On the evening of October 1, 2017, at the close of the 3-day Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, a shooter, who had transported an arsenal of 23 firearms to his 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay hotel overlooking the venue, smashed out 2 windows and repeatedly raked the concertgoers below with indiscriminate bursts of semiautomatic weapons fire. The death toll from this rampage shooting climbed to 59 gunshot fatalities (58 gunshot victims and 1 shooter suicide), the highest single-shooter incident in US history and second only to the 2011 shooting massacre that resulted in 69 deaths in Utøya Island, Norway.
The Las Vegas Shootings—Underscoring Key Features of the Firearm Epidemic
Shultz, J. M., Thoresen, S., & Galea, S. (2017). The Las Vegas Shootings—Underscoring Key Features of the Firearm Epidemic. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). doi:10.1001/jama.2017.16420
Themass shooting in Las Vegas highlights several issues that mandate attention in public and academic conversations around this issue. We summarize them here.