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Kelly has a large tattoo on his left arm memorializing the Las Vegas shooting, which killed 58 people. On his other arm Thursday, he still had his wristband from the California bar. When the Las Vegas gunman opened fire from a 32nd-floor hotel room, Kelly said he threw a friend to the ground before helping get her out of the area and into a room. Armed with a knife in case an attacker came in, he hunkered down and waited with 40 other people for four hours. He said living through Vegas changed his life. He doesn’t know how a second mass shooting will affect him down the road. “Everywhere I go, everything I do is affected,” he said. “I don’t sit in a room with my back to the door. You’re always picking up on social cues. You’re always overanalyzing people, trying to figure out if something were to go down, ’What would I do?”’ Kelly said Borderline had become a safe haven for dozens of Vegas survivors: “It is our home.”

I want those bastards in Congress — they need to pass gun control so no one else has a child that doesn’t come home

A few weeks after the Vegas shooting, the bar held a benefit concert for five people from the area who were killed, and now-eerie social media posts show a number of survivors holding up a “Route 91” sign inside the bar at a six-month anniversary event. Kelly said he’ll be looking to God for comfort in the coming weeks and months. “I know that, being a religious person, that God is never going to give me anything more than I can handle,” he said. “I’m here for a reason.”

Myers reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, and Christopher Weber in Thousand Oaks, contributed.