Guest Post by Scott Adams
I’m pro-gun. I say that up front because your beliefs about my intentions will color how you see this post. My intention is to be objective. You can be the judge.
The Vegas gunman used bump stocks on semi-automatic rifles. Those were totally legal. They are also a poor choice of weapons, or so I am told by gun experts. In fact, they are so inaccurate at the distance involved in the Vegas incident that professional snipers say Paddock could have done more damage with a single-shot weapon and some aiming.
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The gun experts I talked to (informally) also agree that the shooter would have killed more than a hundred additional people had he used a fully-automatic weapon. You can legally buy an automatic weapon that was made prior to 1986, for about $15-20K. The shooter was a millionaire, and he seemed to know a lot about guns. He would have known a fully-automatic rifle is designed to not jam the way his bump stock rifles did. He would have known they fire more bullets per second and more accurately. The death toll would have been much higher had the Vegas gunman used the right weapon.
He knew a fully automatic rifle would be more lethal than a bump stock rifle.
He was rich enough to afford the fully automatic weapon.
He had months to plan and prepare.
He was smart.
And yet he didn’t use a fully-automatic weapon in the attack.
The probable reason is that a fully-automatic weapon is harder obtain and it raises some flags. I believe even private transactions with those weapons require some government paperwork.
I’m speculating, of course, but it seems to me that the ban on fully-automatic weapons did, over time, create enough friction for the Vegas gunman that he decided to settle for relatively worse weapons.
Ask a gun expert how many more people would be dead if automatic weapons were as easy to procure as bump stocks. My estimate of a hundred extra dead in Vegas is probably low.
Gun control apparently worked in this case, at least to an important degree. The tragedy could have been far bigger. A little bit of friction for obtaining a fully automatic weapon probably saved lives. We can’t know for sure what was in the mind of a madman, but we do know that any kind of friction causes some people to change plans. That’s probably what happened here.
My hypothesis is that crazy people will use whatever weapon is the most effective killing device they can obtain at acceptable cost (friction). Gun laws introduce friction. They are not intended to stop every type of crime or to deter every type of criminal. But it looks like they helped a bit in Vegas. Had there been no friction to procuring fully automatic weapons, it is likely the Vegas gunman would have used them. Why wouldn’t he?
If you want to ready my argument for why I am pro-gun, see the end of this prior post.
There is a problem with more gun control. The liberals are 100% intolerant and will not stop until all guns are banned. This will create a citizenry at the mercy of an authoritative government and the criminals who will obtain their guns from the same illegal sources that provide illegal drugs.
The rich/wealthy will have their armed guards and gated communities, while the proles will be sacrificed.
I liked the Dilbert cartoons until Admin started posting his columns here last fall. Now I really can’t stand the SOB and seldom agree with anything he says but beyond that, I just don’t like the guy.
Zara, Adams doesn’t know anything about guns. People generally do themselves a disservice opining on things they know nothing about.
Unfortunately, in spite of evidence to the contrary, much the anti-gun crowd believes that gun control laws CAN stop every type of crime and deter every type of criminal. If logic and evidence held any sway, there would be no “gun free zones”, and nationwide concealed and open carry would not be controversial. The fact that the NFA of 1934 made automatic weapons require background checks has nothing to do with restricting their distribution. What made them nearly impossible for the average person to possess was the GCA of 1986, which keeps new automatic weapons from being transferred to civilians. This turned the M-16 I could have bought in 1985 for $2500.00 into a restricted purchase worth nearly $20 thousand today. Currently it makes an affordable MP-5 ($2500.00 for cops) about the same. (The $200.00 NFA tax stamp was originally intended to make the guns too expensive for the average citizen)
Incidentally, crimes committed with legally held full-auto weapons have ALL been committed BY COPS.
Is it the proctological exam of the registration process that stops assholes from using a “machine guns” to commit crimes?
Nope, it’s the market price of the legal (and illegal) guns. Did the same process keep the LV asshole from getting an MG? Nope, it was probably a lack of understanding of the process, and not wanting to wait a year to get one.
As usual, regulation, registration and background checks mean zip.
That’s very true, Mile.
Adams kept saying “he knew”, this, “he knew” that. Adams, nor anyone else knows what Paddock knew (if it was even Paddock, which I highly doubt). There is still a debate on whether fully automatic weapons were used or not. Assumptions are worthless, as is accepting the “official” story and the pictures from the hotel room.
Evidence is severely lacking from “authorities” on this crime.
The details of this clusterfuck incident will never be fully known.
Scott Adams ought to stick to what he knows. I can read about business and Trump’s brain all day. Guns, on the other hand…
I’ve fired a slidefire and it was flawless for me. I also found it fairly controllable. It was much more controllable than the old trigger guard-mounted devices.
Adams seems to miss what, to me, seems to be an obvious fact in this day and age: laws are for little people. We self-apply them to keep out of trouble or because we think it makes us good citizens. Big people and criminals don’t worry about laws, which are merely used to beat them once they’re caught. They’re speed bumps.
