October 1, 2017. A 64-year-old professional gambler and retired IRS agent has lugged 23 guns to a room on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay Hotel Casino. He breaks the windows and starts shooting into a crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Festival concert on the opposite side of the Vegas strip. Fifty-eight die and 489 are injured. The killer takes his own life. His motive remains unknown.
October 7, 2017. Fifty-eight doves, one for each victim, are released in front of Las Vegas City Hall. Prior to the San Diego State-UNLV game, 58 white helium-filled balloons are released. Addison Short, who is one of the shooting victims and is in a wheelchair, does the coin toss.
Brian Fraser of La Palma had recently become an ordained minister. Charleston Heartfield was an off-duty Las Vegas police officer who had served with the US Army in Iraq. Austin Meyer of Reno was at the concert with his fiancée. Jack Newton of Bakersfield was there with his wife. It was their 32nd anniversary. Carrie Barnette of Riverside worked at Disney's California Adventure. Each of those five was killed. There are 53 others who died.
Two headlines on the satirical website The Onion make some really good points: "'No way to prevent this,' says the only nation where this regularly happens" and "NRA says mass shootings are just the unfortunate price of protecting people's rights to commit mass shootings."
In the United States, there are an estimated 300,000,000 guns. Crazy people who want to go on a shooting spree never have any trouble getting lots of guns. Nothing changed after the massacres in Columbine or Aurora or Newtown or Orlando or Roseburg or Charleston or Fort Hood or Binghamton or San Bernardino.....but perhaps something will change now, following the massacre in Las Vegas.
We can only hope. Otherwise, how many more will die?