Guns don’t kill people, but they sure help people kill people

On Sunday night in Las Vegas, during a concert by country and western star Jason Aldean, a middle-aged, well-to-do white guy with a receding hairline sat at a window on the 32 floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, and started shooting with automatic weapons into the thousands of people at the concert below. In a matter of 15-20 minutes he’d killed more than 50 — that number is now 59 and climbing — and wounded 527. Some of the wounded might have gotten hurt in the human stampede that started after people began getting shot.

   I got the news in the middle of the night when I woke up from a fitful sleep and decided to sit at my computer for a few minutes. My heart sank. My first thoughts were of the people in that crowd and how that 15-20 minutes ended the lives of so many and changed the lives of thousands and thousands of others who knew the dead and injured.

   My second thought was of a friend of mine from Fort Worth who had written just hours earlier to say she couldn’t believe she was in Las Vegas. Then I thought of two friends of mine who helped build that club and of another friend, from north Fort Worth, who owns three cupcake stores on the strip. Were they safe? Had they been at the concert? Were they walking on the street and caught in the stampede?

   I’ve only heard from two of them. The one who had just gotten to Vegas was next door when the shooting happened and saw the people running and was shaken up but okay. The woman who owns the cupcake places is okay too. The friends who built the club I have not heard from as yet.

  All of us are asking “why did this happen?” We’re not likely to get an answer. The police and FBI say the killer, Stephen Paddock, had an absolutely clean record. His brother in Florida is dumbfounded. One of the gun dealers who sold Paddock some of the dozen or more weapons he had in his hotel room said Paddock seemed perfectly normal to him. Paddock himself can’t answer because the SWAT team that burst into his room said he was already dead from a self-inflicted gunshot. And he apparently left no notes to explain why he did what he did.

   He certainly didn’t just snap: This was well thought out, a planned action. Why?

   Here in Texas, as in Nevada, we’ve got open carry. Supporters say that you need a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. That would not have helped in this case. It might help sometimes: The guy at the gas station on the corner is always strapped because he is determined not to get robbed again. Understandable.

    A little less understandable are the people at the Walmart and HEB in Burleson, walking around with semi-automatics hanging from their shoulders. It’s the law and I’ll live with it, but I wouldn’t hold my breath imagining that those guys are really going to save us if a problem crops up. In fact, I actually get the heck out of any aisle they are in because I don’t want to get caught in the line of fire of anyone who thinks they’re going to be a hero.

   While we don’t know they “why” of Paddock’s hellish rampage, we do know the “how”. The how involves guns. Paddock’s guns didn’t kill those people but they sure helped him do it. So what do we do now? Nobody wants to take people guns away, but there must be some room for making changes in our system to see that the future Paddock’s of the world do not get their hands on weapons that can do so much destruction and killing so quickly. Do we bother to close the “gun show” loophole? Do we make it illegal to manufacture or sell semi-automatics that can be easily converted to full automatics? Do we just put our heads in the sand until the next mass shooting, or the one after that? That’s what we have been doing. This was, after all, the 272 mass shooting in the last 274 days and we have not done anything yet. We, as a nation, have not even started a conversation about it.

    Our president’s spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee, said it’s “premature” to discuss guns. President Trump said “we’ll get around” to discussing guns. Meanwhile, Congress is set to vote on a bill this week that would legalize gun silencers.

   Not good enough. I don’t know what’s good enough, but anything would be better than keeping our heads in the sand.