If Crazy wanted to get illegal guns, I’m sure he could have found that connection. I’ve had a variety of people try to offer me crazy things. I’ve always stopped that conversation cold- I do not want to know. I don’t know how much there is out there, but I think there must be a whole lot of it.
Also, if the media is accurate, Crazy was able to buy the best, including incendiary ammo for his attempt to ignite the airfield fuel tanks. That stuff is expensive and I don’t think the average shooter is even aware it’s available.
Actually, now that I think about it, I think Adams is wrong for a different reason. I don’t think Crazy was deterred by laws he had the ability to either comply with or just avoid;
I think he was in a hurry.
Had he wanted to stay legal, it would have taken him a long time to accumulate an NFA collection. It would have taken paperwork and fees and red tape and waiting.
Had he wanted to go illegal, he would have had to take less time, but still invest time in making connections and finding what he wanted.
Going to gunshops or gunshows to buy conventional semis and exotic accessories was probably much faster and fit whatever his timeline was.
Crazy’s brother claimed Crazy was never a big gun owner. Either that was incorrect or Crazy started buying stuff up brother didn’t know about. The media claimed Crazy even bought a rifle on his trip to LV, so he wasn’t completely set in his preps when he departed for his attack. Now the interestnig thing will be figuring out if he was in a hurry for some reason, i.e. malignant tumor or the law found out about his 10,000,000 coke operation or his full-blown Syphilis was out of control.
The big question for me is caliber. I have seen nothing on the caliber of the guns in the hotel room and nothing about the forensic evidence recovered from the victims. We’re all his guns 5.56, or was there some 7.62 mixed in ? Was all the spent brass 5.56 or mixed with .7.62? What has the medical
Examiner found in terms of wounds and recovered bullets? Sure 5.56 is still potent even at that range, but 7.62 would have done far more damage vs 5.56 in terms of fatalities vs wounded. Potentially, wounds/recovered bullets matching or not matching the brass recovered might clarify the multiple shooter theories.
Here’s a clue on how to read Mr. Adams, when he begins an article saying ” I am, or I am not”; assume the opposite of what he says and wha la: that’s what he is. Oh, he’ll spend the rest of the article using some form of klingon mind tricks to try to prove his point, but in the end, he ends up proving, in this case, he is quite pro gun control.
He is the kind of like the guy who will reach out to earthquake victims and say, hey, at least you will know where the fault lines are for the next house you build over the smoldering ruins of your first house. There, feel better?
(((Klingon mind tricks.)))
Maybe I should have gone with Vulcan, Klingons are not that subtle.
FFS Its JEDI mind tricks.
Fuckin wanna be nerds………
Not Sure has exceeded the proper mis-spelling of voila’:
Vwa-lah, Wa-lah, Wa-la: the Many Misspellings of voilà – Voilà is a French borrowing into English that has mostly retained is Francophonic pronunciation:
\vwä-ˈlä\, or \vwah-LAH\. It is clear that the \v\ in the pronunciation of voilà is sometimes not heard, and this, combined with the mismatch between voilà’s spelling and pronunciation, has led to a number of misspellings of the word based on its pronunciation.
We have seen evidence for vwa-lah, vwah-la, wa-lah, wa-la, wah-lah, wallah, and even viola (for those who remember the letters in the word, if not the particular order of them).
While these misspellings are more common in informal writing, we have started seeing them in newspapers and other edited sources as well.
The correct spelling is voilà: if you have a hard time remembering how to spell it, you can use the mnemonic that voilà very often is misspelled.
Tanks!
FWIW, although I was aware of the unusual spelling, I did not want to be nailed for accusing the author of playing a musical instrument.
If you are willing to drop a few thousand on the machine tools, and learn to use them, you can fabricate a drop-in auto sear (search for DIAS blueprints). If you want full auto, and don’t care about the legal issues for whatever reasons, there is nothing stopping you.
If you are interested in something a little nicer, you can drill another hole in your lower, and install the appropriate parts, and again, you have what you want.
The vast majority of people, quite reasonably, won’t do this because of the potnetial legal consequences. Paddock had no reason not to do it, if the story about him is accurate – but he, apparently, did none of these things. He also did none of the other things one might have expected, considering the goals being attributed to him – like buy a belt-fed upper.
Gun control laws have absolutely no impact on these events, except to defensively castrate the victims – the only real goal of gun control.
I am still mystified how all those full-automatic weapons we have distributed in the middle east are magically confined there. Do you suppose someone who took (multiple cruises) to travel there might pick up a few? Or simply hire someone to smuggle them over here in a cargo container?
Laws are for the unresourceful people.
Years ago, I read an article in which the author discussed a smuggling network which used the Mohawk Indian reservation to smuggle weapons into the US and wanted people out. He called it the freedom train. He said the govt was sort of helpless to stop it, because the smugglers were being facilitated by the reservation, using govt-supplied patrol boats. It made for fascinating reading. At this point, the only thing that would surprise me is if there were no illegal weapons out there.
Mike Adams, at Natural News, does an acoustic forensic analysis and says there were two gunmen. Even give the range for the second gunman, who was close than the Mandalay Bay shooting. This is an interesting article with video.
http://www.naturalnews.news/2017-10-11-health-ranger-acoustic-forensic-evidence-proves-more-than-one-shooter-at-vegas-massacre.html
Mike, seriously? You believe the official government story-line?
