While most people saw the terror on TV following the mass shooting in Las Vegas earlier this month and can only imagine what the survivors went through, Tobi Buckman, a retired private therapist from Aberdeen, spent days in the immediate aftermath talking with survivors and helping them cope with their trauma. She spoke with 40 people who escaped from the shooting, most of whom were in the front rows of the crowd and told her they saw dead bodies as they fled the chaos.
“A couple were almost immobile and couldn’t talk at all, others were still pretty in shock and beginning to have anxiety,” said Buckman. “I wanted them to have tools for things they can do today and tomorrow to get over the initial stuff.”
For some, even leaving their homes and deciding to speak with health specialists was difficult, she said.
“They were afraid to be around people, some of them hadn’t been in for days because they were fearful and couldn’t leave the house,” she said. “Some had family members encourage them and helped bring them in.”
In 24 years as a disaster mental health volunteer for the Red Cross, Buckman has traveled to offer therapy at many of the country’s notable disasters, including New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and New York following 9/11. In this case, 62-year-old Stephen Paddock used numerous modified assault weapons to shoot from his Mandalay Bay Hotel room, killing 59 people and injuring hundreds more at a country music festival.
After arriving at the city’s convention center crowded with health specialists and recovering survivors, Buckman interviewed each patient about what they saw and how they felt following the event, most of whom she advised counseling and noticed a sense of guilt over how they handled the tragedy.
“People were feeling guilty because they see stories on TV about the heroes and felt they hadn’t done enough,” she said. “Mostly, there’s an overwhelming immobilizing terror that people experience. It’s chaos, they don’t know what’s happening, but they’re able to push through that and survive.”
And for the few she decided didn’t need counseling, it was often because they were able to leave the concert without seeing much of the greusome aftermath.
“There were a couple people who were trampled as everyone was exiting, and they didn’t see as much as those near the stage where the shooting was and people were falling over bodies, seeing things the human mind just doesn’t want to see.”
Buckman was shocked at just how far away the shooter’s room in the Mandalay Bay Hotel was from the concert venue, and how many personal belongings were still littered around the area days after it happened.
“The FBI came in and picked up more than a million items … of things people left (at the scene). They were bringing in pallets of stuff and dropped them with a loud noise. Survivors would get startled, and even me after hearing their stories since we were all so hyper-vigilant.”
Now, Buckman is adamant about getting gun laws modified so such a massacre is less likely to occur. She believes that bump fire stocks, which Paddock used to essentially turn 12 of his semi-automatic rifles into automatic ones, should be the first thing to go.
“Those bump stocks are what allowed him to kill and injure so many, because he could just hold the trigger down,” she said. “They need to be illegal. The starting price of semi-automatic rifles can be below $600, and the bump stocks can be anywhere from $50 to $200, so they’re readily accessible.”
With the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act, most automatic weapons such as machine guns were banned, but equipment like bump stocks allow gun owners to sidestep that and make semi-automatic guns fire just as quickly.
Buckman added that she owns a gun and doesn’t think it’s feasible to ban all of them, instead suggesting the government rethink and restrict the sale of new and more powerful weapons capable of killing in large numbers.
“There’s nothing in the second amendment that says, ‘Forever in the future, whatever weapons shall be developed can be owned,’” she said. “Does this allow me to have an (rocket-propelled grenade), or if I develop a neutron bomb? There’s no good reason to have those, so it’s about gun reform. It’s not about taking guns away from people. Why do people need to have a gun that shoots multi-hundred shots so quickly?”
Some officials have made attempts to create stricter regulations, such as California Senator Dianne Feinstein who proposed a legislation to ban bump stocks following the shooting.
However, Buckman has been disappointed with how little she’s heard from the federal government on a need to readdress gun laws, and lamented that most people forget about mass shootings before anything changes.
“At Sandy Hook, someone shot 20 first graders, if that doesn’t motivate you to really think we need some changes, I’m not sure this will either,” said Buckman. “My concern is as time goes on, people kind of forget and go on with their daily lives since it doesn’t affect them. But we need to keep pressure on our legislature and officials to make this happen. We hear Paul Ryan talking about how we need to look into this, but now I’m not hearing anything.”
During her therapy sessions, Buckman said she avoided discussing her patients’ thoughts on gun control, as her main goal was to help them come to terms with what they experienced.
In the end, Buckman’s consensus is that current regulations fail to rule out fundamentally evil people from getting guns, and that the best alternative is to take away the most powerful ones that have led to some of our country’s greatest tragedies.
“You know those cartoons where they’ve got a little angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other telling them to do it anyway? These people aren’t born with an angel in them,” she said. “They have no remorse when they do these things, and our system does not preclude people who are evil and twisted from having weapons. The least we can do is make sure they don’t have these high powered automatic weapons that kill people so quickly.”
