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:
- They can watch the massacre on YouTube. Yes! It was filmed.
- The Orinda party was on Halloween. How many parents can show their trick or treaters real corpses?
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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…
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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.
But she was his mother, so we can’t charge her with anything! I mean, after all, her son simply shot out the school’s door, exchanged gunfire with police, and then killed himself. He didn’t kill all his classmates, which was his intention…
Hey wait. Lookee here.
The felony charges against [Mary] York relate in part to [her boyfriend’s] gun-storage locker located in her basement. It was easily breached by [her son], nearly allowing the massacre to occur.
Maybe things are actually changing. She’s been charged with six felonies. Good. Now we’ll see if a jury has the sense to send her to jail. If American gunnies want to have a zillion weapons in circulation, they’re going to have to accept the consequences.
Once, I led a few special agents to retrieve several firearms from a local Philadelphia resident. We found one loaded firearm being used as a doorstop in his house. On another occasion, the resident had loaded firearms in every room and on almost every flat surface. Given the recent news stories of infants shooting mothers, themselves or other children, it’s clear that “common sense” laws must prevail.
Wow. Encountering these statistics – shared in their broad outlines with many other states – UD suddenly perceives the NRA in a new way: Not as the steely-eyed advocate of hunters and hearth-defenders, but as a kindly Kevorkian, provisioning all households with reliable, easy-exit, appliances.
Not defending the right to bear arms, but defending the right to find life unbearable.
Given this country’s massive, and quickly growing, suicide market, we can eventually expect an NRA public relations campaign with a tag line like If you’re going to do it, do it right.
Carrying a gun isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I learned that most people I encountered actually didn’t feel better knowing that I had a gun. And, though I tried to keep it concealed in a hip holster under a shirt or jacket, the people who inevitably did glimpse it frequently wondered why I had it and whether my gun or my presence put them in danger — like the staff and customers who panicked at that Walmart in Missouri. Even the people who knew and trusted me — knowing that I was a responsible gun owner who had been threatened — wondered if being near me in public exposed them to … danger …
… it’s SO much like this one – so much like hunderts of ‘merican boy deaths – that I thought I’d throw it into the mix.
A man, [who had earlier consumed alcohol and taken a Percocet pain for which he didn’t have a prescription], admiring a friend’s pistol during a gathering of friends, accidentally shot and killed another man with it …
[The shooter] had asked to hold a visitor’s pistol, which was loaded but did not have a bullet in the chamber. While admiring the gun, [he] pulled its slide back and simultaneously squeezed its trigger, police said, citing the witnesses’ accounts.
One of the visitors said he tried to warn [him] that he had loaded a bullet into the pistol’s chamber when he pulled the slide back, but it was too late — he had already fired the gun.
“We were looking for things that were new and exciting,” [one parent] said. “You can only buy so much cookie dough, cheesecake and wrapping paper. We were looking to be unique in our offerings the best we could.”
… you get American deaths like this one, of a Colorado State University student. Both he and his armed to the teeth housemate seem to have been shitfaced when they started playing around with the housemate’s … let’s see…
… military-style AR-15 carbine, a Remington pump-action shotgun, a Springfield .45-caliber handgun and a Glock 34 9 mm semi-automatic handgun with a mounted flashlight and 17-round magazine.
Strange brew… see what’s inside of you — drugs, alcohol, and… hey… a fatal bullet! How about that!
Who cares. The police initially believed the beyond-bogus story the housemate concocted about how you know a young man with his whole life before him and no history of depression just up and marched into his room, took his Glock (conveniently loaded) and shot himself through the head with it. Case closed! Kids these days.
Only after all sorts of shouts and cries from the dead guy’s family have the police who I mean nu? I mean every day around here some hopeless jerk with a gun kills his kid boohoo you expect us to sit up and take notice when another one bites the dust? So the guy keeps changing his story, his timeline, his alcohol consumption, his everything – I guess that’s why he failed two lie detector tests…
[He eventually admitted] he posed for a couple of Snapchat photos with [his housemate] before the incident, which contradicts his initial statements to police that [he housemate] came into his room without warning, picked up the gun and shot himself… [He also made] four calls to family, … removed the 17-round magazine from the Glock 34 and ejected the round from the chamber and put the gun in [his housemate’s] lap before police arrived. He also moved [his housemate’s] marijuana pipe from the room and cleaned up several beer cans.
So a guy’s lying mortally wounded in front of you. What do you do? … Hello muddah, hello faddah, here I am at…