Lost Vegas

Words cant't express the sorrowful emotions I'm feeling about yesterday's mass shooting in Las Vegas, so I won't even try.

The latest tolls I've heard have 58 people dead and hundreds more wounded after a gunman opened fire with an automatic rifle from the 32nd floor of a hotel into the audience of a country music festival. 

This mass murder/act of domestic terrorism follows the Bataclan shooting where gunmen opened fire at an Eagles of Death Metal show in Paris, and the suicide bomber attack at an Ariana Grande pop concert in London.  A few years before all this, someone drove a car into a crowd at Austin's South By Southwest festival, killing four.

As someone who attends festivals and concerts fairly regularly, I can understand the horror that these audiences must have experienced.  Even under the best of circumstances, it can be claustrophobic being in a big crowd like that, but once mass panic sets in, the experience must be absolutely terrifying.   

It also angers and disgusts me that terrorists seem to have now discovered concert audiences as their latest "soft targets."  People are drawn to concerts out of a mutual love for art, for the feelings that music evokes, for companionship and camaraderie, and to be part of a larger community.  The terrorists in their sick and hateful minds seek to annihilate all of that, and that's the biggest disappointment of all.

No cancel that - the loss of 58 lives is the biggest disappointment.  It doesn't get much worse than that.