On the subject of lying scumbag governments and gun control, read this :
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/sandy-hook-redux-obama-officials-confirm-that-it-was-a-drill-and-no-children-died_062014
(1) it had been a drill;
(2) no children had been killed; and,
(3) it had been done to promote an anti-gun agenda.
That has been known for a while. Though government states otherwise. Another psy-ops. Dont’t believe the MSM.
Don’t forget that during the Clinton administration the Chi Coms were caught smuggling automatic weapons into the US.
We caught the shipment of 2000 weapons that time but how many made it thru and where are they?
What a bunch of nonsense. If we somehow managed to get total gun control, the guy would have launched some kind of explosive device from his window and killed 2000. Yeah, what a big win for gun control that would be.
Total gun control is what Mexico has.
You can see the result in the daily news there.
iconoclast,that’s true–
don’t forget,the biggest mass murders have been bombs/explosions–
the largest school massacre was in the midwest(michigan?) and was committed by a loser with explosives–what was it,60 or 70 killed?
And rape laws kept Weinstein’s numbers lower.
Laws only apply to people that obey them. Is that persuasive enough, Scott?
“The gun experts I talked to (informally) also agree that the shooter would have killed more than a hundred additional people had he used a fully-automatic weapon. ”
More “sources” used top promote some agenda that has no basis in reality.
If not, name the “gun experts” and show why they are experts on automatic weapons.
But that isn’t going to happen, now is it?
Because they are either not experts, maybe not even very knowledgeable, or are just imaginary to start with. I’m betting I know more than you, Scott, than either you or any of your “experts”.
And I don’t call myself an “expert”.
Again, we are distracted beyond belief
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/10.17/fake.html
As for my readers, this is the deal: If there are validatated replies, I will provide a report, and that will be the conclusion of my participation in this issue. If there are no validated replies, I will conclude that no qualified people are willing to commit one way or the other on the issue. Without expert opinion, the matter cannot be resolved.
This is the letter from the person who represents himself as a surgeon familiar with gunshot trauma. It was sent to a person named Jack and forwarded to me. I eliminated “Jack” so that it would read to you simply as the expression of a purported trama surgeon’s opinion. Note also, that all of the fake videos of the wounded to which links are supplied have been removed from YouTube. Apparantly, as people are catching on, the authorities are being more careful about their “fake news.”
“As a patriotic American, I must say I was, like most people here, initially totally shocked by the Las Vegas shooting and I hate to admit naively believed the media. However, after receiving disturbing emails about it, with references to others with doubts, I began to look at the media reports with more suspicion, and from a medical point of view primarily the almost complete absence of blood on site from the around 550 victims apparently shot was an immediate give away.
“I am a retired general surgeon, and when younger served in a number of military hospitals in Asia and the Middle East, and I can assure you, few would have had such extensive experience in treating bullet wounds as I. Unless you’ve actually seen bullet wounds from a clinical perspective from high powered weapons they claim were used in the shooting, it is hard to appreciate the extent that the mainstream media are plainly lying.
“Most of these military style weapons now shoot high velocity bullets above 3000 f.p.s. muzzle velocity and when these bullets strike a human body they often cause the bullet to yaw (or tumble) and fragment into about a dozen pieces of various sizes thus creating wounds way out of proportion to the calibre size. Often these wounds are so devastating many have considered the modern M16 type assault rifle rounds (and other similar type of rounds) to be inhuman. Most media sources claim the victims were hit at a range of about 500 meters. To use the U.S military M16 assault rifle as an example. It uses 5.56 x 45 mm high velocity, flat trajectory cartridges giving it an effective range of about 200 meters, but with now more common M855 cartridges and heavier projectiles this is increased to 600 meters, with the bullet being lethal to over 3000 yards or 2700 meters. The M855 round produces massive wounding effects. After about 200 yards, as the velocity declines the projectile is less likely to fragment when it strikes the target, but it still does a huge amount of damage, way above wounds delivered from a regular hand gun for example.
A number of factors in calculating the ballistics of the round, but keep in mind that he was shooting at a downward angle which changes everything from level trajectory calculations.
Maggie- That scene should have been swimming in blood. When I posted Sunday that there was more blood evident in the Sunday Funnies cartoons than was shown in the on site video/photos, I was not kidding. These FF’s are getting VERY OLD and very lame.
“M855 cartridges and heavier projectiles this is increased to 600 meters, with the bullet being lethal to over 3000 yards or 2700 meters.”
I want to see someone hit a plate at 3000 yards with an out of the box AR .
I doubt it could be done.
I used to know a 50 caliber shooter and at the range he belonged to (long range for 50 caliber shooters) a mile shot was kind of rare with highly experienced shooters with very expensive rifles. 3000 yards is 1.7 miles, something I’d have to see with any AR round before I’d believe it (even a close shot).
The Billy Dixon shot, celebrated to this day, was only 1538 yards. That shot was done by a much, much heavier and longer bullet.
Everything I tell you is a lie, honestly.
Robert (QSLV)