Proud that the US makes international news so often. In this case, it took seconds for the foreign press to pick up on the four-year-old with a loaded handgun at his elementary school in Texas.
Of course Texas doesn’t have any lower age limit on gun possession,** so it’s fine; and in fact his parents are the talk of Corpus Christi for proactively arming their kid as he sets out on his first week of class!
‘[W]e do not believe that students and staff were in any kind of imminent danger,’ wrote the principal to parents, and god why did he even need to say that, since a loaded gun floating around an elementary school is safety personified.
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** Along with fetal personhood bills, some states (Texas is one of them) are now looking into the legal/technical viability of so-called Fetal Firearm legislation, in which as soon as arm buds appear on embryos, tiny guns are implanted in the amniotic sac, ready for the fetus to clasp and, if need be, use to defend itself against an impending abortion. Advocates point out that this procedure – if practicable – would have the further advantage of accustoming the unborn to safe and responsible gun ownership.
It’s great to see PBS focus on Wyoming, guns, and suicide; and the report is very moving.
However, what they needed to include and did not is the powerful, and vocal, other side. That is, they talked to no one who said we utterly reject any restrictions of any kind on our guns, including any form of safe storage rules.
And we reject asking gun ranges to scrutinize to the extent possible the mental state of people coming to shoot, and encouraging the ranges to reject the business of people who seem depressed or agitated.
Plus we totally reject coming down hard on parents whose tykes kill themselves and murder their sibs cuz the folks leave guns lying all over the house. NO to all of this, Wyomingites will tell you. They will also say:
You gonna restrict bridges too? Cliffs? Rope? Suicide methods are all around us; if you don’t use a gun you’ll use something else. Guns are part of our life blood, our very being, out here, and you’ll have, well, quite a bloody revolt if you try to tell us ANYTHING about guns. Full stop.
The humongous lawsuit everyone’s been anticipating against – among others – the people who make and market the military weapon which that teenager used to obliterate twenty one elementary school kids and teachers in Uvalde is announced ($27 billion, if you were wondering).
Daniel Defense is famous for this adorable ad:
I mean the one on the left. Paranoid, fully militarized variations of the one on the right are used by most gun makers, who typically target violent unstable teenagers with them. As Ryan Busse, a former gun executive, notes in my headline, manufacturers don’t even bother playing along with the protection/hunting bullshit anymore. Daniel Defense’s factory address is 101 War Fighter Way.
The ad on the left stands out because it doesn’t just go after insane eighteen year olds like the Uvalde guy; and it doesn’t just go after babies (what age is the babe in the photo? three? four?) but itsanctifiesthe AK-47 wielding toddler with a Biblical verse and a praying hands emoji. It adds Jesus to the mix.
The president of Daniel Defense sits on the corporate advisory board at Georgia Southern University but UD‘s thinking he’s desperately seeking his own consultants this morning.
I’m pretty sure I know what Bain or whoever is telling him. The suit won’t go anywhere but the whole thing’s gonna cost you a shitload of money. The good news is the NRA will pay it all.
Smith&Wesson blasts back at deep state harassment over its kid-friendly/shooter game ad campaigns for human-pulverizing toys. Wee1 must also be pissed:
Not to mention BabyGun or whatever its called:
A little known fact is that rather than featuring in romper room play, most guns are simply used to kill yourself. Self-slaughter holds a vast majority over any other use. Guns are largely about blowing your brains out with one hundred percent certainty (other methods fall short of this standard), and in some states (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana) they’re scooping wildcatters and cowboys off the floor pretty much 24/7.
For instance, Utah, another gunny he-man state, boasts this remarkable statistic:
Utah has one of the highest death by suicide rates in the country, currently ranked sixth. According to the Utah Department of Health, suicide rates in the tricounty area [northeast Utah: Daggett, Uintah and Duchesne Counties] are 58% higher than the rest of the state.
Got that? The state’s already comfortably in the top ten; but the tricounty area is 58% higher than the state’s rate!
