Las Vegas shooting: at least 50 killed, hundreds injured

RENO, Nevada — Marilyn Lewis had never held a gun. But on one dry desert afternoon in June, the Alabama education official aimed a 9 mm pistol at an armed teenager in a high school classroom during a shooting rampage. Students screamed. Lewis pulled the trigger. After the third round, the gunman fell to the ground.

Everyone applauded. “He’s wounded in the chest, he’s down,” said one of the Laser Shot sales reps as he looked at the results on a computer tablet.

After every national tragedy, like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a familiar rhythm of grief emerges. Politicians, religious leaders, and other public figures emerge to offer “thoughts and prayers” to those afflicted. President Donald Trump offered “prayers and condolences,” and First Lady Melania Trump tweeted that the Florida victims were in her “thoughts and prayers.”

Offering “thoughts and prayers” after such tragedies is so common that it has become a model for performative sympathy and inaction. It’s the title of a satirical video game in which players are challenged to use “thoughts and prayers” to stop school shootings (spoiler alert: it doesn’t work). It’s the title, too, of a particularly cynical BoJack Horseman episode about mass shootings, in which beleaguered film producers find themselves rolling their eyes while they trot out the phrase, again and again, in response to real events as they try to get back to the “actually pressing business of making sure the movie gets made.”

Wednesday’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida claimed at least 17 lives; an unknown number of students were wounded. It’s the kind of horrific mass violence that raises questions about why the United States, which has by far the highest rate of gun violence in the developed world, makes it so easy to acquire guns.

This baffles people from other countries — for reasons that Australian comedian Jim Jefferies explains in a bit from his 2014 Netflix special, (which we’ve discussed before). Jefferies was actually attacked in his home and tied up while captors threatened to rape his girlfriend. But instead of making him pro-gun, it taught Jefferies that a gun would never have protected him — “I was naked at the time. I wasn’t wearing my holster.”

Editor’s note, May 26, 2022: This story was originally published in 2018, and the statistics included may not be the most recent available. For Vox’s latest coverage of America’s gun violence epidemic, see our explainer.

Does gun control help reduce gun deaths? It’s a crucially important question, but even for PhDs, it’s a tough one. There’s been a mountain of research on the subject, but these dozens of studies conducted over many years and in many different countries reach a broad and sometimes contradictory range of conclusions. It’s hard to know what it really tells us, taken together, about whether gun laws can reduce gun violence.

Republicans seem to be humoring a gun control proposal to ban “bump stocks” — a device the Las Vegas shooter likely used to make his semiautomatic weapon function as a fully automatic one.

In the wake of the tragic mass shooting in Las Vegas, which left 59 dead and injured hundreds more, Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate have proposed banning bump stocks. Police found 12 bump stock devices in the hotel room the Nevada gunman shot from, an explanation for the rapid gunfire at the incident.

If what we say on Twitter is any indication of how we’re feeling these days, Monday, October 2, was a very, very bad day.

Mathematicians and complex systems scientists at the University of Vermont have been tracking sentiments on the social media site since 2008 with a program they call the “Hedonometer.” And Monday, the day after the massacre in Las Vegas that claimed 59 lives, was the saddest day they’ve ever measured on Twitter.

Following this weekend’s deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas, numerous rumors centered on fake victims and misinformation about the tragedy have circulated across social media.

Amid those rumors was a series of deliberate hoaxes that originated from a variety of sources — including 4chan’s alt-right stronghold /pol/; a fake Facebook page claiming that the shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a member of antifa; and several troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter.

Gun control works, as Australia powerfully demonstrates.

Between 1978 and 1996, there were 13 massacres in Australia; 104 people were killed. In 1996, at Tasmania’s Port Arthur, 35 people were murdered (and 23 injured) by a man armed with semiautomatic weapons.

In the wake of this weekend’s deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) proposed a ban on the “bump stock,” a device that makes semiautomatic weapons function like automatic ones, which are generally banned in the United States.

