We woke up Monday morning to the news that a maniac in Las Vegas killed 59 people and wounded more than 500 others by firing a variety of weapons, at latest report, perhaps 12 semi-automatic rifles that he configured to fire at rates approaching those of automatic weapons from the window of his room on the 32d floor of a hotel, into a crowd of some 22,000 people attending a country music concert.  The massacre immediately raised the suspicion of an Islamic terrorist attack, but at this writing, the motive for this madness remains to be seen.  The killer was not your average, run of the mill Whack-a Do.  By that I mean, not the type of detached, down on his luck, loner normally associated with such attacks.  By all accounts, this guy owned four homes and two airplanes.  He was reputed to be a multi-millionaire, in the habit of gambling 10’s of thousands of dollars a day, and sometimes staying in casino hotels for weeks at a time.  The killer’s status as a casino high-roller gave him access to the suite overlooking the concert area that he used for the attack.  That status also explains how a single man was able to tote 10 different heavy suitcases, reportedly containing 23 firearms, and the ammunition for these weapons, into the hotel without anybody voicing the suspicion that something might be amiss.  Entering a casino with one gun is prohibited, but if you’re in the habit of regularly spending big money in the casino, you could roll in steamer trunks containing a fully equipped petting zoo and a team of Korean midgets, and, as long as you didn’t soil the carpets, no one from the hotel would dare complain.  Money indeed does talk.  As this is written on October 4, the Las Vegas Sheriff is speculating whether the killer somehow became “radicalized.”  His girlfriend, conveniently in the Philippines at the time of the attack, is now back, and hopefully can shed some light on his motivation.  After the attack, ISIS took credit for it, calling the killer a “soldier” recently converted to Islam.  I guess anything is possible, but frankly, that seems a bit farfetched.  Somehow, the notion that a guy who apparently enjoyed spending so much time in the gambling, drinking and debauchery capital of the world would suddenly embrace fundamentalist Islam to the point that he chose to immediately martyr himself doesn’t wash.  Whatever he was, he was a soulless bastard, but you’ll note the title of this work is plural, because the echos of the gunshots barely had faded when the equally soulless bastards of politics and the media got into the act.  Not willing to waste a good tragedy, at a time for grieving, with the investigation incomplete, there were immediate calls for more gun control laws.  Somebody even woke up Hillary Clinton, but she must not have  been fully awake, because she tried to tie the Las Vegas shootings to the Republicans’ failure to ban what she called “silencers.”  No matter that sound suppressors had nothing to do with this tragedy, no matter that “silencers” aren’t silent, no matter that the use of one might have given away the shooter’s position sooner by filling the room with even more smoke.  No.  When a nut runs amok, you blame the Republicans, it’s what you do.  Hillary should wipe the oatmeal off her chin and go back to sleep.  I’m sick and tired of Democrats like Hillary spouting that Republican support for the Second Amendment is just a “dog whistle” to their ignorant hillbilly supporters.  Not for nothing, but if Hillary is hearing sounds only a dog can hear … I won’t go there.  It got so bad that the day after the shootings, CBS had to fire (reluctantly, I’m sure) one if its high ranking lawyers, who tweeted that she was “not even sympathetic” to the shooting victims because “country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”  Think that statement was outrageous?  CNN’s Jeff Zeleny said on air, “A lot of these country music supporters are likely Trump supporters.”  He didn’t explain if that meant they deserved to be shot, or if he was just thinking of voter demographics for the mid-term elections.  A number of Congressional Democrats used the tragedy as an opportunity to bash Republicans.  Noting that Republican leaders asked Americans to donate blood in the wake of the shooting, Nancy Pelosi said she wants Republicans “to give some political blood.  They think their political survival is more important than those 59 people.  It isn’t.”  The liberal blood-sucker went on to say “the Republicans in Congress are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America.”  Many Democrats called for action on “commonsense gun control measures.”  The problem is they can’t decide what these measures are.  The federal and State statutes are replete with gun control laws, none of which would stopped this nut, or any other nut from doing what he did, because criminals, if I have to say this again, by definition, do not obey the law.  Democratic Representative John Lewis of Georgia said prayers were not enough, asking “how many more dead bodies will it take to wake up this Congress?”  I understand Mr. Lewis’ zeal to do “something.”  Maybe he should do something about the 700 bodies of murder victims on the streets of Chicago every year.  Someone is shot in Chicago every 2 hours, 2,412 so far this year.  Lewis represents Atlanta, where the violent crime rate is even higher than Chicago’s.  But Democrats don’t talk about those kinds of killings.  I understand the desire to do “something.”  Reports are the Las Vegas shooter used a now legal accessory known as a “bump stock” to make his weapons fire faster.  Unless someone can explain to me why firing over 600 rounds a minute is necessary, then outlawing such items might be the “something” to do.  It won’t end mass shootings, nothing a legislature does will do that, but it might help the politicians protect their phony-baloney jobs for one more term, because that’s what it’s all about.