On October 3rd, 2017, at 10 PM, Stephen Paddock rained bullets upon the concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival. With 58 dead and 489 injured, this was the deadliest mass shooting in North American history. As the story grows in its controversy and new facts develop every day,  it’s hard to understand why someone would do something so atrocious.

Growing death tolls from mass shootings are worrying people nationwide. Why would anyone do something like this? The mystery unfolds with the increasing information coming out. Inside of his room he had a variety fully loaded high capacity guns inside of his room. The Las Vegas Shooting reminds us of all the mass shootings in the recent years. It raises the question how do these mass murderers obtain high power weapons and what regulations are there to prevent them?

Stephen Paddock was a man with some very strange habits. In 2013, Paddock had sued Cosmopolitan Hotel when he had fallen on their walkways. Paddock said in the deposition that he split his time among California, Nevada, Texas, and Florida, and at one point he traveled “maybe upwards of three weeks out of a month.” Another piece of evidence comes to light that, “His girlfriend, Marilou Danley, told investigators on Friday that he seemed to be mentally and physically deteriorating in recent months.”

Some believe that Paddock may have had undiagnosed mental illnesses after his Valium tablets were found in his room. The FBI has investigated a plethora of people close to or affiliated with Paddock. They believe that he had a hard time making friends and staying in stable relationships.

Why was such an unstable citizen able to purchase a dangerous weapon? Thank the Nevada legislation for allowing people like Paddock to purchase such weapons with barely any restrictions.  With the ease of access to guns, mass shootings are more common in our day and age. Federal law states that one must pass a background test to purchase any type of gun.

In Nevada, a license is not required in order to purchase rifles, handguns or semi automatics. However, anyone with a criminal history or deemed mentally unstable by the courts cannot purchase a gun. Those who have not been declared mentally ill are still able to purchase high power weapons (with the exception of automatic) guns. In the case of Stephen Paddock, who had  no track record for violent outbursts, the mass shooter was easily able to obtain a multitude of guns. In fact, Paddock was able to purchase a total of 33 weapons in the past year.

How does Nevada’s gun control policies compare to the ones we have here at home? Well, Maryland is much stricter than Nevada and many other states when it comes to gun control. Current state law says that an individuals may not own or purchase a firearm if they are a, “1. Fugitive from justice; 2. Convicted felon; convicted of crime of violence; 3. Habitual drunkard; 4. Addict/habitual user of narcotics/amphetamines/barbiturates; 5. If spent more than 30 consecutive days in mental institution for treatment; 6. Under 21 yrs.”

The controversy of gun-control has been a long, drawn out debate that our government hasn’t been quite able to fully resolve. Those in favor of more restrictions on the purchasing of firearms have been advocating for new legislation to be implemented for quite some time. On the other hand, avid supporters of the 2nd amendment (the right to bear arms), have maintained that any restrictions on the purchasing of guns are an infringement on their constitutional rights.

The issue of gun control has been one of the most controversial ones to date, and as new facts develop in the Paddock case, one can expect for the debate to become even more heated than it is already.