Amplify: This October photo shows the view of the grounds of the Route 91 Harvest festival from the Las Vegas shooter’s Mandalay Bay hotel room. (Photo by LVMPD). Below are photos of the interior of the shooter’s 32nd floor room at the Mandalay Bay hotel and a small sledgehammer, broken glass and bullet casings inside the Las Vegas shooter’s hotel room.
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This still sits at the front of my mind, especially now as I begin to look for summer work. This person wasn’t targeting the festival, he wanted a place to go where he could inflict mass casualty. For him, it doesn’t appear that it was about the festival’s theme or performers, he simply wanted a place where he could stock and prepare and then unleash his demonic anger at people who were only out to have a good time. This is not a gun issue. Yes, he had devices that allowed for rapid fire, this is true, but it’s not a gun issue. This article and the police report highlight that he was in debt, and mentally unstable. If we look at mass shootings, we can see patterns. Isolation, mental health issues, so forth. This article speaks more to the mental health crisis in the U.S. than anything else. Clearly we have an issue and it’s not being addressed. Everyone wants to focus on the gun and not the mind of the shooter. Maybe we should start looking at our mental health capabilities and availability before we start trying to regulate firearms.
This is a really unsettling report to read. It might sound naive, but it is really hard for me to wrap my mind around this type of well thought-out massacre. It was so obvious that the shooter was looking for a place with the highest density of people so they could kill as many as possible. This man was extremely mentally ill, but still, it is shocking that a human mind, even an ill one, can conceive of and carry out such a horrific and violent plot that will damage so many lives. And not just the lives of the victims, but the lives of their families, the performers, and even the lives of the professionals who planned and were working this event. I think the vast majority of people do not think of the technicians when they think of this tragedy, but, of course, for us, that is where our minds go in addition to the victims. How will big entertainment events be different when I could be a part of them in the future?
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