Death and Terror On The Strip...

[Burning Petard]

so sue me, NY Times, I am cutting/pasting the whole thing here., from John Branch

NOVATO, Calif. — I was on the sideline of a soccer field two Saturdays ago, watching my 12-year-old daughter and her Novato teammates. I don’t remember much about that game, but Novato won, and one of the goals was scored by the smallest girl on the team, a quick and feisty forward who wears a long ponytail and jersey No. 8. We whooped and cheered her name. I found out later that her parents weren’t there that afternoon. They were in Las Vegas for a getaway weekend.
About 36 hours later, I was on my way to Las Vegas myself, rushing to join my New York Times colleagues to cover the latest mass shooting, maybe bigger than them all. I hadn’t covered one of them since 1999, when I was in the wrong place at the right time and rushed into the aftermath of Columbine.
A colleague of mine and I checked into a massive suite at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, 11 floors directly below that of the shooter. It had the same view of the concert ground across the Strip, where investigators in the daylight were picking through the carnage of the night before. That was about when my wife sent me a text. That little soccer player’s mom was at the concert the night before, she said. She’s missing.
But Stacee Etcheber was not my story. The gunman was. I spent a week mostly about 100 feet below where the shooter committed mass murder, trying to solve the mystery of what he’d done. I talked to people, followed every lead and wrote stories. It’s what reporters do. It was a news story, as horrific as they come, and we’re trained to keep our emotional distance from the things that we cover.
Late that night, I stood in front of the window, the same one that a madman broke 11 floors above and used as a perch to shoot hundreds of people he did not know. The body count was on its way to 58. I thought about home.
Stacee’s family soon announced that she died. My wife and I didn’t really know Stacee much — obviously not well enough to notice that she was not among the few dozen people at a rec-level girls’ soccer game. But some of our closest friends were dear friends of hers, and our town is small enough that there was probably no more than two degrees of separation to the family.
My family was among the hundreds of people, friends and strangers, who crowded onto the grounds of an elementary school and held candles aloft during the vigil. My daughter was one of the dozens of kids who solemnly held roses in her honor, and she hugged her classmate and teammate when it ended. She and a couple of friends made a cake and delivered it to the Etchebers’ house the next day.
Orange was Stacee’s favorite color, and on Friday, after people bought as much orange ribbon as they could find at all the local craft stores, an army tied ribbons all around town, from the trees on downtown’s Grant Avenue to the posts in front of Pioneer Park. My wife and her friends tied them around the trees in front of the middle school where Stacee’s daughter goes to school, along with mine.
I missed it all. I was as close to the site of the shooting as you could get, and yet felt fully disconnected from the effect of the tragedy. One night I walked to the memorial that sprang up in the median of South Las Vegas Boulevard, the kind of now-familiar post-shooting memorial that I saw at Columbine almost two decades before, with balloons and flowers and candles. I found a photo of Stacee that had been placed in the middle of it all, and took a picture and sent it home.
In Las Vegas, Stacee was just one in a crowd, part of a list. But she and her family were all anyone talked or thought about back in Novato, and that is where I got my news. I heard that Stacee’s husband, a San Francisco police officer, was running with Stacee through the barrage of gunfire when he stopped to help someone; he told his wife to go on and never saw her alive again. I heard that television news trucks were parked in front of the house. I heard stories of friends pulling over in their cars to cry at the weight and nearness of it all. There were beautiful and crushingly sad Facebook posts in Stacee’s honor, the kind you see after every tragedy, except these were written by people I knew well.
I heard my wife, who grew up in a nearby town, tell me that she had never been more proud to call Novato home.
I checked out of that Mandalay Bay suite on Saturday morning, excused from reporting duties, and flew home in the hopes of making my daughter’s soccer game. I found the red rose from the vigil, starting to fade and wilt, in a vase on the kitchen counter. When we got to the game, we and the other parents were somewhat surprised to see Stacee’s husband and extended family there, too. Warming up with the girls was No. 8, with her long ponytail.
We all wore orange ribbons, attached by safety pins, including the girls on both teams. The Novato team wore orange armbands with the initials “S.E.” Before kickoff, both squads came across the field to the spectator side and lined up in straight lines. Our team’s coach asked the parents to stand for 30 seconds of silence. And then two of the league’s better teams played a rather meaningless soccer game, only this one felt about as meaningful as anything I’ve ever watched.
And it was late in the second half when the ball suddenly swung from one end to the other, and Stacee’s daughter gave chase through three retreating opponents and beat them all to the ball. And in one blink-and-you-missed-it moment, she booted the ball into the corner of the net for what held on as the winning goal.
Her teammates chased her and swarmed her, and they and she looked as free and happy as girls can be on a sunny fall Saturday afternoon with their friends. The parents jumped and cheered as loudly as I’ve heard parents cheer at a kids’ soccer game. Behind my sunglasses, I was bawling. It was the first time I’d cried all week.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/spor ... oting.html

[Bicycle Bill]

Hell of a post, BP.

Is there some way we can bring back torture and execution methods like slow hanging, boiling in oil, or burning at the stake for the kind of callous, sick, warped person that would do something like this or other particularly heinous crimes? I know the Las Vegas shooter killed himself (and most likely wouldn't have been taken alive anyway), and even if he had been captured, tried, convicted, and sentenced to a particularly gruesome death himself it wouldn't bring back Stacee Etcheber or any of the other victims, but I still feel a weird sense of emptiness, of frustration, and futility. This asshole took away 58 people, people (including this twelve-year-old girl's mother) that he had never met before, and forever changed the lives of literally thousands more in a ten-minute orgy of random death, destruction, and mayhem.

