Slate "Guns vs. Thoughts and Prayers"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/2017/10/in_the_battle_of_guns_vs_thoughts_and_prayers_guns_are_winning_in_a_rout.html

In Las Vegas, the guns won, and it looks like they’re going to keep on winning.

By Jeremy Stahl

LAS VEGAS—In the wake of Sunday’s massacre, a series of images loom across Las Vegas as profound reminders of where this country stands on gun violence, and how total a rout one side has achieved in that debate. Driving into the city on I-15 North, passing the towering Mandalay Bay—the site of the attack that claimed the lives of at least 59 people and wounded more than 500—I pass a massive billboard depicting a beautiful woman in a tank top. She’s holding a long gun. It is an advertisement for a firing range that promises on its website the opportunity to “shoot fully automatic weapons in Las Vegas.” The city is replete with such opportunities.

On Monday, the same note was plastered on hotel marquees throughout the city: “Pray for Vegas.” In the battle against assault weapons in America, prayer has beaten gun control, and it’s not even close.

One of the first people I talked to in the city was a man named Brian, who was doing some shopping at Mandalay Bay on Monday afternoon. Leaving the hotel through a door that was partially tied off in police tape, he wore a T-shirt with the words “Black Rifle Coffee Company” and a decal of an assault weapon. The Salt Lake City–based java business lists its roasts by firearm type and promises to “fuel freedom-loving Americans everywhere.”

Brian, who declined to give his last name, told me he’d been a Marine for eight years, doing “anti-piracy operations and counterinsurgency stuff,” and a police officer in Central Ohio for five years. He patiently and knowledgeably explained why he believes the current regulations on “gun suppressors”—that is, silencers—are too onerous, and why the legislation to loosen those restrictions needs to pass. Even so, he acknowledged that the types of guns used in Sunday’s attack—reportedly semi-automatic weapons that had been modified to fire essentially as automatics—serve no practical purpose. “I was in the Marine Corps […] and we used them on our helicopters,” he told me. “But as small arms, something you would carry, we never used it. It’s used for suppressing fire, that’s all it’s used for.


snip - more at the link above