[imagesource: David Becker / Getty Images]

A new docuseries is taking viewers inside the largest mass shooting in America’s history.

At an October 2017 festival celebrating country music in Las Vegas, a lone shooter killed 58 people and injured 869 from the safety of his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.

Now, through emotional firsthand accounts and never-before-seen archival footage, 11 Minutes makes us step into the utter chaos and unadulterated terror of the Route 91 Harvest country music festival mass shooting.

The Daily Beast writes that director Jeff Zimbalist’s four-part docuseries steps into the calamity with “stunning urgency” and creates a “long-form portrait of hell that, figuratively speaking, never ends, both in its victims’ minds and in America”.

Have a look:

The docuseries does a great job of honouring the victims of the mass shooting and purposefully neglects to name the suspect, reasoning that doing so likely only leads to glorification and copycats.

We’ve written about him before if you really want to go down that road, but since authorities still don’t have a comprehensive clue about why he did what he did, there’s not much point in zooming in on him anyway.

The only criticism of the doccie is the omission of a serious discussion about the US’s “never-ending national infatuation with firearms”:

11 Minutes is frustrating in its refusal to scream—loudly, angrily, hysterically—over the blatant insanity of any person being able to legally purchase over 55 firearms in one year, including the fourteen AR-15 rifles, eight AR-10-type rifles, and single bolt-action rifle and revolver that were found in the shooter’s Mandalay Bay room.

The up-close-and-personal view of being in the thick of a mass shooting, which looks and probably felt exactly like a war zone, doesn’t seem to be enough to encourage a more forceful conversation about getting military-grade weapons out of civilians’ hands.

11 Minutes is available for streaming on Paramount+.

[source:dailybeast]