Las Vegas Massacre: Will Anything Change? Probably Not


Today I interviewed a mother who is a student at Cal State Fullerton, Melinda Callaway's daughter was caught in the Las Vegas massacre. Luckily  Callaway's daughter Hannah is counted among the living, but the tale of Hannah's experience, which Melinda  recounted in her interview with OC News, still sends chills of fear into my bones.

 Hannah Callaway, in the midst of  fear and chaos, watched a woman in front of her die from a shot through the neck. She saw people falling and slipping in the blood of the wounded and dead. She felt scared and exposed as she got stuck on top of the fence she had been attempting to escape over, only to feel some relief when a tall man came and gave her the push she needed to get over. Lost and separated from her friends she glued herself to a nice couple and found refuge in their hotel room. 
At the beginning of my interview with her mother, Hannah Callaway had just finished sending a friend of hers into surgery, he had been shot in the leg. 

 While all mass shootings that have occurred in recent years have made me angry and sad, the Route 91 Harvest Festival massacre is the first one to truly hit close to home and make me just want to weep. So many people in my life often go to Las Vegas for it's concerts, it could have been anyone I know and love that could have been among the 59 dead. So many students at my school, Cal State Fullerton, were there and are living with the trauma they experienced. A classmate and friend of mine I would learn not long after hearing about the massacre was actually there in the midst of it, experiencing it, and dealing with the trauma now.

 We have all been affected and feel like a part of this insane tragedy and at the same time no one, including myself, has ever felt more powerless. The shooter, Stephen Paddock, was a harmless looking, middle aged white man that no one, not even his brother or girlfriend, saw as having any 'warning' signs. No one could predict what he was capable of, no one ever does.

Either people don't want to see the signs, or most people just don't know what to look for. Many assume that anyone capable of murdering mass amounts of people must have some sort of mental illness, or are crazy, or just pure evil. Stephen Paddock, and all the others like him, are probably all of those things.

 But still, if no one can detect it, how can we truly prevent it? Do we keep increasing detection of weapons in all areas of life and anywhere with a crowd? That seems to be where the conversation is going. As Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show, said in todays show, instead of talking about gun control and regulation, people seem to push that huge part of the issue aside and look to regulating and securing virtually everything else.


 Personally, I'm pissed and disappointed in us and our government. Massacres like this have been going on for how long? Judging by what the Washington Post calls the first mass shooting in American history, which was Howard Unruh's killing spree in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, this has been going on for  60 years. It was September 6, 1949, when Unruh took a walk called "The walk of death" where he made rounds at  his local barbershop, tailor shop,  pharmacy, and a nearby house and killed 13 people in the process. 

 Mass shooting has only been gaining speed and this should shock people more than it does. We have had time, we have had more massacres then we should ever have to count to study, and yet we have not figured out the best way to regulate our guns and keep them out of murderer's hands. 
I obviously don't have the answers, but America is full of brilliant minds, we should have come up with a better way by now, and I want to know what the hold up is.

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