It’s Time to Have An Open Discussion on the Attack in Mandalay Bay and End the Stupidity in Congress /u/KellinQuinn__ Follow Oct 10, 2017 · 5 min read

With the insanity that happened, I feel there needs to be real anger with an unhinged attitude to the incident at hand, reader’s discretion is advised due to the sensitive nature of this subject.

One week to the minute after shooting started, casinos along the Las Vegas Strip went dark in honor of the 58 victims of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. (Photo: Alden Woods/The Republic)

One week after the shooting at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, the death count is 59 and more than 500 people injured. The information slowly pours in and the insanity described in Congress is growing. It’s time to open real discussion and end the bullshit excuses created by the GOP.

Time and time again when a mass shooting happens we turn a blind eye to the source of the insanity. We have NRA money pouring into Republican Congressmen’s wallets to stop whatever discussion that happens. They say the Democrats are infringing on the Second Amendment, and we need to protect the Constitution. The Republicans want to infringe upon the Amendments and the Constitution. They want to ban gay marriage, or tread the lines of a crisis and deny the rights of African Americans’ right to vote.

It’s time for Americans to get our heads out of our asses and open our eyes to how we’re making it easier for these human piles of garbage to spill blood by letting them use gun show loopholes or not getting a background check before they purchase military grade assault rifles.

At the Mandalay Bay, the shooter had an extensive list of weapons:

● 5 handguns

● 2 shotguns

● A “Plethora of ammunition”

● In total, 42 guns

● Ingredients for bomb making in his car

● A rifle with a bump stock (an item used to convert semi-automatic weapons to automatic weapons)

“Thoughts” and prayers aren’t doing anything. Every time a shooting happens we say, “Let’s not play politics and just pray.” This happened at Sandy Hook, Charleston, San Bernardino, Orlando and this is happening now. And it’s going to happen again. We are going to have one mass shooting today somewhere in this nation, since at least once a day there is a mass shooting in this country according to NewsWeek.

We have a Congress in this Nation for a reason. To pass laws and try to fix these issues. But instead of doing their jobs, they use hubris and talk about how we can’t do anything, while more than 60 times they have attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They’ve silently killed the CHIP program, which is doing more good for this country than people using military-grade assault weapons to rain bullets on others.

We have a chance to vote for gun regulation. 93% of Americans believe there should be background checks, but we have people on the terrorist watch list who can still get guns. I believe people should have guns if they would like, but it’s common sense to not let someone on the terrorist watch list, someone who has been eyed by police as a potential red flag, to get a gun.

We have the rights to bear arms to ensure the security of a free state, and a right to a well-regulated militia, but we ignore that part because the NRA says so. This amendment was made in the time when little muskets would wound someone and the infection from it did the rest of the job. But we now live in a time when armor piercing bullets are readily available to people, and a lot of times its one shot = confirmed kill.

We apparently have the right to bear military-grade assault weapons to go on a massacre because NRA lobbyists and their right-wing drones believe the government is going to roll into their neighborhood within a split second, so they have to load up. We have our priorities so out of order that it’s apparently an issue to ask for a background check to buy a gun, but we need permits to build in our backyards, on our own private property. We have to get a background check when applying for a job or to work if you’re a kid. Its common sense to get a background check to make sure you aren’t criminally insane or a terrorist before we give you a weapon which could kill an extensive amount of people.

It shows we have a problem in this country when even Jay Dickey believed the Dickey Amendment was not the way to go after all. We need to let research happen. If research happened, and it confirmed what many believe, that the looser the gun laws, the more mass shootings happen, the NRA would fund to suppress the information, or we’d have GOP senators and representatives call it fake news or a Chinese hoax. It’s unfortunately too late to save the dead, but there is still time to make sure people don’t become the next victims of the mass shootings that happen every day.

No one is asking for the banning of guns altogether, because I know people still hunt, and it should happen. I know people want to protect their families because if I had to resort to a weapon to do so I would. But what we are saying is that we need to make sure the wrong people don’t get military grade assault weapons. We need to make sure people who are so mentally disabled they can’t even handle their own money shouldn’t get a weapon. We especially need to make sure people on the terrorist watch list are unable to get a weapon in this country. We need to make sure people who are red flags to authorities shouldn’t be able to get a weapon.

Last week an act of domestic terrorism of a higher and larger scale degree than our nation has ever seen occurred. It’s time to defy the lobbyist money and the obstructionists called Congress. It’s time to get our priorities in order and stop complaining about people kneeling for the national anthem. The Constitution says they can, and Title 36 USC § 171 allows them to kneel because US Flag code is a guide and optional. These people kneel because of police brutality and the growing mass shootings because we aren’t doing anything as a nation to try and stop these horrendous acts.

It’s time to pass common-sense reforms. And if we aren’t going to pass gun reform, at least we can do are mandated background checks to prevent the worst of human beings getting guns. The gravity of this situation is growing, and the body count is going to grow the longer we wait. Write to Congress; call your representative or senator. Publicly shame the NRA as much as you can, because they are one of the reasons we will never get to see change in this country. They and their bottom line earn money from us dying with the use of these weapons. We can definitely stop them and their reign on the GOP and Congress. We beat the tobacco industry when it was believed it wasn’t possible, but this is a new battle, and it’s time to be intense and show the hard truth.

If we are truly for freedom and the safeguarding of our nation, we need to do this now and stop waiting or delaying until the next mass shooting happens. This is one of the many wakeup calls Congress is choosing to snooze on. It’s time to force them to open their eyes