Sculptor shapes weapons into memorial of Las Vegas massacre

LAS VEGAS — Using 600 decommissioned guns from a New Mexico-based group, a Las Vegas artist has created a sculpture to be displayed in downtown Las Vegas on the third remembrance of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Artist David Fay created the sculpture, titled "On Second Thought," almost entirely out of gun parts and ammo, playing off the classic "The Thinker" sculpture created by Auguste Rodin.

"I think it (the gun debate) needs to be thought of more," Fay told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "I've never had so much of the same thing to work with, in so much quantity. It was an amazing project."

The art piece stands 6 feet tall, weighs 250 pounds and took 750 hours to create out of the hundreds of firearms, which were bought last year.

The art piece will be on display near Park on Fremont in downtown Las Vegas on Oct. 1, the anniversary of the 2017 shooting that killed 58 people and injured hundreds at an open-air concert on the Las Vegas Strip.

The sculpture was commissioned by an anonymous "activist art collective" called Indecline. The group website says it comprises "graffiti writers, filmmakers, photographers and full-time rebels and activists" focusing on social, ecological and economical injustices. The group requests anonymity because some of its work involves illegal activities.

The network describes itself as a nonprofit collective and "not an anarchist group" on its website, which sells clothing and other items to pay for its projects.

The group may be best known for another sculpture project: five life-size, nude statues of Donald Trump erected in August 2016 when he was the Republican candidate for president. Indecline also took credit for vandalizing a billboard on Interstate 15 that advertised a Las Vegas shooting range.

An Indecline member dubbed "N," who agreed to be interviewed by the Review-Journal only if his identity was kept confidential, said the goal was not to offend anybody, but to honor people whose lives were affected by the Oct. 1 shooting.

During a meeting at a downtown warehouse, Fay said he has shown the sculpture to 10 people he knows who were at the Route 91 Harvest festival when the shooting occurred and they all thought the piece was well done.

"I think you leave it up to the thinker, the people who are viewing the piece to decide what it is," Fay said.

In remembrance of the victims of the tragic events, 58 bullets were embedded in the shoulders of the statue. Since the statute was created, authorities say at least two more victims have died from complications from the injuries they suffered during the shooting nearly three years ago.

Also, 1,100 bullet casings line the wooden frame at the base of the sculpture, the approximate number of rounds fired by a gunman from windows on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. The shooter killed himself before police arrived.

The art piece has moving parts to it, with two clock mechanisms strategically placed inside the body of the sculpture to stimulate thought.

"It's 100 percent guns, except for the clock mechanism itself," Fay said. "Any of the shaved wood pieces came from the gun butts."

Although Indecline supports gun reform, the group didn't want to send a message tied to the statue.

Members want those who see it to do what the piece is intended to inspire — think — in particular, about the gun debate in the U.S.

"Obviously the gun debate is something that we as a country have a lot, where there's a lot of emotion, where maybe thought would be better," "N" said. "Our main response to Oct. 1st was a hashtag, #VegasStrong, and a campaign for a hockey team to win us a Stanley Cup. Although both are beautiful symbolically, they don't do a lot to further the actual debate."