Was his doctor (who he shot to death along with most of the doctor’s family) treating him for mental disorders related to the concussions? Was he obviously mentally ill? If so, how did he get the gun? Do they sell guns to mentally ill people in South Carolina?
His proud alma mater, South Carolina State, hasn’t yet taken down his hero page.
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‘I can say he’s a good kid,’ [Adams’ father said]. ‘I think the football messed him up.’ Football and an entire state sagging under the weight of its weaponry. Football and weaponry and mental illness and I’ll bet Adams was transmitting for some time to a number of people that he was messed up. Nothing like 21 guns per person for the deeply paranoid. Even if people tried keeping him away from guns, in South Carolina that would have been impossible.
I wonder if he issued threats. All of this will come out, and we’ll all read about it, because in a country where heavily armed uninteresting madmen kill dozens of people every week, this killing titillates: a rich prominent doctor; a high body count including children; an NFL football player. South Carolina: Ground zero for Strange brew, see what’s inside of you: Guns, god, football.
And what drugs – prescription, non-prescription – was the shooter on? All of this will come out.
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And as to the shock the local police chief is expressing – “This doesn’t happen here.” – weawy? Depends on what you mean by “here,” don’t it? Here as in the teeny tiny town where it happened, or here as in all over South Carolina, one of the ten most dangerous states in the country.
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His sister confirms that he had been for some time “aggressively” unbalanced. Yet another instance of the truth Nathan Heller not long ago uttered: Going berserk with guns has become a way of American life.
Yeah, Roof was twenty-one years old too – just like our latest massacrist – when he sat in a chair and point blank killed a group of black Bible students. 22-year-old Elliott Rodger didn’t like women, so he shot and killed a bunch of women. Latest guy’s thing was Asians (information is preliminary, but UD‘s going to presume this motive). Mentally unbalanced hate-monger young ‘uns armed to the teeth: What a grand American achievement. Couldn’t have done it without the NRA.
Betty Baucom McConnell said she witnessed the events from her front door.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ she told KODT-TV.
‘It looked like the wild, wild west. I couldn’t get my phone to work. I tried to go live.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ McConnell said. ‘The police did a great job.’
McConnell said she was enjoying a birthday dinner at home when she heard gunshots outside.
‘[I] looked out the front door and there was this lady in front of my house with a gun and she was trying to get in my daughter’s car and my daughter was at the door hollering at her to “get away from my car”,’ McConnell said.
‘Next thing I knew she pulled out the gun and she got in her stance and she was shooting at the police and police was shooting back at her.’
There is a disturbing reason Republicans in Congress are giving for refusing to break with President Donald Trump: They fear for their lives.
According to Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO), this is a major reason why more House Republicans aren’t voting to impeach [or, more recently, convict] Donald Trump in the wake of the attack on the Capitol.
“The majority of them are paralyzed with fear,” Crow said in a Wednesday MSNBC appearance. “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues last night, and a couple of them broke down in tears — saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.”
Tim Alberta, Politico’s chief political correspondent, found in his own reporting that “Crow was right.”
Hundreds of millions of firearms are housed in American garages, basements, and attics. Delusions and disinformation still flow through social media. For a long time, however, mainstream politics has been barricaded from violence not only by the moral resistance of decent people—but also by the pragmatic calculations of even cynical politicians that violence does not pay.
That pragmatic calculation has been weakening. In 2018, the present governor of Montana won a House race after he violently attacked a journalist for asking him an unwanted question. More and more politicians campaign with firearms at their side. The taboo on political violence, already weaker in the United States than in many peer democracies, is weakening further. Among other things, Trump’s impeachment trial offers an opportunity to reassert that taboo, to denormalize mayhem and murder as the route to power.
So it’s not only Trump who is on trial. It’s his methods—and all who aspire to adopt his methods as their own in the political contests ahead.
If the National Rifle Association weren’t so busy infighting and stealing from itself and all, it would be in a position to take note of the story out of the Scranton suburbs, where a maddening, incessant noise problem was solved by a gun.
Neighbors in adjoining houses – a single man in one house, a married couple in another – had been screaming across their lawns at one another for some time – insults, obscenities – until the ill will among them really escalated during a recent big snowstorm.
“The Goys were shoveling the snow from their parking spots, shoveling the snow across the road, and throwing the snow onto Spaides’ property,” [neighbors] said in their statement.
