The Sandy Hook shooter took the time to go to gun ranges regularly and he was a teenager.
I wouldn’t conclude this guy acted alone just yet, but I don’t say that because I don’t think he COULD act alone.
I am getting really annoyed about the publicity given to people who are only tangentially related to Paddock.
At this point, we do not know that Marylou Danley did anything at all wrong. But the Washington Post–not the National Enquirer–has now published the name of her married daughter, her daughter’s husband and the name of her father in law and the company at which he is a top level exec, the fact that her daughter has a child, and the value of the home the daughter and her husband own. It also has published the names of her sisters, who live in Australia. Her former stepdaughters allege that they have received death threats and that their father, Danley’s ex-husband, has as well. Social media posts allege he was involved–which is pretty far fetched, IMO.
Is this really necessary–or fair?
We don’t choose our families. I can understand that the police/FBI might want to talk to some of these people, but seriously, why do we need to know how much the house owned by the killer’s girlfriend’s daughter and son in law is worth? Why should anyone think that the daughters of Mr. Danley are responsible for what the boyfriend of their former stepmother did?
He was spraying bullets into a CROWD. He wasn’t targeting certain individuals with precision, he was just raining bullets on all of them, letting them land where they may. His guns required the power to travel, not any kind of talent.
I’ve worked trade shows before and there’s no particular skill, planning, or sneaking required to haul heavy crates of random stuff to a hotel room. You pull your car up to the valet, hand the bellhop a $20, stroll along behind him, and in 5 minutes your stuff is in your room. Rinse and repeat as often as you like. If you want to haul your own stuff, you park and haul your own stuff, and nobody even looks at you twice unless it’s to hold a door open for you.
For learning to shoot - you go to a gun range. Zillions of those all over the country. Probably plenty of instructors available at the ranges too.
Really the only hard part about the whole thing would be getting the preferred hotel room. You’d have to scout the rooms and pick out what you want, then ask the front desk if you could reserve that particular room number in advance. For a retired millionaire that doesn’t seem too hard.
He didn’t have to be a good shooter. Is it hard to hit someone across the room with a grain of rice? Maybe.
If you throw a handful of rice across a crowded room, will you hit some people. Yes. Many of them.
Won’t bother to look up the link, but a veteran with sniper training said he could have killed a lot more people if he had just stayed in semiautomatic mode, used his sights (He had some high quality sights) and fired every 5 seconds or so instead of using automatic mode. It wouldn’t have taken much training with the equipment and geometry he had. Maybe he would have wounded fewer, but he could have killed more. According to someone our government has trained to kill from a distance.
Just like it annoys me to hear people talking about average bright students as math geniuses, it bothers me to hear people claim this guy had any special talent. Yes, he had the executive function to plan the attack, so he had the kind of qualifications you need to work, for example, in the hospitality business. It isn’t rocket science.
There was a pot of money, back in the 90’s I believe, for what was an attempt to treat gun violence as an epidemiological problem. Much research was done, many papers were published. Because of a discussion on this very board, I read enough of them to confidently say… dangling wads of grant money will lead at least a majority of academics in whatever direction they’re led. It’ll suffice to say: what eventually become clear was that gun ownership itself was what was being pushed as the disease in need of treatment.
A conclusion in search of the research to justify it, in other words. Not much of a method, as for as the scientific variety goes, but… not one that would raise many eyebrows around here. Not if some of the posts are serious and not parody.
Anyway, there were enough retractions, discredited research, ‘dog ate all my carefully compiled underlying data’, and general ugliness… I’ll pass on pulling out my wallet for another round.
Shooting from that high up, at night, with what I’d guess was a fair amount of hand tremor and poor night vision given his age and appearance…
He needed to spray bullets into a crowd. If a bump stock makes a gun fully automatic, it should be as illegal as auto weapons have been since the '30s.
Looks like bump stocks will soon be illegal or at least more regulated.
I’ve heard that song and dance before. I wouldn’t bet money on Congress doing anything.
^^ Agree. I wouldn’t be surprised if we got a 10 year ban that would expire and not be renewed, like the assault weapons ban.
It’s a myth that number #1 is a myth. This is another case of the fact-checkers needing fact checkers. This thread makes clear: there are a lot people who want the government to ban and confiscate semi-automatic rifles. I get the sense a lot of posters here would want to go even further and ban private ownership of handguns. Or if all the article meant was there aren’t the votes in Congress to pass a ban, they’re attacking a straw man argument.
The NRA is apparently attempting to put the bump stock issue beyond the purview of Congress. They are urging Congress to kick it back to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who back in 2010, when bump stocks were approved, saw no need for regulating them. The ATF apparently said they were “accessories and not a conversion device.” Apparently the contention is that bump stocks allow other guns to mimic automatics but do not convert them to automatics. So the NRA is now saying the ATF should re-visit that decision – not congress.
If Breitbart reports can be believed, that same NRA statement issued today concludes with requesting Congress turn their attention to national reciprocity for right-to -carry, which I assume means if you are cleared in one state you are free to carry in all states.
Here are some other takes on the NRA/bump stock/reciprocity issue:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/10/05/the_nra_s_bump_stock_ban_statement_is_hardly_an_endorsement.html
Terry Gross - NPR - Discussion about NRA and far reaching policies and practices
“…national reciprocity for right-to -carry, which I assume means if you are cleared in one state you are free to carry in all states.”
IMO, that would run into a h-uuuge problem of the feds dictating what the states can and cannot do; the SCOTUS might get their hands full.
The ATF will do the right thing this time, I’m sure. Otherwise, we’d be looking at the rarest of things: a federal agency that screws the pooch, repeatably, and still gets funded every year.
If the information is publicly available, what would you suggest – rules to not publish certain things?
The police leaked some crime scene photos, and one of them is absolutely gruesome. If the police can’t stop their own from leaking info/photos, then why should we expect the media to not publish what they find out?
Marylou apparently shut down her Facebook account immediately. She should have told her relatives to do likewise.
Yes, NOT laws, but rules. Most legitimate publications have a rule not to publish the name of the victim of a sexual assault, for example. I think they should have a rule not to publish the names of family members or former family members of a person who commits a criminal act if there is nothing to suggest they participated in it.
If you don’t already know it, some right wing sites posted the info that Danley’s ex-husband was the shooter.This was before the police identified the shooter, but after if had leaked that Marilou’s id was found in the hotel room where Paddock died. They somehow missed the fact that the two were divorced. Her ex-H is a registered Democrat and these sites had articles saying he was the shooter and was an anti-Trump liberal that wanted to kill conservatives. At one point, that was the top news link on google.
I don’t think people like your ex-H’s adult daughters from a previous marriage qualify as “relatives.” And, in the circumstances, I don’t think it would have been wise for her to reach out to family members as the very fact she contacted them might lead to questions as to their involvement.
Here’s what it comes down to for me. The U.S. has more civilian guns than any nation on Earth. We also have more civilian mass shootings than anywhere on Earth. I see a correlation between those two things.
Your statement is absurd. There are lots of countries with more civilian gun deaths than the US and more mass shootings than the US.