March 18th, 2024
Three separate shootings in one hour. “This is a safe community,” says mayor.

LOL.

March 15th, 2024
Glorious Spring Break…

USA! USA!

March 14th, 2024
‘Now, two separate juries have taken the unusual step of holding a parent criminally responsible for a child’s horrific crimes.’

Yep, when the little bugger grabs one of the guns lying around the house and maims/slaughters all over his school, you get to go to jail too.

March 14th, 2024
Of course there are no surprises here. But it’s useful to get empirical confirmation.

Gun laws and regulations are among the most impactful policy factors [in college choice], with 80 percent of students saying these are at least somewhat important in their college choices, and 84 percent of those said they prefer campuses that restrict firearms… Reproductive healthcare policies are [also] a significant consideration, with 71 percent of students citing its importance to their college choice. Of this group, eight in 10 prefer states with fewer restrictions on reproductive healthcare. 

It’ll be interesting to watch enrollment trends in, for instance, Idaho, with utterly unrestricted gun laws and utterly restricted abortion laws. Ob/gyns are fleeing the state as fast as their specula can carry them. Let’s see how many female applicants find that attractive.

March 8th, 2024
For two months now, Greek soccer matches have been played in empty stadiums.

That’s because for decades Greek fans have been killing people and torching cities and all. The hapless government thinks a temporary pause and some more security cameras will bring Peace in Our Time, but this latest scheme will work out just as well as Chamberlain’s. I guess it’s real hard to confront the only thing to be done with a significant population of nihilist shits: No. More. Soccer.

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A BAD CROWD

Since that’s way rad an idea, let me say a bit more about pre-modern and postmodern crowds, and how they’re making crowds themselves obsolete.

The Greek football fans generate primitive, pre-modern crowding, all about atavistic drives among men. We had one of these recently in the States — the mass shooter at the Super Bowl victory parade was just, you know, hormones, spoiling for a fight.

Any scenario that surrounds fundamentally aggressive men with other young men will bring out the AK47 (that’s new — primitive cavemen had rocks), or, outside of gun-drenched USA, knives. And not just random young men: It was a signal cultural moment when the sixty year old owner of a soccer team got angry and ran onto the field during a game, with a gun in his outstretched hand to kill a referee.

You understand – yes? – the message Savvidis sent to all random hormoned-up young men? What I’m doing is a highly charismatic act.

You make matters worse when you present these people with established ‘enemies’ – opposing domestic or foreign teams. They don’t have to – like the Super Bowl shooter – go looking for enemies. You’ve set up a war for them to fight in, collectively, cuz they’re part of… a crowd.

And it’s an all-male, all-young crowd, right? Didn’t use to be, but over the years women children and older people have arrived at the conclusion that Greek soccer stadiums are not conducive to longevity, let alone a fun afternoon. So now you’ve concentrated the scariest element of society into loud sweaty excited rageful quarters.

So Greece is simply farther along in the evolution toward the end of crowds: It has watched for decades as its soccer matches – increasing numbers of them – devolve into fatal violence. It has tried everything, including, indeed, the end of crowds. The country is coming off of a two-month moratorium on soccer attendees.

But now that they’re letting these incredibly dangerous groups of people back in, what do they think is going to happen?

So, you know, we’re getting the stern announcements about enhancements of the police state they’ve already set up in the stadiums – vast numbers of security cameras, police, mandatory digital identification, weapon checks, blah blah.

Will it work? Keep your eye on Miami’s spring break. It’s happening right now. Those crowds are so awful that Miami released this ad a couple of weeks ago, and has made clear that it does in fact want the total end of those crowds. We don’t want you. Don’t come here. AND here are all the police state goodies we’re throwing at you if you come anyway. Let’s see if it works. Might make the guys madder, you know.

Anyway, so Greece. So what was once supposed to be A GAME, a certain thing, a sports gathering, is now – you understand? – a kind of lord of the flies free for all held perilously in check by insane levels of surveillance technology plus a very large, very frightened, security force. The players are scared, and not just the ones dreading racist chants. The referees? Forget about it. You know that groups of them have gone on strike because of the attacks.

So my thing is who’s kidding who. Eventually it won’t just be Savvidis packing heat. Obvious escalations of an already lurid situation are on their way, and we know from security’s inability to stop a mass shooting at the Super Bowl parade that guns are too quick and easy and lethal to police.

Think security will find weapons and confiscate them? Haha. Check out how many smuggled guns are discovered every day at all of America’s airports. People are always trying, and think about how many guns the TSA isn’t finding.

When crowds become impossible, what are your choices? You can try identifying and excluding the evil doers, but you’ll never get them all, and of course they’re evil enough to figure out how to get into the stadium no matter what you do. You can get to North Korean levels of police state apparatus, I guess (lines of soldiers with guns pointed at the crowd throughout? torture chambers below the locker rooms?), but this won’t be very… pretty. No, UD is thinking that Greece (and other countries) will have to shut down the whole thing.

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Our highly advanced postmodern crowds are a whole other thing. It’s their innocence that gets you. They are sitting ducks, awaiting the Las Vegas shooter, the Prague shooter, the Highland Park shooter. They are gathered to enjoy a concert, a parade, or just a sunny afternoon on the campus of Charles University. Massive, extensive, the highest of high-tech firepower rains down upon them from a heavily fortified genius who has thought everything out to guarantee he’ll be able to shoot for a long time and kill a lot of people.

I don’t think American parades or outdoor concerts have a very long shelf life either.

**********************

Oh, and on the subject of Greek violence — We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the petrol bombs being thrown at police, even as we speak, in opposition to the government’s shocking intention to allow private universities to operate freely in Greece.