And we — the victims, the injured (who will recover but will have to live with the physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives), their families (ditto), and the rest of us — have no reasons, no answers, no accountability, and no closure.

-"BB"-

[MajGenl.Meade]

Thinking of "why" this man did what he did.... surely, it's because he could. In his mind, there was no sanction against such an action and in US society there is too little effort or will to make such actions difficult to impossible.

Humans are awfully flawed but the majority, who don't do such things, want to believe in "insanity" and "abnormality" and "mania" - because that absolves the rest of us. Fact is, if society gives any semblance of normality to such behavior, far too many "regular" folks join in with a will. The excesses of Germany, China, the CIA, US soldiers in Iraq and Cuba, Boka Haram, the Roman church and so on were not committed by "insane" people but by everyday citizens whose darker impulses were given official, or at least cultural, sanction.

Today, the USA gives official sanction to a section of the populace that tends early to "anti-social" behavior. Yes, you can purchase that semi-automatic or automatic rifle. Yes, you can purchase thousands of rounds of ammunition. Yes, you can. Oh, publicly "normal" folks, some of them politicians, will flap their hands and say "It's wrong". And the dust will settle on the dead and nothing will change.

[BoSoxGal]

Excellent post, Meade.

[Sue U]

Nothing will change only so long as people are content to do no more than flap their hands and let the dust settle on the dead. The gun sickness in this country should be intolerable for all normal people. No other country in the world enshrines gun ownership as a sacrosanct constitutional right, because that is not how normal people in normal societies operate. The Second Amendment must be repealed so that the sheer number of guns can be reduced and their ownership and use tightly controlled. I frankly no longer give a fuck about the "law abiding gun owners" who may be dispossessed of their bang-bang toys. The consequences of gun violence are too serious and too widespread to be ignored any longer. It is long past time to rid ourselves of these murder tools.

[Jarlaxle]

Yeah...$100 each to the NRA and GOAL. Will match i t to JPFO when I get home.

[Sue U]

Yeah...$100 each to the NRA and GOAL. Will match i t to JPFO when I get home.

Like I said, not how normal people in normal societies operate.

[dales]

What is a "normal society"?

[ex-khobar Andy]

I'd never heard of GOAL, so thanks for the tip, Jarl. I looked them up. http://goal.org/legislation.html

On their legislation page there are links to 22 pieces of legislation they are following. Bear in mind that their 'About us' page tells you that 'We provide public education and advocacy leadership to ensure protection of the environment, wildlife, and your civil rights. From town hall to the State House, we are there for you.' SFSG, I'll buy that. Of the 22 laws that they are following, 21 relate to the purchase and use of firearms. One relates to the environment including such tasty items as allowing hunters to lay bait for bears so that they can shoot them. Of 13 sections in the environment bill, 12 relate only to weapon types and one addresses the harassment of hunters by those opposed to hunting. In a week where we have seen what real harassment is (here's a clue - remember the Jimmy Stewart movie/play about a 6-foot rabbit called Harvey?) I don't think that harassment of snowflakes in camo is high on my list of things to be outraged about.

[Jarlaxle]

As usual, my uncle matched my donations.

[Burning Petard]

Actual demonstration why the public does not 'have a right to know", just because there is a microphone in front of a cop.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... 674e119a07

Much less confusion and rumor and contradiction if the investigators say nothing until they really know something

snailgate.

[rubato]

The states with the highest rates of gun deaths are nearly all Red states. Life is cheap to those ignorant savages.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicat ... desc%22%7D

yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

As usual, my uncle matched my donations.

Blood relative? Same gene pond?


yrs,
rubato

[Jarlaxle]

No, actually. (He is my aunt's ex-husband.)

[Sue U]

What is a "normal society"?

Pretty much anywhere else in the industrialized world:

Even though it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths. The United States also accounted for 90 percent of all women killed by guns, the study found. Ninety-one percent of children under 14 who died by gun violence were in the United States. And 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns were in the United States, the study found.

Source: How U.S. Gun Deaths Compare to Other Countries.

Why is this so difficult for you to understand? This isn't rocket science, it's sheer empirical statistical evidence. Why is having a gun so important to you that you refuse to even see what literally everyone else in the world knows?

[dales]

It must be that pesky 2nd Amendment again.

[Joe Guy]

Our forefathers ratified the 2nd amendment as a means to decrease the surplus population. Those forefathers had foresight. They knew things before they came to the fore. That's why they were called forefathers.

[dales]

And "foremothers", too.

[Econoline]

What is a "normal society"?

Pretty much anywhere else in the industrialized world:

Even though it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths. The United States also accounted for 90 percent of all women killed by guns, the study found. Ninety-one percent of children under 14 who died by gun violence were in the United States. And 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed by guns were in the United States, the study found.

Source: How U.S. Gun Deaths Compare to Other Countries.

Why is this so difficult for you to understand? This isn't rocket science, it's shee!!!r empirical statistical evidence. Why is having a gun so important to you that you refuse to even see what literally everyone else in the world knows?

I think that's what's known as "American exceptionalism"...

WOO-HOO!!! WE'RE NUMBER 1!!! WE'RE NUMBER 1!!!

[BoSoxGal]

The Second Amendment was meant to preserve the right of a well-regulated militia in a time when Congress refused adequate military funding under President Washington. Our founders couldn’t conceive of a world where such weapons as we now have would exist, much less defense spending on such a massive scale. It’s ridiculous to rely on the Second Amendment as a bulwark against a corrupt government; if such government has the loyalty of the police and military, the citizenry is toast no matter how many semiautomatic weapons they have stored away.

Our bulwark against a corrupt government is the 1st Amendment, which IQ45 doesn’t respect at all.