Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters expressed grave concern about the ability of the lone shooter in the Las Vegas massacre to obtain such high-powered weaponry, telling Fox Business Network on Monday that "I am a gun owner. I will always be a gun-owner, but the founding fathers didn't want every juiced-up psycho to have a machine-gun collection."
Peters, who is Fox News strategic analyst, emphasized that his "concern at the macro-level is this lone-wolf terrorism is becoming a default position of self-affirmation, of self-expression across the world," stressing that the copycat nature of it particularly worried him.
"We need to look at what kind of weapons he had — clearly this guy had military-grade weapons — and where he got them. Because automatic rifles are illegal for the average citizen to own."
Peters said it was clear that the shooter very carefully planned the massacre, saying that he managed to fire at least hundreds of rounds into the crowd.
"He had an arsenal of at least 10 rifles in the room…. and he waited for days until he got just the right environment" to carry out the maximum carnage, Peters said.
"This was an act of terror," the colonel said. "Just because it was not motivated by religion or didn't necessarily have political ends doesn't make a difference. It was an act of terror because it terrorized. It was intended to terrorize, to punish a population."
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