Yes! What’ll they think of next? Private, as well as, public universities!

Most Greeks are in favor; over 40,000 of the smartest young Greeks currently study abroad, having fled the squalid corrupt national system. (Put Greece university in my search engine.) Competition might wake up the dead public campuses and reverse the brain drain, but who would want to do that?

March 4th, 2024
Sadomasochism in Myrtle Beach

Where else? It’s long been one of America’s most twisted locations. Nothing surprising here.

Shooting pledges with air guns, making them eat butter with dirt on it and making them drink bong water led to a Coastal Carolina University fraternity’s five-year suspension … [A] first-year student pledging the fraternity was injured after being shot multiple times with an air gun as part of the group’s initiation process… [He] was shot twice in the head, twice in the stomach and multiple times in the back… [The] student sought medical attention in the following days for headaches and hearing difficulty… Shortly after, he received texts from some of the fraternity members, including one who allegedly told him to “keep the frat’s name out of your mouth,” according to the report. The pledge withdrew from the university on Jan. 9, 2023, for medical reasons.

March 4th, 2024
Judicial Temperament, Oklahoma

 [Judge Brian Lovell] was arrested for reportedly firing a gun at five cars, then ramming his SUV into the back of a woman’s car twice. [He] then attempted to push the woman’s car into oncoming traffic.

March 4th, 2024
Late at night, cram hundreds of people into a dark shed in the middle of nowhere, and let men with guns roam free.

It’s the sort of scene you associate with SS massacres, but our own West Point Mississippi offers just this scenario every Saturday. Y’all come down.

March 2nd, 2024
February 27th, 2024
The Freedom to …

go postal.

February 26th, 2024
SO Iconic an American Scene that, if you Encountered it in a Novel, you’d Complain the Writer Overdid it.

Police responding to an adult overdosing in a car had to negotiate with a 10-year-old boy who was holding a loaded AK-47 that had the safety off, investigators said.

Crowley [Louisiana] police said they were called as Jeremy Leblanc was overdosing in the driver seat of a car in a Dairy Queen parking lot, KLFY reported.

Oberlin’s wife, who was seated in the passenger seat, gave police permission to enter the vehicle and told them that there was cocaine and fentanyl in a cup holder.

Officers found two 9mm handguns near four small children and an AK-47 rifle in a 10-year-old boy’s lap. The gun was loaded and the safety was off, investigators said. After a brief negotiation, officers were able to safely get the weapon from the boy’s hands.

“The child, of course, didn’t want to give it up, to probably either protect his family or didn’t know exactly what was going on. I mean it’s a very scary situation for a child, and officers spoke with him calmly and tried to gain his trust and everything. Of course, it wasn’t a huge struggle, but he was still not letting it go freely,” police chief Jimmy Broussard told KLFY. “It was loaded. It was not on safety, so if … the child [had] panicked and decided to pull that trigger, it would have been much worse of a scene than what we had.”

Leblanc was revived with Narcan. He was taken to a hospital and is in stable condition. He was later arrested on various charges, police said.

Child services were called to take custody of the children.

Jeremy Leblanc, of Oberlin, was arrested on two counts of drug possession, three counts of possession of a firearm in the presence of drugs; and four counts of drug use in the presence of a juvenile.

Crowley Police Chief Jimmy Broussard told Lafayette station KATC that a 10-year-old boy was holding the AK47 rifle with the safety off. The boy initially didn’t want to give the gun to officers, not wanting to give up something he believed was his.

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I mean, really: Overdose, AK47, Dairy Queen, drugs in a cupholder, two handguns, Narcan, not one two or three but FOUR kids, one of them refusing to give the loaded AK47 to the police? Right. Pour it on.

February 26th, 2024
What? Just cuz his two year old blew her brains out?

The man faces charges including first-degree child abuse, a felony violation of Michigan’s gun storage law, being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition and lying to a police officer in a violent crime investigation.

Flint police learned of the shooting after the man took the girl to a hospital. They found two guns in the bedroom of the man’s home: the revolver and a semiautomatic pistol. Both were unsecured and loaded. 

February 25th, 2024
In 2008, UD wrote a ten-part series for Inside Higher Ed…

… on guns. For that series, she visited the palatial NRA headquarters in Virginia, a few miles from her house.

C’est fou comme le temps passe vite! The palace is on the market, from every pore the NRA is bleeding out, and that ol’ sweetie Wayne LaPierre has larceny issues.

Update. Details.

February 24th, 2024
Spring Breaking Point

There will always be scuzzy cities (hello, Myrtle Beach!) where spring breakers can continue to crash cars, rape, and shoot during those two special weeks in March. (This behavior is also all over Myrtle Beach when it isn’t spring break.) But when even SB locales as notorious as Panama City Beach introduce restrictions, you know the event’s really getting out of hand.

I mean, look at Miami Beach! Just look!

And you know it won’t change a thing. Kansas City had close to a thousand police at the Super Bowl shootout; the next Super Bowl celebration will have one National Guard member for each partygoer. But it’s just too easy to whip out your AK47. No one’s going to stop you. Same deal here.

February 22nd, 2024
‘[T]he occasional crackle of the firing range is almost soothing.’

We’re getting there. The daily aural reality of a country with four hundred million plus guns in private hands, and well over a million held by local, state, and federal police forces, means that over time incessant artillery will be normalized here to the point of – in the words of a Rhode Islander who lives down the street from a police department shooting range – “almost soothing.”

Normalized? Romanticized:

Again the guns disturbed the hour,

Roaring their readiness to avenge,

As far inland as Stourton Tower,

And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

************************

Only here it will be

As far coastal as Freedom Tower,

And cold Minot, and starlit Carhenge.

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