Police found 12 bump stocks in the Mandalay Bay hotel room from which the gunman shot, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more, making for one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern American history.

After the mass shooting in Las Vegas over the weekend, one of the deadliest in modern American history, Republicans in Congress don’t seem to have much interest in turning to questions of gun control.

“I am sure there will be some debate on it, and then we will go down the road and something else will happen and it will get in the background again,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX) said. But if there will be a discussion, it seems like it’ll have to wait until after Republicans get their budget passed to set up their tax reform legislation.

On the October 3 episode of The Weeds, Sarah Kliff, Ezra Klein, and Matt Yglesias discuss the recent mass shooting in Las Vegas and gun control policy changes that have worked to dramatically lower suicide and homicide rates in other countries.

Ezra opens the show by describing American policymakers’ now-predictable response to every mass shooting in the country, calling it “a bit of kabuki theater.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) on Tuesday reiterated a normal Republican talking point that gun laws don’t affect gun violence, with a twist: It’s the existence of “sanctuary cities” that creates a lawless culture fostering mass shootings like the one in Las Vegas, he said.

Two days after a lone white American gunman killed more than 58 people in Las Vegas, what is now considered one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern US history, Inhofe said the country is “inundated with permissive laws” — like those in “sanctuary cities” where local law enforcement doesn’t enforce all federal immigration laws — perpetuating the “cultural problem” behind mass shooting.

In the wake of one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, which happened in Las Vegas Sunday, House Speaker Paul Ryan was asked what Congress could do to prevent these tragedies in the future. Ryan answered with what Congress has already done.

“One of the things we have learned from these things, we have learned from these shootings, is often a diagnosis of mental illness,” Ryan told reporters at his weekly press conference Tuesday. (We still do not know whether mental illness played a factor in the mass shooting in Las Vegas.)

In the aftermath of another mass shooting in America, there’s new attention to a law that Congress passed earlier this year — effectively making it easier for people with mental illness to buy a gun.

In February, President Donald Trump and Congress enacted a law that blocked a last-minute regulation from former President Barack Obama’s administration that required the Social Security Administration to disclose to the FBI information about people who are getting disability benefits due to severe mental illness. The rule was meant to make it a bit easier for the FBI to flag those with severe mental illness while doing a background check on a firearm purchase.

Steven Paddock, who killed at least 58 people and wounded more than 500 when he opened fire on a crowd from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel Sunday night, reportedly had 23 weapons around him in his hotel room, and 19 more at his home.

Law enforcement officials confirmed on Tuesday that 12 of the rifles in Paddock’s hotel room were outfitted with a device called a “bump stock,” which enables semi-automatic weapons to shoot rapid fire, like a machine gun.

A shooter opened fire at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a three-day country music event, in Las Vegas on Sunday night, reportedly killing more than 50 people and leading to hundreds more injuries, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD).

The gunman is dead, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said at a press conference early Monday morning. And police had located a woman they were seeking who had been traveling with him. LVMPD said they believe he acted alone.

Shortly after news of the Las Vegas shooting broke on Sunday evening, ISIS’s official Amaq News Agency claimed responsibility for the attack. In the subsequent hours, most experts have concluded that the claim was almost certainly bunk. The shooter, Stephen Paddock, so far has not been found to have any established links to ISIS, nor is there any evidence that he shared their worldview. The FBI has publicly stated that Paddock had no connection to international terrorism, a rare step at this early stage of the investigation.

Yet when I searched Google News at around 3 pm Monday, several of the top articles had headlines that clearly treated ISIS’s claim seriously. And these weren’t from fringe outlets; we’re talking Fox News and Newsweek:

As the nation reels over the Las Vegas massacre, which left more than 50 people dead in one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, House Republicans are poised to pass legislation that would make it easier to buy gun silencers, which gun control advocates say could make mass shootings even deadlier.

The provision, the Hearing Protection Act, included in a larger bipartisan legislative package called the Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, would remove gun noise suppressors, or silencers, from the list of items regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934, making them substantially easier to buy.