October 6, 2017
The Americans targeted in Vegas are what makes America great
By Ilana Mercer

A man, Sonny Melton, 29, died, shielding his wife from the bullets.

Another commandeered a truck to drive victims of the Oct. 1 massacre in Las Vegas to the hospital.

At first, Vanessa, a concertgoer, fled the Vegas venue, which was being sprayed with bullets from high-velocity rifles. Then she turned and ran back. She credits her professional sense of duty as a nurse. We all know that it was Vanessa's heart that enabled her to push past the fear and place herself in the crosshairs.

From her hospital bed, Addison Short profusely thanked a stranger who had helped her escape the confines of the country music concert in the Vegas Village. She was hobbled by a gunshot to the leg. The first words Addison uttered to the ego in the anchor's chair quizzing her were words of gratitude for her rescuer. Short also gave thanks for having a minor injury.

"April" is a girl who stopped her car to pick-up a bloodied young Canadian couple. The young man had been shot in the head. He's fine. Heartbroken as he and his girlfriend are, they're still a vision of wholesomeness – Canadian clones of the Americans attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

Heather Gooze, 43, cradled young Jordan McIldoon, 23, in her arms until he went limp. She was a bartender who had attended the concert, he a Canadian mechanic from Maple Ridge, British Columbia. He loved the Vancouver Canucks and his girlfriend, who was at the three-day country music happening as well.

As she spoke to CNN's John Berman and Poppy Harlow, Heather's moral resplendence only accentuated the depravity of the two notorious fake-news pornographers.

"No, ma'am, I didn't run." A cowboy hat clutched to his chest, Brian Mckinnon recounted how his best friend petered out in his arms. Only after his friend had passed did Brian flee. But then he stopped in his tracks, went back, put his pal's signature hat back on, and waited beside him.

They may never know his name, but a man they'd never met shielded two young women from bullets. He was shot as he hovered over them, protectively, his blood oozing onto their shirts. Anthony Rabone, an off-duty firefighter and paramedic, secured his girlfriend; stabilized his brother, who had sustained a chest wound; and then charged back into the concert killing field.

Vanessa, aforementioned, captured the Vegas valor on display that day: there were so many citizens, she said – ordinary people, doctors, cops, paramedics, off-duty nurses – everyone was just communicating and working together. It was completely horrible but also utterly amazing.

Even the medics interviewed could not help but effuse about the unusually fabulous folks they were treating.

Men moved into leadership roles quickly, using barricade gates, maintenance ladders, and banners to carry the injured out. Many of these men do the dirty jobs Mike Rowe dignified in his eponymous TV series. They're firemen, commercial fishermen (like the late Adrian Murfitt), heavy-duty mechanics (rest in peace, Jordan McIldoon), and pipe-fitters, like 29-year-old Austin Davis, RIP, from Riverside County, California. Davis had gone to the festival with family friends.

Yes, who goes to a concert with "family friends" – grown-up sons with middle-aged moms, entire nuclear families together, young and old; teens who don't twerk their tushes (like Iggy Azlea's primate-in-estrus act), but belt out "God Bless America." These fans are families, literally. These are the people who pitched in during the massacre of 58 concertgoers (489 people were injured).

Those cow-kickin' country music-lovers in cowboy hats and Tony Lama boots are the finest folks on Earth.

Let's not beat about the bush. Middle America, patriotic America, oddly monochromatic America is the America we saw in Vegas in all its splendor. The same America is berated daily, and dangerously, by the envenomed coastal elites – in print, in cyberspace, and on the idiot's lantern.

Hand-on-heart, I can say that the larger-than-life personalities who died in Las Vegas are the best of America, the very heart of America. They are what makes America great.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017...rica_great.html


NOTE: "Ilana was born in South Africa, which her father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, decided to leave pursuant to harassment by the South African security police on account of his anti-apartheid preaching and activism. (Ilana herself fought petty apartheid tirelessly.) The family departed in the 1960s for Israel, where Ilana spent her formative years. She returned to South-Africa in the 1980s, married and had a daughter. The family emigrated to Canada in 1995, and then went on to settle in the US.

http://www.ilanamercer.com/biographical/";