9781422274071

OVERVIEW AND HISTORY OF GUN CONTROL

Over 20,000 people were enjoying the music at the day-long Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017. At around 10 pm, country star Jason Aldean began singing his hit song “When She Says Baby.” At first, some attendees though the “crack-crack” noises were fireworks going off to accompany the song. But as people in the crowd began to fall, the festival-goers realized that the noises were rapid-fire shots. Panicked, they ran and sought cover. From a room on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel across the street, a sixty-four-year-old man named Stephen Paddock fired into the festival crowd. Paddock had snuck twenty-four firearms into his hotel room. All but two of them were semiautomatic rifles, most of which had been legally modified by the addition of a “bump stock.” The bump stock enables such rifles to fire rapidly like fully automatic military weapons. By pulling the trigger once and holding it down, Paddock could spray nine bullets per second into the screaming throng. Each of his weapons was equipped with a high-capacity magazine that held up to 100 rounds. In less than ten minutes, Paddock was able to fire more than 1,100 bullets into the panicked crowd, killing fifty- eight people at the concert site. Another 850 people were

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