October 4, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

This video (~2 min.) records when the shooting first began. My question is why were the lights on the stage turned on to illuminate the crowd?

• The latest on the Las Vegas shooting:

• Liz Shield's morning brief for today has summarized most of what is being reported today:

        We now have confirmation that the man who slaughtered 59 concertgoers and injured 500+ attendees in Las Vegas had modified 12 guns with "bump stocks," an accessory which would allow his rifles to fire virtually at the rate of a fully automatic weapon. Bump stocks are legal, apparently. Forty-seven weapons have been recovered from three different locations: the Mandalay Bay, his house in Mesquite, and his house in Northern Nevada. The New York Post writes that the shooter's weapons cache "included a .308-caliber AR-10 rifle and an AK-47 type rifle — as well as four Daniel Defense DDM4 rifles, three FN-15s and other rifles made by Sig Sauer, according to reports." Spendy stuff. In addition to the firearms, there were bomb-making materials found in the shooter's home and car. It was also confirmed the shooter had set up cameras inside and outside his room to monitor the inevitable force that would come to stop him. The police have released selected body-cam video. The Daily Beast floats an idea: did the gunman target a Chance the Rapper and Lorde Concert the week before? 

        The shooter's companion/girlfriend has returned to the U.S. Prior to the shooting, the gunman wired $100,000 to the Philippines, where his lady friend was visiting at the time of the massacre.

• "The Timeline of the Las Vegas Mass Shooting, Start to SWAT"--Ammo Land. About 10 minutes or so of Paddock shooting, with SWAT entering the room about an hour later.

• "Las Vegas SWAT Team Waited One Hour Before Entering Killer’s Hotel Room"--The Truth About Guns. Criticism of the length of time it took for SWAT to enter the room.

• "72 minutes"--Vox Popoli. He notes that we need to update the old comment about when seconds count, the police are only minutes away to include the longer time frame. 

• For the conspiracy minded, some information that one of the plains planes owned by Paddock is now registered under the name of a Virginia corporation tied to the alphabet agencies. (H/t Bayou Renaissance Man).

• "Receipt shows Vegas gunman ordered a burger and a bagel to his room at the Mandalay Bay DAYS before the massacre - suggesting he may have had a guest visiting him"--Daily Mail. The main takeaway from this article is that Paddock may have checked into the hotel 1 or more days before police have reported.

• "Additional Oddities Start to Emerge About Las Vegas Shooter"--Power Line. Noting the $100,000 wire transfer to the Philippines and speculating whether Paddock's girlfriend (who was in the Philippines at the time of the shooting) knew about Paddock's plans. (See also this Guardian article confirming the wire transfer from Philippine law enforcement sources).

• "I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise."--Washington Post. The author, Leah Libresco, discusses what she learned as she dug into the details of gun deaths:

       ... [M]y colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

        I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

       When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. ...

        As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

        As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. ...

        However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.

        By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.

        Instead, I found the most hope in more narrowly tailored interventions. Potential suicide victims, women menaced by their abusive partners and kids swept up in street vendettas are all in danger from guns, but they each require different protections.

• "Federal 9mm 150gr HST gel test and review"--The Firearms Blog. This was a round specifically developed for short-barreled 9 mm handguns, and so the tests was conducted with a compact pistol. The results showed excellent expansion and just the right penetration (16-inches) in bare gelatin, but the bullet failed to expand when shot through heavy clothing (multiple layers of denim).
• "China’s Secret Military Plan: Invade Taiwan by 2020"--Washington Free Beacon. The article summarizes the plan: "Military operations will emphasize speed and surprise to overwhelm coastal defenses and create so much destruction in the early phase that Taiwan would surrender before the U.S. military can deploy forces to the area."
• "Catalonia moves to declare independence from Spain on Monday"--Reuters. From the article: 

        Mireia Boya, a Catalan lawmaker from the pro-independence Popular Unity Candidacy (CUP) party, said on Twitter that a declaration of independence would follow a parliamentary session on Monday to evaluate the results of the vote to break away.

        “We know that there may be disbarments, arrests ... But we are prepared, and in no case will it be stopped,” she said.

        Catalan President Carles Puigdemont earlier said he would ask the region’s parliament to declare independence following the poll, which Spain’s government and constitutional court say was illegal and in which only a minority of Catalans voted.

• I found this on this week's Woodpile Report and found it sadly amusing because it seems to accurately set out how the social justice warriors define racism: