A gunman opened fire on a crowd of more than 22,000 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct  1.  Fifty-nine people were killed and over 500 were injured by Stephen Paddock who used a wide array of rifles. Twenty-three guns were found in his hotel room, including semi-automatic rifles and hundreds upon hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Shortly after the incident, former democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton took to twitter and made quite a few remarks.

“The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get. “

I think it’s important to know the crowds didn’t even realize it was gunshots but rather fireworks. So having a silencer wouldn’t have made a difference on how well they would have heard the gunshots.

Living in Wyoming my whole life I’ve grown up around guns. Wyoming is an advocate for all things Second Amendment, so you don’t have to look far when looking for a firearm. We use guns for a variety of activities and protection. According to USACarry.com, as of 2007, 59.7 percent of Wyoming’s population owned guns.

With many shootings going on, the latest in Texas (involving a mentally unstable individual whom the Air Force discharged but did not properly follow up on), politicians and anti-gun advocates are calling for stricter gun laws to be passed. Hillary Clinton’s comments about silencers goes to show you she doesn’t know a whole lot about what a silencer actually does.

Paddock used a wide range of machine-type guns, but for an AR-15 type of gun a silencer would make it about as loud as a jackhammer. With the sounds echoing off surrounding buildings, it wouldn’t have made it any harder for people to hear.

Following up on her tweet Clinton continued to press for greater gun control by using the incident as a platform for her message.

“Our grief isn’t enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.”

Way to keep politics out.

I think it’s important to note that we already have laws against murder. According to gunviolencearchive.org, the country averages about 44 murders every day. Paddock murdered 58 people. The idea that one more law on gun control would have prevented this is simply asinine.

The National Rifle Association strives to make sure all Americans have the right to bear arms at all times. The Second Amendment is not put in place to protect us from criminals;  the Second Amendment was put in place to protect citizens from the government and anyone who tries to take their freedom to protect themselves away.

Nobody is asked to give up any of their rights given to us in the Bill of Rights other than the Second Amendment. We are not asked to give up our First Amendment when walking into our school and nobody is ever stripped of their Fifth Amendment rights. Why should the American people’s rights be infringed? The problem isn’t guns, its societal decay.