Ancient Mysteries

While the current news cycle churns out reports about multiple bills to ban bump-fire stocks and other accessories, or to ban nearly all semiautomatic rifles, let us cast our minds back to the ancient — in lamestream media time — history to the event that prompted this round of Second Amendment infringements.

Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, where the uninformed world discovered “bump-fire.” You know the narrative: A multimillionnaire dragged a couple dozen semiautomatic weapons to his 32nd floor suite. A dozen of them were equipped with evil bump-fire stocks. He broke out two windows and used those bump-fire “fully automatic” weapons of mass destruction to hose down a crowd of 20,000+ country music fans who probably deserved it because they’re nasty NRA gun owners themselves.

So our heroes in Washington, DC were forced to protect us by offering legislation to deny stuff to the 55 to 120 million gun owners who didn’t do it. “Bump stocks” must go! Bump stock manufacturers must pay for their crimes!

Whoa. Like I said, cast your minds back in time. To… say, October 2, 2017.

Did you see that? At least one fully automatic weapon and weapons equipped with bumpstocks.

The LA Times reported that other weapons were being examined to determine if they had been converted to full auto.

The Weekly Standard reported at least fully automatic weapon as well.

Dennis Michael Lynch noted it, too.

But the automatic weapon(s?) vanished from the narrative. Perhaps I overlooked it, but my searches turn up no “correction” that, “Oh, we didn’t mean full auto,” or, “That person was mistaken; we were talking about two different bump-fire devices and he thought we meant bump-fire and full.”

They just stopped talking about it.

Then they just stopped talking.

Well, why not, when you have powerful senators and congresscritters who need a lawful accessory to demonize in the interest of creating a gun control slippery slope?

Was one (or more) of the shooter’s weapon fully automatic? Personally, I thought at least one recorded burst sounded so regular (as opposed to other stuttering bursts) that I took it for full-auto fire.

The shooter had a clean record, so he’d have been eligible to purchase an NFA item. Certainly a multimillionnaire could afford one even at the inflated prices driven by the FOPA of 1986. But if he’d bought one legally, that would be just another example of the law not working as advertised. If he purchased one unlawfully, or converted a semiautomatic to full, well, then he’s just another criminal. Our protectors need something unregulated to… regulate. Gotta get that slippery slope.

So our ancient media mysteries are:

  • Was there one or more fully automatic weapons as reported in multiple outlets?
  • Did inspection of the weapons found in the hotel suite show which had been fired?
  • Has ballistics testing determined which were used to kill and wound the victims?

This is fairly important, really. The Mandalay Bay massacre is being used to justify a whole new set of infringements of human/civil rights, starting with bump-fire. Are they justifying legislation by something that didn’t happen per the script? (Note to nutcases: I’m not saying the incident was staged/faked; I’m questioning which weapon(s) was used.)

But shooters — aside from a few Mom’s Basement Army keyboard commandos and mall ninjas — consider bump-fire stocks to be nothing more than fun ammo-wasters. Granted, I can’t really wrap my head around mass murder, but it seems to me that if I were a wealthy guy intent on the murder of as many people as possible in ten minutes, and I had one or more automatic weapons handy, I don’t think I’d look over the selection and say, “Nah, the toy is the better tool for the job.”

I might transition to a bump-fired weapon if everything else jammed or broke, but who would start with that?

The cable news attention span has expired, so we may never learn the answers to my questions.

Facebooktwitterredditpinteresttumblrmail

2 thoughts on “Ancient Mysteries”

Leave a Reply to Carl Bussjaeger Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *