ONE OF THE guitarists who was on stage at a country music festival before the mass shooting started on Sunday evening has said that he has changed his mind on gun control in the US.
Previously a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, Caleb Keeter said yesterday: “I cannot express how wrong I was.”
In the aftermath of the mass shooting, which killed at least 59 people and injured more than 500, neither US President Donald Trump nor his spokespeople engaged on the issue of gun control.
This was in contrast to the approach taken by Barack Obama who attempted to introduce stricter gun control measures in the wake of the Sandy Hook primary school shooting in 2012.
It has since emerged that perpetrator Stephen Paddock had legally bought a number of firearms in the past year.
The worst mass shooting in the country’s history has reignited the gun debate in the US, but it is believed that Trump will not attempt to follow Obama in calling for reduced access to guns.
Keeter, who plays with the Josh Abbott Band, said that he had been a “proponent of the Second Amendment [his] entire life”.
He said: “We actually have members of our crew with CHL (Concealed Handgun Licence), and legal firearms on the bus.
They were useless. We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think that we were part of the massacre and shoot us. A small group (or one man) laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of firepower.
He said that he had written his parents and “the love of [his] life” a goodbye because he didn’t know whether or not he would be shot, himself.
Keeter went on: “These rounds were powerful enough that my crew guys just standing in a close proximity of a victim shot by this fucking coward received shrapnel wounds.
We need gun control RIGHT. NOW. My biggest regret is that I stubbornly didn’t realise it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it.
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