MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claims that last weekend’s mass shooting in Las Vegas was worse than if the gunman used a “fully loaded 747” as a weapon of terror.
At least 58 people were killed and more than 500 others injured at an outdoor country music concert when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire from the 32nd-floor window of the Mandalay Bay Hotel on Sunday. Ms. Maddow used her eponymous show during Monday’s coverage to liken the shooting to the terror tactics of the 9/11 hijackers in 2001.
“[He] was able to assemble and set up enough, apparently legal, firepower that he, as a single person, created more victims than if he had crashed a fully loaded 747,” the host said.
The host’s commentary sparked a debate in a Donald Trump Reddit thread and was picked up by The Daily Wire on Tuesday.
The website noted that besides the MSNBC host’s math for a “fully loaded” 747 not adding up, if a plane crashed into the 22,000 people listening to singer Jason Aldean, then it would have been far more deadly than Paddock’s shooting rampage.
Authorities who searched Paddock’s hotel room after he turned a weapon on himself found 23 guns in the room and 19 at his home in Mesquite, Nevada.
The massacre is the most lethal mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“We have no idea what his belief system was,” Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters on Monday. “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath.”
• Douglas Ernst can be reached at dernst@washingtontimes.com.
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