Re: School Shootings
Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2022 5:35 pm
RiverDog wrote:And like I told HT, "seriously reduce" isn't good enough. All it takes is one mass shooting and everyone will be crying for more legislation. Read the biography of Stephen Paddock, the shooter that killed 60 people from a Las Vegas high rise, and tell me how a background check, a waiting period, or an age restriction would have prevented that crime. Paddock's only previous encounter with LE was a minor traffic violation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Paddock
Let's see. Stephen Paddock.
Broken home. Fatherless. Seems to be a common trait of mass killers not having a strong, healthy male figure in the home.
Former Postal worker. Not relevant, but strangely ironic.
Seems he descended into alcoholism and taking anti-anxiety drugs.
Gun purchases spiked between October 2016 and September 2017. He purchased 55 firearms. This guy had a ton of red flags.
This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Gun hobbyists being able to buy far too many firearms too quickly. Waiting period alone would have slowed a lot of this. If a guy is buying this many guns, he should be flagged as a threat and investigated.
I'm for a person owning an assault rifle. I would be completely ok with a ban on the number of weapons you can own. There is nothing in the 2nd Amendment in purpose or rhetoric supporting unlimited gun purchases for hobbyists.
This is the type of behavior the FBI should be flagging and investigating like they did with militias, gangs, possible terrorists attacks after those incidents. So I would say Stephen Paddock sent up a lot of red flags that should have put law enforcement on to him that we are not for some reason currently tracking.
This is when a lack of racism isn't helping us. If some Middle Easterner or some black guy on a gang list were engaged in exactly the same behavior as Stephen Paddock, he would have been flagged and investigated. But because this guy is some rich white guy he gets to buy a ton of guns while being an alcoholic taking valiums while gambling excessively, then he blows up we act surprised? C'mon now. This wasn't even a hard one. This guy had all kinds of flags that should have sent out a message to law enforcement.
This is just more of an example of people being overlooked because of a positive racial stereotype same as my mother does when she complains about every criminal act of an immigrant while making excuses for white males shooting people up or being serial killers in much larger numbers. It's just this kind of ridiculous bias to why these things slip through.
Paddock should have been investigated. His behavioral and psychological profile fit very well into a mass shooter profile. Those types of behaviors should be red flags in our law enforcement and background check system.