Metal Detectors on the Strip?

Many are speculating on enhancing security on the Strip, but additional security measures wouldn’t necessarily have prevented this crime or many others. For instance, the concert venue banned firearms, so a ground-based attack would be out, yet the defilade fire attack we saw worked sickeningly well. Inventive, evil minds will find a way. Meanwhile, some suggested solutions would only cause more problems.

Metal detectors at each entrance wouldn’t have done a thing in this instance. The man was a guest shooting from his suite, not someone shooting on the casino floor. Management wants traffic coming in and gambling as quickly as possible, so they are not going to check every person coming in. More advanced technology (we’ll call it gun radar) can scan crowds, but isn’t actually that efficient or reliable yet. It also can’t read someone’s intentions, i.e. concealed carrier high roller or potential cage robber.

Disarming the many concealed carriers would also alienate a lot of American gamblers very quickly. It also puts people at risk as they go to and from the hotels. The Strip isn’t safe. Rapes, robberies, and murders happen in parking garages and out on the streets, alleys, and pedestrian bridges. People working, visiting, or staying on the Strip deserve to be defend themselves and being unable to carry to/from one’s room or discreetly while patronizing a casino puts folks at risk. I certainly wouldn’t visit the Strip if I knew a hotel would throw me out for carrying concealed while behaving myself.

TSA style baggage screening would have detected the killer’s weapons and equipment, but it isn’t feasible. Hotels would not have the resources—manpower, money, or time—to screen what each person had in their bags. Guests wouldn’t stand for it either.

Had hotel staff known the killer had firearms somehow, he would have probably asked him to store his guns elsewhere or perhaps check it with security. To avoid suspicion, he could have easily claimed that he was a competitive shooter, etc. and didn’t want his guns stolen down in the car.

Seeing the shooter’s “setup” would have been a dead giveaway, but that is fixed with a little door handle placard. Staff could daily enter each room in the future, “do not disturb” or not, but that is impractical and still would have been easy to defeat by altering when the guns came into the room.

We just have to accept that evil happens and is sometimes beyond our ability to control it. We don’t need more bad ideas and gun control.