“We'll be talking about gun laws as time goes by,” President Trump promised all too casually after the Las Vegas gunman took 58 lives in a rapid-fire slaughter. Time is indeed going by, and the silence is alarming as the Republican Congress and Mr. Trump, the devoted candidate of the National Rifle Association, duck their responsibility to confront the public health crisis of gun deaths.
There were so many hundreds of casualties in Las Vegas that many were treated by local Air Force surgeons who found themselves serving as specialists in triage — in a civilian fire zone. “These were definitely injuries you would see in a war zone,” one of the doctors told The Washington Post. Victims bled from single wounds through the chest and abdomen because the gunman shot from a high perch with military-style weapons adapted to shoot rapidly downward into the concert audience that was his chosen target.
