Some people claim it wasn’t accidental. The 16-year-old shooter shot a fellow student right in the chest, has a reputation as a bully, and isn’t cooperating with authorities.

And the student who wrote the opinion piece I quote in my headline adds another element to the story: Already, in the first semester of the year, there have been “multiple incidents” of students bringing guns to school. This was just the first incident to end with someone dead.

Wow.

… it proclaims over and over again on the Bellaire, Texas website.

But hey.

It’s Texas.

The mayor is “utterly shocked” you can’t go to high school in Bellaire without risking a fatal gunshot wound. But what does Don’t Mess With Texas mean? It’s means Texas has more registered guns than anyplace else in America.

And hyuk! That’s just registered guns!

What I’m trying to say is Texas has a lot of guns and Texas is always talking about guns and showing off guns and taking guns to church and all and how utterly shocking that the state is one big ol’ shootout.

**********

The details are just great. Little kid brings loaded gun to school; shows other little kid. Shoots other little kid to death.

… spray.

Glock.

… mawnin. As in much of the rest of the world, mass shooting is the way Americans celebrate ball games. (Southern won the game by doing what it had to do. Congrats!)

Already eighteen and only just bagged your first murder? This is America! This is Bama! Remember: There are competing states. I’m gonna assume you’ve already bagged a bunch, but only got caught for this one.

Only 13 years old and already so confident an AR-15 marksman he’s about to kill his whole middle school!

Here’s a headline with a whiff of the obsolete. Not long from now, parents will recall for their children the quaint practice of suspending football games when people in the stands or on the field initiated mass shootings. “Now of course they play right on through it – couldn’t have youth football if you suspended every game where some little fella took out his AR-15! … People still scatter. But as soon as the shooter’s finished, everyone comes back to the stadium. And something I’ve noticed is that there’s an excitement factor, a wake-up factor – like the guys on the field and the people in the stands are all shook up – but in a good way – after the shooting. The players are sharper; the fans are more enthusiastic. The whole thing feels more real; bleeding children remind the crowd of the preciousness of life and how lucky they are to be here, on a sunny day, watching football.”

Airbnb: Bringing Gangland to your neighborhood.

And the Supreme Court just said go ahead and sue.

You can’t help wondering, driving through Potomac, Maryland, or the Hamptons, or hundreds of locations like them, what’s going to happen to all the empty, unsellable, mcmansions. Turns out not every generation of Americans wants a meaninglessly vast, crushingly expensive box in a distant field – so once the owners realize they’re also desperate to get out of them, what do you do with the abandoned, house-littered landscape?

Of course there are always squatters – Florida and Nevada mcmansions are full of them – but there’s no money in that. OTOH: Turns out a beautiful cosmic convergence is playing out right in front of our eyes: Owners are renting to enormous bring-your-own-guns parties! Shooters want anonymity for their shooting; owners want rental income: Win/Win.

Yes, neighbors are pissed about hundreds of drunk dangerous people next door in what they thought was an upscale neighborhood — dumping trash, blasting music, fighting, crashing their cars, and killing each other — but town councils don’t give a shit, and by the time the police get there, as in lovely Orinda, California, five people are already dead, and more to come, kiddies.

And look – as I’m sure the NRA will explain to the local belly-achers – there are two cool things they’re overlooking here:

1. They can watch the massacre on YouTube. Yes! It was filmed.
2. The Orinda party was on Halloween. How many parents can show their trick or treaters real corpses?

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

Uhhhhhhhh… okay! Day 1 post-massacre, Airbnb announces it’s banning party houses. But if you read the article I linked to, it’s clear that this won’t be easy. Massive parties and criminal activities have for some time been the “scourge” of the industry, and UD doesn’t see how you can effectively police liars of the sort who lied her way into the use of the Orinda house. Plus, as abandoned mcmansion territory grows, there won’t be any neighbors to complain about your meth lab/assault weapon jamboree. Miles of tumbleweed and turrets will assume a Mad Max character…

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

UPDATE: ” [T]he party was filled with people carrying firearms…”

Parents of teeny weeny soccer players get all booohooo when it turns out spectators carry multiple weapons, including an assault rifle. I mean hellooo? This is America, people!

Layers and layers of horrible in UD’s hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, where a woman driver being threatened by the city’s adorably named squeegee kids takes out her gun to make them go away.

Squeegee is a venerable Baltimore institution:

One police officer estimates squeegeeing has been a part of the city “as long as murder has.”

… after the success of their committee room storming, Republicans are planning a second action, this one a knitting circle. Apparently the congressmen will sit together just outside the hearings room, each of them knitting a panel revealing a dystopian America if Democrats win the White House. Steve Scalise, for instance, will depict an America where James Hodgkinson is unable to buy a gun.