Isn't that the eternal question? If what happens in Las Vegas stays there, too often the compulsion is to find trouble. Not that Las Vegas hasn't been prepared for it. It's the home to an elite SWAT team, the casinos and airport have the best biometric facial recognition systems in the country, and it is generally one of the best surveilled cities in the world. But what does it matter how close you're being watched when, throughout Nevada, it's legal to bring a gun into a bar, into a casino — including the Mandalay Bay — or when there's no waiting period to buy a gun of any caliber or automation, when you can easily purchase high-volume magazines? Most of Nevada is still the literal Wild West, the stretch between Las Vegas and Reno filled with desolate beauty and scrub cities in all directions. Make that run in your car sometime and you'll understand the liberal gun laws; you may even appreciate them. But you may also understand how the cowboy slowly morphed into the gangster, how a desire to have your own plot of land with a view and no one pushing you around can mutate into something harsh and angry when society pushes back. And how when people enter the city limits of a town built to defraud them, they have the propensity to act unpredictably.