The shooting in Las Vegas that took the lives of some 58 people and wounded at least 515 more probably will lead to lawsuits, and one of those lawsuits is likely to be over how the shooter could get so many firearms into his room without attracting the attention of someone in the Mandalay Bay casino and resort, from which the gunman fired his fatal shots.
The body count may make it the crime of the century.
The shooter, Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nev., had 10 guns with him, including rifles, police said. How did that happen?
Big hotels tend to be pretty careful about what their guests take into their rooms. Rifles would be pretty hard to smuggle unless the hotel staff was shirking its duty.
The staff also was apparently baffled about where the shots were coming from. But wouldn’t it be apparent to the security staff once the shooting started that they had a problem on a particular floor. Did any guests notice the noise and report it to the front desk?
The Islamic State terrorist group took credit for the attack, but law enforcement officials say that so far, there’s no evidence of that being true. ISIS is in the business of taking credit for the acts of insane people who cause havoc. It is a cheap way for them to reap some of the benefits of being terrorists without having to actually perform terrorist acts.
Besides, Paddock did not seem to be the terrorist type. Yet, you never know.
As Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said, “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath at this point.”
Something else that’s likely to follow is an effort to tighten Nevada’s gun-control laws, which are some of the loosest in the nation. Yet, states with much tighter gun-control laws also have been the scenes of massacre shootings.
As we learn about Stephen Paddock, we likely will learn what could have led him to commit this heinous crime.
We’ll probably find out he was just a horrible human being who went out of control in a place that made it easy for him to do that.