… Spaide asked the couple to stop, sparking a heated exchange of words. James Goy apparently threw a tool at Spaide that he had been using to clear snow from his car…. When James Goy approached Spaide with a raised fist, Spaide reportedly retreated into his house and fetched a gun…
[D]espite seeing Spaide with a gun, James and Lisa Goy continued shouting names at him from the middle of the street.
Wow. He must have really been angry. Popped them multiple times, then went inside and got another gun and did it all over again.
Then he killed himself, natch.
So– thank God he had a gun! I mean, guns! The neighbors had had it up to here with the shrieks and obscenities. Now, if you visit that street on the outskirts of Scranton, things are back to normal.
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Spaide’s second gun was an AR-15 – cuz nothing finishes off the neighbors – already maybe dead from his pistol? – like an AR-15. People who argue that civilians don’t need AR-15s have clearly never been there, in the thick of snow-removal battle, against unarmed neighbors.
… to be a real moneymaker for the federal government, now that fines will be imposed on House members unable to resist even for an hour or two the peculiar arousal of up close and personal arsenals. Friends and family have tried all kinds of interventions, but Lauren Boebert’s craving for glocks has now become a financial and reputational emergency, costing her so far $5000 in fines as she goes into a swoon at the Capitol metal detector and becomes a national laughingstock.
That amount will rise with each daily infraction, until her salary falls to something like $20,000 a year, but farcical as this daily public mental breakdown may appear, addiction is no laughing matter. Much as she might like to avoid personal and professional disaster, Boebert has no more control over her screaming fits at the detector, and her efforts to illegally evade it, than Jeffrey Epstein did over his daily need for sex slaves.
Boebert’s the loudest, but she’s far from the only House member melting down every day at the metal detector. Fine-wise, we’re talking real money, which UD proposes Pelosi donate to a fund for the victims of gun violence.
The ONLY one; and he represents people way over THERE… over on the far right… the eastern shore… which is BARELY Maryland… Let’s call it Tidewater West Virginia or something …
Back over here, in MARYLAND, we don’t elect stinky doodoos who do a doodoo in front of the Capitol police days after a violent insurrection because they MUST be allowed to break the rules and carry their guns onto the House floor because what if there’s another insurrection and he can be of assistance to the Proud Boys? Pence is gone, but someone’s gotta pop Pelosi…
Farhad Manjoo frets over the power of the reactionary paranoid media and how it’s leading our people astray, but it ain’t that. That’s a symptom. That’s merely their reading material.
There are two primary causes of violent insurrection in today’s America:
Arsenal Sadness: Most people solve the problem of arsenal sadness by unlocking their arsenal and killing themselves, or their wife, or both, with a selected weapon from it. They are sad because they have spent decades, and tens of thousands of dollars they don’t have, amassing a world-class armory, and have been unable to use it. It sits, a seething reproach to their promise to themselves that someday they would spray some setting with bullets and everyone would pay attention to them. These people have what used to be called an itchy trigger finger. They are actively looking for occasions to pop someone; they open carry in desperate hopes that in the course of this or that ordinary day they can whip out their semi-automatic and do a wee-wee on the Waffle House lawn. Scaring people with their AWS-16 Beowulf just doesn’t do the trick anymore; they’re still sad. What better target than the national leadership of American democracy? It’s cathartic; it’s a culmination; it’s a hoot. If Stephen Paddock hadn’t prematurely shot his wad in Las Vegas, he’d have been blasting his way into the Pence family secure location on January 6. Ditto Adam Lanza.
Stupidity: This is the most thoughtful analysis of American stupidity UD has found. Yes, it is a long read; yes, it is somewhat pedantic. But the author captures better than anyone I know the roots and significance of the globally recognized idiocy of many Americans, their hatred of intellectuals, and their love of Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, and Tommy Tuberville. Like the almost seventy percent of Americans who cannot name our three branches of government, Senator Tuberville, pride of Bama, cannot … name our three branches of government. I would not be surprised if Senator Tuberville thinks he sits on the Supreme Court. The archē-idiot, the person who took the ultimate, most powerful, opportunity to do good in the nation and the world and turned it into the foulest, most degenerate, most pointless killing field this country has ever seen, directs these people in their political activity. He shows them where to point their Beowulfs.
