:08pmPST. The suspect is deceased; early reports stated he had been killed by law enforcement, but the Las Vegas sheriff’s department reports he was found dead in his 32nd floor hotel room. His name is Stephen Paddock. He was 64 years old and, according to the Las Vegas sheriff’s office, had received one citation from local law enforcement (clarifying earlier reports that he had been “known to local law enforcement” according to multiple news sources). Multiple weapons were found in Paddock’s hotel room.

The New York Times reports,

Online video of the attack… showed the country singer Jason Aldean performing outside at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a three-day country music event, interrupted by the sound of automatic gunfire. The music stopped, and concertgoers ducked for cover. “Get down,” one shouted. “Stay down,” screamed another.

Several SWAT teams were sent to the hotel immediately after the first reports of the shooting at 10:08 p.m., and officers overheard on police radio reported being pinned down by gunfire. Shortly before midnight the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department reported that “one suspect is down,” and soon thereafter the police said they did not believe there were any more active gunmen.

Confirming that one suspect is down. This is an active investigation. Again, please do not head down to the Strip at this time.

— LVMPD (@LVMPD) October 2, 2017

At this time we do not believe there are any more shooters. More information to come shortly from @Sheriff_LVMPD.

— LVMPD (@LVMPD) October 2, 2017

…

The police reported clearing out the Mandalay Bay’s 29th floor and working their way up to the 32nd floor. A police Twitter post described reports of an “active shooter” near or around the Mandalay Bay casino.

We’re investigating reports of an active shooter near/around Mandalay Bay Casino. Asking everyone to please avoid the area. #LVMPDnews

— LVMPD (@LVMPD) October 2, 2017

…

Two concertgoers described hearing round after round of gunfire.

“It just kept coming,” one of the witnesses, Robyn Webb, told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “It was relentless.”

Among the dead were at least two off-duty police officers.

It is far too easy for Americans to purchase automatic weapons. For this, you have the NRA to thank. The NRA started as an organization for target shooters and hunters, but thanks to hefty donations from America’s gun industry that led to a de facto takeover of the association, it is now a lobbying and propaganda mill. Their public face is that of Wayne LaPierre, who has spewed inflammatory gun rhetoric for more than two decades.

In a fundraising letter to NRA members, dated April 13, 1995, NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre called the federal officials who enforce U.S. gun laws “jack-booted government thugs.”

LaPierre tied the phrase to a law banning certain semi-automatic and automatic weapons, which had passed during President Bill Clinton’s first term in office, with Clinton’s support.

That law is popularly known as The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB).

The AWB is a subsection of the broader Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The provisions in that act which imposed harsher penalties on violent and repeat offenders have recently inspired “Black Lives Matter” protesters to heckle both Hillary and Bill Clinton at their 2016 primary campaign speaking engagements.

Back in 1995, it was Wayne LaPierre who was making news for harshly attacking the measure and its enforcement.

Among other things, LaPierre said in the April 13, 1995 letter to NRA members:

“…the semiauto-auto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

The last part of that sentence conjured up images of the fatal confrontations between officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and Randy Weaver’s family at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992 and the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas in 1993.

LaPierre’s use of the phrase “jack-booted government thugs” was his metaphorical way of equating BATF officials with Nazis.

LaPierre is thisclose to Donald Trump:

Four years ago, Wayne LaPierre’s face was plastered across New York’s tabloid covers as a “gun nut” and a “loon”. His refusal to admit gun laws had anything to do with the Sandy Hook school massacre earned him the title of the “craziest man on earth”.

Today, LaPierre sits at the left hand of the president. Trump seems eager to flatter the National Rifle Association’s executive vice-president and CEO, the leader of the group that became one of his most loyal champions and spent more than $30m to back his candidacy.

In his second week as president, Trump called LaPierre to the White House for a special meeting of conservative leaders. Securing a new supreme court nominee who would guard the court’s favorable rulings on gun rights had been the NRA’s highest election priority, and Trump had just delivered it.

…

Trump has promised to support a sweeping pro-gun agenda, and the NRA has told its members that it’s finally time for the group “to go on offense”. But LaPierre’s ascendancy marks more than a shift towards ever looser gun laws. It’s a triumph for the political strategy that LaPierre perfected, one that has frequently been derided as extreme and paranoid.

Trump won the White House, and is now governing the country, using the same playbook as LaPierre: always attack, never apologize and treat the news media as the opposition party.

“If you want to understand some of the approach and personality of Donald Trump, I think you look at what Wayne LaPierre has been doing for a long time. He’s a little bit of a test run of what Trump been doing,” said Arkadi Gerney, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and longtime gun control advocate.

Asked what Trump and LaPierre have most in common, Gerney said, simply: “Lying.”

LaPierre’s spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the president’s relationship with the NRA.

LaPierre and other NRA leaders have long argued, even as the gun control movement has set increasingly modest aims, that Democrats’ real goal is confiscation of Americans’ firearms. LaPierre claimed that a narrow expansion of background check laws after Sandy Hook would be turned into a national registry of gun owners, something that is prohibited by federal law, and that the final background check legislation explicitly said it would not do.

LaPierre has been the prime enabler for America’s mass shooters, be they students at Columbine High School or a disturbed man taking his anger out on dancers at a gay nightclub in Florida or a mentally ill liner shooting moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.

Or an angry individual known to law enforcement who had the ideal vantage point to target thousands of people with automatic weapons.

LaPierre is once again an accessory to mass murder, and the blood of Las Vegas concertgoers who were just out for a night of music and fun becomes the latest layer of blood – including that of at least one off-duty cop – on the hands of a bilious homicide enabler.