STAR of the Month : Mass killings worry Agent Sasco

Late Sunday night, the Mandalay Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, was hit with tragedy as a lone gunman opened fire on concertgoers attending the final day of the annual Route 91 Country Music Festival.

The death toll rose to 59, with the list of the injured topping the 500 count. STAR of the Month Agent Sasco said the frequency of these international mass murders has changed the travel atmosphere, and now makes passing through airports a more tense experience.

The artiste told THE STAR that he saw a few minutes of the Mandalay Resort coverage on TV.

"It's really a time of great concern to say the very least. If is not Las Vegas, it's 'Pray for Paris' and it's pray fi dis, and it's pray fi dat. Clearly, it's a dreadful thing to go to a concert and don't know if it going to result in you running for your life or a man pick yuh out from 32 floors up. It's a horrible thing, man," he said.

Agent Sasco said travelling in Europe now brings a "new temperature of fear and concern.''

He said: "If a nuh shooting, man a mow yuh down with truck and car and ting and ting. When you hear a loud bang one a time yuh nuh even look, cuz clearly, some man a construct sumn over there or sumn. But now ... 'ah wah dat'?!"

GUN CONTROL

Gun control is usually revisited as a means to quell the frequency of mass killings, but Agent Sasco believes remedial gun control is not a solution to curbing the deadly attacks.

"It's just a very delicate thing ... It's multilayered. I don't even know what it's about, but the worst thing about what's been happening over the last 15 to 20 years is that people hurt people. We need to get to understanding why people hurt people that never hurt them. Make we address that. Why we want to hurt one anedda? Especially people weh nuh do yuh nuttin? That I think is the core of the issue," he said.

However, for Agent Sasco, the most harrowing development in light of such tragedies are the profiles of the culprits.

"The scariest thing to me is that whenever you hear that (an incident), it's a law-abiding man and a regular person that never had a run-in with the law. It just means that everybody now become a potential [threat]," he said. "How you protect against that? That's a very scary reality, that we don't know who these people are because they are everybody. And the danger in that is you blanket everybody then, 'the good suffer for the bad'. Who knows what liberties [people] have to give up next?"