Yesterday, a gunman opened fire on the Strip in Las Vegas and killed 59 people and injured 527 more. It was the worst mass shooting in the history of the United States, and it has sparked the Gun control debate yet again. However, two survivors of the shooting have spoken out with their surprising standpoint that the US gun laws should stay the way they are.
Startling opinions came on BBC Radio 4 this morning
Caren Mansholt went on the "Today" show on BBC Radio 4 to tell her story. She got down as low as she could as bullets rained down on her from the assailant's hotel room window across the street in Vegas.
But then she surprised listeners with her views on gun laws. For starters, she doesn't believe that stricter gun regulations would prevent these kinds of attacks, but she does believe that "there is a time and a place for gun ownership" and that Americans have "the right to protect ourselves as needed." Here we go again with the Second Amendment rights of the American people. When will they let that go? Even after a man with an army's worth of weapons opens fire on them, they stick by it.
Meanwhile, fellow Vegas shooting survivor Rusty Dees said, "The biggest problem for me and for many was that we didn’t hear anybody returning fire." They were less concerned that they were being shot at and more concerned with how no one was shooting back as there was "no one outside to protect us." Dees added the Bill O'Reilly-esque comment, "It’s a tragic cost of freedom, that people can do bad things." This echoes almost word-for-word what O'Reilly said on Sean Hannity's Fox News Channel show this morning. O'Reilly is a notorious conservative broadcaster who was fired from Fox after a 21-year tenure due to allegations from colleagues of sexual harassment.
