The iconic Las Vegas Strip went dark on Monday night to mark the first anniversary of the deadliest mass shooting in US history in which 58 people were killed and more than 400 people were wounded at a country music festival. The attacker, Stephen Paddock, fired at a crowd from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino.
Sputnik has talked about the mass shooting in Las Vegas last year with Greg Shaffer, former FBI special agent, President of Shaffer Security Group and one of the leading policy experts in the prevention of domestic terrorism and active shooter events.
The shooter does things in the weeks or days leading up to the shooting that give out signals that he is about to become violent. So gun control is not the issue. It is more education, it is more awareness and it is preventing those individuals who are identified as having possible mental health issues from getting access to weapons.
So we need to look at ways where we can have that information strictly on mental health to be a part of the criminal background check. So again when an individual walks into a gun store and attempts to buy a weapon he is somehow identified as having mental health issues and then unable to purchase the weapon.
The hit rate on a moving target with a handgun and most of these incidents are shooters with handguns and not with long guns as was in the Las Vegas shooting, the hit rate is 4%. So that means you have a 96% chance of not being shot just by running.
