by Ruby Henley
One of my favorite YouTube channels is “According to Joe.” Joe is analyzing the Las Vegas Shooting, and he is an ex-police officer. He is really good and has the expertise to do this type of work. You should check his channel if you want answers about the October 1 incident.
I had noticed a long time ago that there were some people walking slowly and casually away from the scene, while others were running.
I thought it was bizarre, but my mind became obsessed with the shooting itself. I have lost sight of those inside the concert scene. I have not analyzed the videos like Joe is doing.
But there are too many angles in this tragedy, and the Las Vegas Police could care less. They are adding to these chaotic descrepancies.
In the opening moments of clatter and confusion, concertgoers were “out of it.”
“I still thought that it was fireworks,” Mia Uribe, who had been in the crowd, told NPR. “I heard someone yell ‘gun!’ — and everyone was running towards us, everyone was telling you to get down. There were people jumping over.
“It sounded like ‘pop!’ — over and over and over again, and it didn’t stop,” she added. “There was just continuous flashing light.”
A couple named Gayle and Mike were huddled inside a merchandise tent at the time.
“I told my husband it’s firecrackers,” Gayle said to a local CBS affiliate. “He goes, ‘No it’s not, it’s machine gun or something — an automatic rifle.’ ”
And as the gunfire kept on, they knew they had to do something. They just didn’t know what. Everyone around them seemed to be running — but it didn’t make sense.
“There was nowhere to run, because you couldn’t tell where it was coming from.”
The one thing above all else, which has haunted me is the fact someone turned the lights on the crowd. Here we get a first hand account of this, and it is shocking.
There, in the tent with them, was a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officer.
“He was yelling, ‘Turn the lights off! Turn the lights off!’ Because we were sitting ducks,” Gayle said. “And you could hear the bullets coming closer. And then it would get quiet when they would reload and then they’d start going again.”
A girl just a few feet behind them was shot in the stomach, Gayle said. Others reported seeing bloodied bodies strewn across the ground. Ricochets around them echoed the bangs from above, and still “no one knew where the gunfire was coming from,” said journalist Mark Gray, who had been covering the concert for Rolling Stone.
“I smelled gunpowder,” he said. “A lot of gunpowder.”
Those who didn’t run hid under the bleachers, under their seats, in beer trucks and vendor tents. Some people lay on others, protecting them from the gunshots, while first responders tried to usher people to safety.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7SR4DgW_q8
In this article, we discover there were aerial assaults which have been denied by the Las Vegas police. I am thinking, did I read that right? Aerial assaults are from the sky by airplanes or helicopters, right???
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/arts/music/vegas-shooting-concert-security.html
It was a “watershed” attack, “one in a million,” an all-but-unforeseeable “black swan.”
In the aftermath of the mass shooting at the Las Vegas country music festival, event security professionals — many with years of experience thwarting bad actors in bustling crowds — are characterizing the ambush in darkly exceptional, almost fatalistic terms. But they are also reckoning with ever-changing threats in their field after the aerial assaults that killed at least 59 people and injured more than 520 on Sunday.
The specter of calamity is especially worrisome for open-air events in urban environments — including the Austin City Limits music festival, which begins Friday in a Texas park and is now undergoing renewed security assessments.
“There is no manual for this,” said Chris Robinette, the president of Prevent Advisors, a security subsidiary of Oak View Partners, a company that advises sports and entertainment venues like Madison Square Garden. “It is a dynamic process that requires promoters, venue managers, local authorities and other stakeholders to work together.”
Las Vegas Village, the site of Route 91 Harvest Festival, is owned by the same company — MGM Resorts International — as the hotel where Mr. Paddock opened fire. It is likely that there was at least some preplanning between the two facilities before the festival took place. (MGM has not commented.) But even if Mandalay Bay were on high alert last weekend, snaring Mr. Paddock would most likely have required a level of screening that far exceeds current practices.
“You’d have to have X-ray machines and magnetometers at every single entrance,” said Mr. Adelman. “No hotel does that.”
Festival organizers could choose to avoid locations near the sorts of tall buildings that can offer gunmen cover and a clear vantage, but Mr. Adelman suggested that other loopholes would then emerge. “Do you not hold festivals near hills or tall trees?” he wondered. “Do you ban trucks?”
Mr. Dorenfeld offered a similarly rueful hypothetical. Does every festival now have to be like Bonnaroo, “in the middle of an open field?” But he stressed that procedures are constantly evolving. “I go to these festivals and I look around and I’m so impressed,” he said. “Security is really good and it’ll just get better.”
For the people behind Austin City Limits, which will bring 75,000 music fans to Zilker Park in Austin, Tex., this weekend, the question of how to keep people safe is now freighted with even more pressing urgency than usual.
In conclusion, there are so many unanswered questions that continue to pop up daily. Keep searching and discerning truth from fiction. It is not easy, but if we do not do it, no one else will.