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So one thing UD has never understood is why gun makers don’t feature ease and certainty of suicide in their advertising, since this happens to be the gun’s calling card, its claim to fame, the primary reason tens of thousands of owners own guns. One obvious campaign would feature pre-death videos solicited from, say, tricounty suicides, in which they explain why choosing a gun to blow their brains out was, well, a no-brainer!
And there’s no reason consumers need to degrade their final act by choosing cheap pistols and smaller arms; in one celebrity spot, manufacturers could feature quarterback Tyler Hilinski’s use of an AR-15 in his suicide. (A Glock will only set you back $500 or so, whereas an AR-15 costs around a thousand. Tag line in this campaign: WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO END THE VERY BEST.)
Guns command a vast and growing suicide market; their makers need to exploit this fact. A lot of drunk lonely cowboys are right now sitting on the fence suicide-wise; a strong ad campaign is probably all they need.
Yeah. That one delegate. When you boast the country’s highest gun suicide rate, you need to be ready to blow your head off at a moment’s notice. To keep your first-place ranking.
… and now, only a few months later, we get a guilty verdict and a life sentence for his girlfriend, who Adelson apparently paid to put together the conspiracy to murder Florida State University law professor Dan Markel.
Markel had to die because he sought shared custody of his children by Adelson’s sister, and this annoyed Adelson. He allegedly had two thug friends of his girlfriend blast his head off.
Ja, ja, wheels of justice… UD only hopes they nail Adelson (and his mother?) before Markel’s elderly parents die.
When a fifteen year old in America’s jest-about gunniest state takes his parents’ gun (why wasn’t it locked away?) and annihilates three of his siblings and then himself, it generates a lot of interest. National coverage has been extensive because even high up in our mass murder madlands fifteen is remarkably young for such extensively lethal gunplay; and, you know, he killed his sibs and not his high school buds as per usual; and I mean just in terms of the whole leave an entire house a blood-splattered mess thing the killer exhibited noteworthy precociousness.
Now this all went down three days ago, and as this article notes, absolutely nothing has issued forth from the Alaska authorities. Just the bare minimum. No names. No explanation as to why a house full of little kids (a bunch of other sibs in the house survived) featured no parents and a gun.
Why so shy, big guys? The bedlam was discovered by a neighbor, so clearly the family’s identity is known to the neighborhood. Why don’t we know it? Why don’t we know anything about parents who had… seven? … eight?… kids and didn’t think it worth their while to put their gun away? Or did they say to their kinda funky fifteen year old Here’s the gun in case anyone tries to break in while we’re gone?
Here’s a possibility. In these big gunny states there’s a Lookaway Protocol. Nothing to see here. None of your goddamn business. You’re just gonna make a big fucking Thing about it and next thing you know they’ll take away our guns. It was probably a false flag operation, with gun-control fanatics playing the kids. Like at Sandy Hook. Let’s all just shut up about it and move on.
In the U.S., the urgent desire to stop mass shootings — and gun violence in general — is met with almost total refusal in conservative state legislatures to pass laws or restrictions that make careless gun ownership a crime. “I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that’s very encouraging,” says Allison Anderman, director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center. Meanwhile, 4.6 million children live in homes where loaded firearms are unlocked; a 2021 survey showed that 70 percent of parents believe they have sufficiently secured their weapons, while a third of their adolescent kids say they can find them within five minutes. In 2020, 4,368 kids died of gunshot wounds in America, making it the leading cause of childhood death. A third of these were suicides.
Although Black Rifle is as it were holding its position, UD fears that – under the influence of unfortunate events – we are seeing the end of an era.
But there’s a little good news on the horizon: The most popular name for baby boys in Fairbanks Borough Alaska is currently Barrett REC 7, and among girls it’s AAC Honey Badger.
Sing it!Circuit judges
Pointing guns at lawyers
Frightened courtrooms
Running for the foyer
Wacko Justice
Pulling out his Colt
Threatening attorneys
Everybody bolt!
Get me home!
Country roads
From the jurist's
Pistoled robes
West Virginia!
Bloody wasteland
Get me home
Country roads
