09:22 – It was 48.1F (9C) when I took Colin out at 0615, dark and mostly clear.
We’re left with mostly unanswered questions about the Las Vegas mass shooting, and no way to separate fact from lies and spin. ISIS claimed responsibility for the shooting, claiming that the alleged shooter was a recent jihadi convert, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. The large “arsenal” of automatic weapons initially reported now seems likely to be standard semi-auto black rifles equipped with slide-fire stocks.
If you’re unfamiliar with those, they’re simply replacement buttstocks that use the recoil of the rifle to pull the trigger rapidly and allow a semi-auto black rifle to fire 900 rounds or so per minute. They’re completely legal and uncontrolled. As far as the government is concerned, a semi-auto rifle equipped with a slide-fire stock is still a semi-auto rifle, just one that has a very high cyclic rate. They even come with a letter from BATFE that so states, in case a user runs into a state or local LEO who thinks such rifles are Class 3 weapons.
When I read this morning that the shooter had used bump-fire stocks, I admit that my first inclination was to order one this morning, figuring they’d soon be banned, but I decided it wasn’t worth it. I have a fair amount of experience shooting selective-fire and automatic weapons. I’ve fired probably 50 or 100 different models over the decades. They don’t impress me for civilian use. Military use, yes, but then the military has logistics pipelines to keep them fed.
The cyclic rate of a typical selective-fire or automatic weapon is 10 to 30 rounds PER SECOND. Most serious preppers I know keep anything from 1,000 to (rarely) 5,000 rounds for each of their battle rifles. On rock-n-roll, you can go through that many rounds very quickly, and you don’t have a military logistics chain to resupply you. You can’t afford, in any sense of the word, to waste the ammo.
Seeing the pictures of the LV shooting victims saddens me. Given that it was a country music concert, essentially all of the victims were probably Deplorables. Good, Normal people, in other words. Mostly young people. The faces were mostly white, as you’d expect, but there were a fair number of blacks and Hispanics and Asians in that crowd as well.
Most of the crowd fled or attempted to flee when the shooting started, as you’d expect, but there were more than a few heroes as well. One guy, black as it turned out, dragged 30 victims out of the line of fire before being hit himself. He deserves the civilian MoH. Progressives are always trying to incite racial hatred, but when the chips were down here, race didn’t matter. Whites helped minorities, and vice versa. That’s because, contrary to the prog party line, Normals don’t generally care much about race.