If it weren’t about such a tragic situation, you would laugh out loud at a recent headline in the Daily Beast:
Las Vegas Killer Had Better Rifles Than the U.S. Military
Yes, that was the headline of the article written by a former Marine infantryman. The reason why it’s funny is because 1. it’s misleading and 2. it’s irrelevant. Let’s start with the first issue.
The headline is misleading because the guy who did the shooting had nineteen to forty-seven weapons with him in the hotel room (depending on who you listen to). But the fact of the matter is that he could only fire one weapon at a time. How many firearms did he actually use in his shooting spree? We know he fired one fully automatic weapon. Can we say that he fired any more than that? I haven’t heard of any more than that.
Which leads us to my second point: the types of rifles that the shooter had in his hotel room are irrelevant. They are simply there to bring up panic in people so that there is more support for gun control laws. The shooter fired a fully automatic weapon which, you may know, have been heavily regulated on the Federal level since 1934 which means that the Vegas shooter had few ways to obtain that weapon. J.D. Tuccille writes about this issue:
short of outright prohibition, automatic rifles are subject to just about every rule and restriction that has been proposed by opponents of easy civilian possession. If the weapon Paddock used in his rampage was legally acquired and owned, it was done so in accordance with laws intended “to curtail, if not prohibit, transactions” in such firearms in the words of federal regulators themselves.
But what if Paddock’s weapons were illegally acquired, or illegally converted to automatic, or were semiautomatic weapons mistakenly identified as machine guns?
So, let me reiterate: the Vegas shooter either navigated the best “protections” that gun control had to offer to prevent evil people from getting weapons or he purchased it on the black market, which gun control won’t be able to stop.
In other words, whatever other weapons that the Vegas shooter had with him in the hotel room, the one he used wasn’t better than what the military has (despite what the headline implied) and gun control wouldn’t have stopped him from doing this evil deed. So, in the article that had that headline, the mainstream media is pushing their agenda and not being honest in their portrayal of the situation. This is why people don’t trust the mainstream media when they report on gun issues.