The weapons apparently were rifles. They were semiautomatic rifles. I do think he could have killed many people with a bolt action rifle given people were clustered together. Charles Whitman killed sixteen and wounded thirty-one with rifles which were not semiautomatic.
But he could have killed a lot more by blowing the nearby fuel tanks. Some say he fired into them trying to do that, but had he blown one of them with the ammonium nitrate and tannerite he had, the casualties would have been in the thousands. He planned with a meticulousness that some find remarkable, but his plan did have some serious flaws. Apparently he believed he could leave that scene and go kill people elsewhere with the other materials and weapons he had. Maybe we’ll eventually find out where and how he planned to do it. But indisputably, some of it did not involve guns at all.
If your insurer doesn’t pay out much, then your insurance costs should be cheap.
You spend an awful lot of effort saying that what didn’t happen could have happened and ignoring what did actually happen.
The guy that shot the Congressman thought he was fighting a tyrannical government and he used a rifle. And I’m not sure why anyone thinks they could stop the US military with anything on this poster anyway.
He thought it was tyranny. And he acted in a way consistent with what you would want done based on your poster. After all, who are you planning to use those weapons against in a tyrannical government. So, you might disagree with him that he was fighting a tyranny, but he did act in a way that you would want based on that poster to fight a tyranny, right?
In your mind. In my mind, he wasn’t either. But he thought he was. Who gets to decide when the government is tyrannical and needs to be fought by murdering Congressman. Him? Me? You?
I do not ignore what did happen. I’m only pointing out that it could have been far worse and likely came very close to it. And ignoring the potential for which Paddock was evidently prepared is in no way justified. In fact, it points out that there are very serious vulnerabilities we have in this society and that they are not going to be removed by restricting firearm ownership by honest citizens.
The whole insurance thing is really a way to administratively ban legal ownership of firearms. No insurance company will open themselves up to the liability of something like the Las Vegas shooting, so nobody will offer insurance, so nobody will be allowed to legally own firearms. It’s a backdoor gun ban.Ridgerunner:
the whole gun insurance idea is simply to make it more expensive to own a gun to make less people able to afford it.
With the growth of population all crimes have the potential to happen more often. A lot of the mass shootings we’ve experienced are an immigration problem. Others may be a psychiatric drug problem. Why should honest, law abiding Americans have their rights taken away when the solutions to the actual problem aren’t tried?