By DEXTER DUGGAN
When tourists on the big jets arrive from around the world at McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas’ high-rise hotels along the nearby Strip are easily visible from the tarmac. There’s no shuttle ride over long miles before reaching the attractions at one of the globe’s entertainment capitals.
Among those hostelries are the golden Mandalay Bay and dark, pyramid-shaped Luxor, both of them prominent in visual reports of the October 1 slaughter or mangling of hundreds of country-music fans by a roar of gunfire aimed at a reported 22,000 people enjoying an open-air concert on a field by the Strip.
The airport is close enough that some hundreds of the fans fleeing the violence breached its fence, bringing flight operations temporarily to a halt.
Reports of the awful ending of that evening truly were heart-breaking, and a reminder that life on this Earth isn’t guaranteed goodness.
A California woman reportedly was dancing and singing country music with her girlfriends when she fatally was shot in the head as the mysterious assassin started raining down death through two broken-out windows of his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay.
A news photo showed another woman after she was taken inside somewhere into the light, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, looking stricken at awful reality. Her bare legs with knee abrasions went into stylish cowgirl boots perhaps made with some animal’s hide.
A man kissed a woman lying outdoors flat on the ground. Had she already died?
Videos that quickly went worldwide showed terrified fans of many ages desperately trying to flee from a deadly source whose positioning they may not even have known yet.
Nevada’s largest city had grown up with a disreputable image, often deserved because of an emphasis on gambling, alcohol, and sex. But Las Vegas subsequently tried to be friendly to all sorts of tourists, and indeed developed into a desert metropolis where the city’s workaday residents may go the entire year in their neighborhoods without once setting foot, or desiring to, on or near the Strip.
One could do worse than take the kids out for some country music after eating at nearby McDonald’s.
However, it’d be true to say that the rest of America has become more like Las Vegas at its most garish, rather than the core of Las Vegas becoming more like America at its decorous best, due to the social and legal revolutions that imposed themselves on the nation beginning with the 1960s, cheered on by dominant media.
People often make their peace with the world around them and try to get on with living, even though it may not be the world they’d choose or most prefer. Indeed, if they dared challenge certain creepy and creeping social structures, they might find themselves in jail before long.
A question of exactly this type comes before the U.S. Supreme Court this term — Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission — as to whether a cake baker personally must be forced to honor assertive homosexuality instead of being left with his conscience intact.
The fact that other bakers would provide a homosexual pair a “wedding” cake is immaterial. This baker, it is argued, must be made to crumple before the conscience-stompers wearing the colorful rainbow robes of the official and officious Colorado Civil Rights Commission.
How did society get to a place like this?
The horrified faces of some of the Las Vegas country-music fans, who may have had the most innocent of souls, nevertheless might make a person think of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel image of an unrepentant, aghast sinner, hand half-covering his face, realizing he has just been condemned forever to Hell.
Is this for real? How could this have happened to me? How could I have avoided it? Is it too late to turn back?
Proper formation of conscience has grown much more difficult in the America, and in the world, that has come about, a state of the world certainly not arrived at by popular demand — but through an arrogant elite that embraces baby-slaughter while waving God away as too bothersome for a busy planet.
Only God can fairly judge a soul, as God Himself says in the Bible. In our imperfect human view, we might wonder why God has let consciences become so confused. Is it because we haven’t sufficiently resisted the aggressions of the elite against our brothers’ and sisters’ moral well-being?
As much as anywhere else, there are residents of and visitors to Las Vegas who want to honor God and raise their children honorably. Are they to be criminalized into a corner by unworthy rulers powerful at one level or another? Are we to allow such a social decline that Western society becomes especially tempting for Islamist radicals looking to rebuke its immorality?
Or did mysterious assassin Stephen Paddock consider the country-music crowd to be rife with gun-loving, Trump-worshipping conservatives deserving severe punishment? Sort of the same victims who had to be destroyed that left-wing Democrat activist James Hodgkinson fired on last June at a Virginia ball field?
During national radio talk host Laura Ingraham’s October 3 program, former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman expressed curiosity at the large number of firearms Paddock had with him in his Mandalay Bay suite — reportedly 23 weapons. He was “overprepared” for whatever he planned, Fuhrman said.
Or was Paddock so out of touch with reality that he thought he could use them all before the crowd completely ran away, or his location was discovered?
Nevada’s largest daily paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, threw its resources into covering the shocking Sunday night shooting — as did other media near and far. But this was on the R-J’s home turf.
Part of the definition of “news” is something you don’t expect, and a Sunday evening as people wind down their weekends probably wouldn’t be expected to have much happening.
Reuters news service noted tweets that R-J reporter Rachel Crosby sent out from University Medical Center, where nurses were dashing in for unexpected duty, and all trauma beds reportedly were full.
Although I’ve spent the large majority of my life in the Southwest, I’m far more familiar with Arizona and California than Nevada. I overnighted only once in Las Vegas, covering the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Nevada for The Wanderer.
And that time, as I walked down the busy Strip one morning from the Catholic diocese’s Guardian Angel Cathedral, two guys walked past on the street holding large cups of beer.
Ah, for the encouraging day when the worst one can say about Vegas is that guys drink some beer on the street after Catholics leave morning Mass.
The high-rise, golden Trump International Hotel was nearby. Maybe President Trump could get some judges and attorneys together there for a conference on how to restore more sanity to U.S. law?
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