For some who were inside the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California when a gunman shot and killed a dozen people on Wednesday night, this reportedly wasn’t their first experience with a horrific mass shooting. Some Thousand Oaks victims…
For some who were inside the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California when a gunman shot and killed a dozen people on Wednesday night, this reportedly wasn’t their first experience with a horrific mass shooting. Some Thousand Oaks victims were also at the Las Vegas music festival where a gunman killed 58 people and injured hundreds more last year, The New York Times reports.
“A lot of people in the Route 91 situation go here, ” Chandler Gunn, 23, told The Daily Beast. “There’s people that live a whole lifetime without seeing this, and then there’s people that have seen it twice.” Gunn showed up at the Borderline Bar & Grill after hearing about the shooting because he believed some of his friends were inside when the gunman opened fire.
The bar was reportedly full of students who showed up for a “College Country Night” — drawing a distinct parallel between Wednesday’s tragedy and the Las Vegas shooting that took place at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival. Although the Thousand Oaks victims haven’t yet been identified, multiple outlets report that witnesses said some of the people inside the bar had also lived through the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in history last year, and The Times reports that people emerging from the bar described having survived the Las Vegas shooting.
“A lot of my friends survived Route 91. If they survived that, they’ll survive this,” Carl Edgar told The Daily Beast.
Although much of the nation was outraged after the tragedy in Las Vegas, Congress never banned bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire shots in rapid succession. MSNBC reports that the Thousand Oaks shooter used a handgun he bought legally in 2016, along with a high-capacity magazine modification (which is illegal in California). The police haven’t determined where he got the high-capacity magazine modification, but Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America founder Shannon Watts noted on Twitter that it would be easy to buy one in Nevada, where they are legal, and drive it to across the state border.
In fact, UC Berkeley epidemiologist Ellicott Matthay studied gun shows in California and Nevada and found that regions near Nevada shows saw rates of death and injury caused by gun violence spike by 70 percent afterwards, while California gun shows didn’t seem to have much of an effect.
More to come…
