Las Vegas Hospitals vs. "No Shooter" Conspiracy Theory

Gary North - October 13, 2017

The ability of people to generate instant conspiracy theories is limited only by their capacity to live in self-induced delusion. There are no significant limits with respect to posting their theories.

I have seen so many conspiracy theories since 9/11 that I no longer am amazed at what deluded people will propose.

A member of this website suggests that no one was shot in Las Vegas. There were not multiple shooters. There were no shooters.

This, he admits, raises a problem. "I don't think there were any shooters. All an act. But what happened to those real people is the mystery." Indeed!

There is no mystery. Their bodies were sent to the local coroner, then to a local funeral home, then shipped to funeral homes in their home towns.

But what of 500 wounded people? They went to hospitals. Michael Rozeff writes this.

We cannot expect police in Las Vegas to come up with true accounts of the mass shooting right off the bat. They’re not equipped to do it. They have little experience doing it. Investigations take time. There are multiple authorities. There is confusion. There is not enough manpower to provide immediate answers. There are many, many people involved. The police forces are government forces, and as such they are bound to be inadequate in many ways. They’re not designed or staffed to deal with a large-scale situation like this. Hospitals were overwhelmed as a Google search reveals, and it’s reasonable to say that the capacity of police to investigate properly were and probably still are overwhelmed 9 days later.

A road that’s used to light traffic will be clogged by a sudden surge in use or a peak load. Government offices and programs are not designed for peak loads or efficiency. They ration through long lines and waiting if some emergency occurs. Police were overwhelmed in Houston, and we can imagine the pressures placed on them in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, all sorts of people can offer all sorts of theories based upon fragmentary claims of evidence. There are not enough police to follow up every such claim. Such claims presented on the internet may or may not come to the attention of the police, so that addressing them and disposing of them doesn’t enter their calculations. Police will easily be overwhelmed if they attempt to follow up every question and claim raised by people on the internet.

Police themselves who are unaccustomed to communications will be pressured to make guesses and statements about what may have happened, and some will do so, thereby spreading unfounded rumors or saying things that are wrong. In the confusion of the event itself, there will be tremendous opportunities for rumors to start and propagate. Then there will be leaks of information or partial information. There are ample sources of confusion amid these sources.

Take one thing, such as the number injured and the nature of their injuries. We have a suspicion raised by a comment such as this: “…we have videos of hospital visits with alleged seriously wounded people who have had an almost instantaneous recovery.” It’s an entirely new layer of suspicion to raise questions about these videos and in doing so to raise questions about the underlying truth about the injured and their injuries. This new suspicion implies a need for even more investigation. This can go on indefinitely, but as it does it obscures the truth and the basic questions. Who was injured? How many were injured? What were their injuries? These are the important matters and on these questions we can find information that allay all of these direct and second-order suspicions and render them as of little importance.

If we search on “Las Vegas injuries”, we find a good many articles such as this. We can learn a great deal about the reality of the injured and injuries by reading this article and the others that come up in this search. Taking into account the provisional nature of what we are reading, because it is a news report subject to error, we can still form a reasonably sensible picture because of multiple confirming reports and the statement of facts that can be checked. We read

“So many patients poured into the city’s hospitals that pediatric surgeons were operating on adults and obstetricians were attending to trauma patients.

“Many of the most critically wounded patients arrived at the 541-bed University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, the state’s only Level One trauma center. Over about four hours, it received 104 patients. More than 80 percent were gunshot victims.”

And, directly relevant to the “instantaneous recovery” statement, we read

“About half of the victims taken to University Medical Center suffered graze wounds, probably from bullets that ricocheted off the ground, Fraser said. Other patients may have been struck by bullets that passed through other victims. Some were hurt as they tried to flee — or were trampled in the panic. But 30 were in critical condition after suffering direct hits, he said.”

Hospitals nowadays send patients home far more quickly than years ago. You can have a surgery and go home the same day, in many cases. It is not surprising that people with relatively minor injuries would be released so as to make room for people with major injuries, and especially as a way of coping with peak load pressures that are not planned for in a hospital and could only be planned for by having uneconomic excess capacity of space, equipment and the appropriate medical personnel.

“Across the city, hospital administrators called in their entire staffs within minutes of hearing of the shooting and mass casualties. Elite neurosurgeons were mobilized. Environmental technicians were tasked with cleaning up blood.

“And the patients just kept coming — by ambulance, in the beds of pickup trucks, in the backs of SUVs.”

“About five miles away at Sunrise Hospital, 214 patients were treated in three hours — nearly the number typically seen in a day.”

Unless you are prepared to question the truth of accounts like these, which means doing your own investigation to verify the details, you cannot deny their substance. This in turn means that suspicions based upon videos and quick recoveries, real or alleged, have to be seen as of little or no relevance or importance. They cannot form a reasonable basis for suggesting “imposition of an official story.” In the case of the injuries and injured in Las Vegas, it is extremely improbable that the report cited above is an imposed official story. It is, in fact, well-nigh impossible, and it’s absurd to suggest that it could be an imposed official story.

I take seriously the intellectual discipline of writing history. I earned a Ph.D. in the field in 1972. I have written several detailed history books. I began one book in the fall of 1962. I completed it in 1996. It is over 1,000 pages long.

I know how difficult it is to write a history book that covers the basics of the topic by assembling evidence and then fitting this into a coherent, plausible narrative. Not many people ever learn how to do this. There is not much demand for footnoted books. There is great demand for implausible narratives that shock our sense of reality.

What I find is this: the more shocking the narrative, the more gullible the readers/viewers. Gullible readers are attracted to shocking narratives like moths to a flame. They will get burned.

Those who produce such narratives find themselves isolated. People who believe in verifiable causality do not like being confronted repeatedly by someone who insists on persuading them regarding what they regard as a lunatic theory. If the person seeking to persuade them is known for indulging in lunatic theories, he will find that people start avoiding him.

It is easy to be sucked into a vortex of lunacy. I have been in the conservative movement since 1956. I have seen this happen to people who were otherwise intelligent. Conspiracy theory by conspiracy theory, they lose contact with reality. They see the world as run by a single conspiracy. They cannot explain what it is or how it operates, but they believe it exists.