It's Not the Who or Why of Mass Shootings; It's How Easily They Can Occur.

It’s not the who or the why of the mass shooting in Las Vegas that should concern us most. It’s how they can occur so easily and with such frequency in the United States.

Naturally, after such a horrific event, everybody wants to know the who and the why. How could someone shoot down on total strangers, people just enjoying life and music, and deliberately rain death and destruction on them? Why would anyone do that? The massacre was planned over weeks, months, possibly even years. Paul Paddock, the guy who did it, was a multi-millionaire, a high-stakes gambler who had no criminal record.

Evil people exist everywhere. Australia had a mass shooting in 1996. But you know what? They haven’t had another one because they enacted gun control. The Australian government bought back assault weapons and implemented other gun control measures.

How the United States managed to lead the world in mass shooting events can best be explained by the hold that the National Rifle Association has on our politicians, especially Republican politicians. Don’t believe me? Check out which politicians receive the most money from the NRA. John Boehner, the former Republican Speaker of the House, received millions of dollars from the NRA for supporting their agenda. Republican Majority Leader of the Senate, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), has received millions of dollars from the NRA ($1.3 million in 2016 alone).

Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, used to have an A rating with the NRA. When he supported criminal background checks for gun sales the NRA was furious. Now he's supporting a ban on bump stocks, which convert semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons. Automatic weapons are banned, so it makes sense that a device that turns semi-automatics into automatic weapons should be banned too.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat in Name Only, voted against criminal background checks for gun sales when it really counted. She was one of three Democrats who helped Republicans kill the bill. Because of her and two other Democrats, plus the Republicans, the bill died.

When Republican politicians are sending gun victims and their families "thoughts and prayers," the NRA is filling their pockets with cash for their campaigns. That's hypocrisy on steroids.

Paul Paddock, the 64-year-old shooter who killed 58 strangers and injured nearly 500 more at a Las Vegas concert with Jason Aldean, a country western singer, was a white accountant with real estate holdings and multiple dwellings. He used to wake up moaning and screaming, his girlfriend told the FBI. His father was a bank robber and was dubbed a psychopath. Having escaped imprisonment, he was once on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List.

Are people born psychopaths? Maybe. Ted Bundy, the infamous serial killer, put knives in his aunt Julia's bed when he was only three years old and stood near her smiling when she woke up. James Fallon, a neuroscientist, purports to be able to recognize a psychopathic brain on physical examination (brain scan). I bought and read the book, so I've seen the pictures of the psychopathic brain versus the "normal" brain. In an emergency once, Fallon scanned his family’s brains, including his own, because he needed an instant control group for an experiment. He discovered that a member of his family was a psychopath. At first he thought that one of the killers in the experimental group had been accidentally mixed in with his family. Alas, the brain scan belonged to a family member, and not only that, he discovered that the mystery psychopath was himself!

The neuroscientist went on to blithely describe himself as a “benign psychopath” because he only cheated on his wife (repeatedly) and had been known to fail to show up for his colleagues when he was supposed to give a joint lecture to an audience. He attributed his alleged benignity to his positive upbringing.

Yet he noted that his colleagues had frequently said, “You’re such a psychopath!” when he had let them down.

If someone is a psychopath and has more of an urge to turn on someone else rather than himself or herself, wouldn’t it be a good thing if semi-automatic weapons and bump-stocks, with which semi-automatic weapons can be turned into automatic weapons, which are banned, weren’t readily available?

Paul Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, had no criminal background. Nobody but his girlfriend knew that he woke up screaming and moaning, "Oh my God."

The NRA wants to normalize guns. That’s their agenda. They want us to get used to seeing guns everywhere because you know, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Of course, it's hard to stop a bad guy with a machine gun, in effect, on the 32nd floor of a hotel overlooking your concert. Las Vegas concert-goers couldn't tell where the gunshots were coming from, even though there were military veterans and off-duty police officers in the audience. No one knew if it was a single shooter or multiple shooters.

Good guys with guns did stop the shooter within 12 minutes. The shooter shot himself as he heard and saw the police approaching (he'd set up cameras to warn himself of people approaching his suite), but not until he'd killed 58 people and injured nearly 500.

The Republicans in Congress, doing the NRA’s bidding for money, were getting ready to legalize silencers so we could all be murdered without hearing the shots coming. I think they’re putting that idea on hold for now.

The NRA wants the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE), which Slate says the NRA controls, to review bump-stocks. Several sources, including Slate and CNN, allege that the NRA does not want Congress to debate the issue. In other words, the NRA isn't backing down, they're making noises like they're backing down, but it's not the real deal.

Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House, said he didn’t know what bump stocks were until just this week, after the Las Vegas shooting, “although I’m a sportsman.” He thinks maybe we don’t need devices to turn semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons.

Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo plans to introduce a bill banning bump-stocks this week. Maybe we’ve reached a point, which should have been reached when the Sandy Hook Elementary first-graders were blown to pieces, when the carnage is just too much and we’ve noticed that other civilized countries don’t have the frequent shooting massacres that we have. It’s high time and past time that we take steps in the right direction toward gun control.

The Second Amendment was written when guns were muskets and took time to load and fire. The Second Amendment was also written when the government needed citizen participation and citizens' arms to maintain its security.