‘Breaking Bad’ Star Reveals Sister’s ‘Horrifying’ Texts From Las Vegas Shooting

Actor Dean Norris, best known for his role as DEA agent Hank Schrader on AMC’s Breaking Bad revealed in a recent interview that his sister was among the concertgoers at the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Oct. 1.

Norris told The Independent that his sister had sent him several “horrifying” text messages while bullets from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino rained over the crowds during the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

The 54-year-old who was in London at the time filming a movie said he had been up because of the time different and received several “panicked” texts from her.

“I get a text from her, which would have been 12 or one o’clock in the morning,” Norris said. “She was at the concert with her friends. I didn’t know she was at the concert, so I got an up-close-and-personal description of what happened. It was obviously horrifying.”

Norris adds that he doubts she has fully comprehended what happened to her.

“I will have to keep talking to her, keep keeping an eye on her, about those events, that’s an amazingly traumatic thing to happen,” he said.

Norris, who grew up in the Midwest, called it a “personal shock.”

“I woke up and it was ‘Oh two people shot in Las Vegas,’ and then it was 20 and then it turned to 50,” he said. “Then I get a text saying, ‘We’re barricaded into some supply room’, and I was like, wow!”

Norris says he hopes that the number of people present at the concert could help make the incident a “tipping point” towards changing control laws.

“My wife also had a friend that was there, a good friend,” he said. “And we both kind of commented to each other on the fact that now there is this new normal, where we know people that were involved in a mass shooting. [In fact] we know two people – they weren’t there with each other.”

Norris, who will be seen next in the TNT series, Claws, doesn’t hide the fact that he personally owns guns, but reiterates that the law should change around the “militarization level” that is currently permitted.

“It always seemed like it was somewhere else… like, well, it’s never going to happen to me, it’s never going to happen to us. But maybe this is a slight tipping point. There were 22,000 people there,” Norris said. “The degree of separation now between somebody who knows someone who’s been involved in an actual mass shooting is getting smaller and smaller, and I wonder if that, in some way, will inject a little more energy into the debate.”

While it can be argued that legislation for gun control didn’t change following the Sandy Hook shooting that claimed the lives of 20 elementary school children, the interviewer asks Norris if it won’t change now.

“That was a school, probably 400 or 500 people. I’m just saying that, personally, now, I know somebody who was involved, and I wonder how many other people, since there were 22,000 people there, got those same texts,” Norris replied. “The scope of that event, multiplied by everyone’s friends, say on Facebook, and you are talking several hundred thousand people, more, who knew someone who was actually at that event.”

On Oct. 1, 64-year-old domestic terrorist Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured more than 500 others when he fired several automatic weapons into the crowd at the country music festival on the Las Vegas strip.