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Get Small

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Sen. John Thune is taking a lot of flack for his comments on the Mandalay Bay Massacre, urging that "people are going to have to take steps in their own lives to take precautions ... as somebody said, 'get small.'"  Nothing wrong with his advice, but as the third highest ranking Senator, one would think he might be urging Congress to take action.

Instead, the Republicans are taking a pass.  Even Steve Scalise, who only recently returned to the House chamber after being shot by a lone gunman at a Congressional softball game, said the Las Vegas shooting only "fortified" his views against gun control.  I think the NRA should be credited here, as he like so many of his fellow Republicans have been paid off by the National Rifle Association.

Meanwhile, His Trumpness wasted no time getting to Vegas, offering a far more heartfelt speech than he did in San Juan the day before, and visiting survivors at the UNLV hospital.  I suppose by Trump's reckoning, this is a far worse crisis than Puerto Rico, as many more persons died.

It's hard not to get cynical when you see these types of reactions.  I was almost laughing this morning when I listened to CNN try to get into the mind of the killer with an FBI agent and criminal psychologist, both young and pretty,  like off the set of one of the CSI television shows.  The FBI agent couldn't believe Marilou Danley had any idea what was going on, even though it was reported that Paddock flew her off to the Philippines two weeks ago so that he could prepare himself for the concert.

A mass shooting like this took a lot of preparation and apparently he had been amassing his arsenal for the past year.  Doing so in a way that would attract little attention.  He also bought cameras to monitor the hallways outside his room and various other supplies to turn the 32nd floor room into a "sniper's den."  He had also worked out his angle of trajectory to get the largest range of the crowd below -- the so-called "trigonometry of terror."

So, no matter how "small" you made yourself, you were going to have a hard time avoiding a rain of lead bullets like that.  I would have liked to put Sen. Thune in that crowd and see how well he fared.

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