Pages

▼

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

What if the Vegas Shooter Had No Access to Guns?

He was rich enough to wire $100,000 overseas. Could he have bought a gasoline tanker, driven into the crowd, opened the tank upstream from the survivors and thrown a match?  Here's what I found when researching just recent vehicle mass murders.

In the last few years, there have been multiple motor vehicle mass murders in Europe and Australia (84 killed with truck in Nice, France[1], 12 murdered in Berlin, Germany with truck[2], 3 killed with SUV, 1 by stabbing in London[3], 5 with truck in Stockholm[4], 13 murdered with truck in Barcelona, Spain.[5]  While these were terrorist mass murders, others have been mental health-related (6 murdered with car in Melbourne, Australia[6]


[1] Angela Dewan, Jason Hanna and Euan McKirdy, Attack in Nice: Truck Driver Identified as 31-Year-Old Tunisia Native, CNN, July 16, 2016.
[2] Anschlag in Berlin Zahl der Verletzten liegt bei 56, Berliner Zeitung, Mar. 6, 2017.
[3] 'No evidence' Khalid Masood had links to IS or al-Qaeda, BBC, Mar. 27. 2017.
[4] Simon Johnson, Niklas Pollard, Rebecka Roos, Uzbek suspect in Swedish attack sympathized with Islamic State: police, Reuters, Apr. 9, 2017.
[5] Barcelona attack: four suspects face court after van driver is shot dead,
[6] Holly McKay and Cassie Zervos, Blackburn South woman dies in hospital after Bourke St rampage, [Victoria, Australia] Herald Sun, Jan. 30, 2017.
at

2 comments:

  1. UnknownOctober 18, 2017 at 3:14 PM

    He also had the resources to build fertilizer bombs a la Timothy McVeigh. His use of guns probably kept the death toll fairly low compared to driving a truck into the crowd and exploding a large bomb.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Windy WilsonOctober 19, 2017 at 7:11 AM

    Everybody tells me that the death toll from knives would be smaller, as if that made a difference to the dead.

    From your list, he still didn't beat the record at Nice, France, and he has a ways to go to get near the Murrah building record from Oklahoma City.

    He just beat the 45 dead in the Bath Township school bombing in 1927.
    38 of those were elementary school children.

    ReplyDelete