Open carry laws make it particularly hard to secure public events because the visible presence of firearms creates a dangerous ambiguity. Law enforcement can’t easily distinguish between a person legally carrying a weapon and someone preparing to commit violence. This ambiguity slows down response times, heightens the risk of mistakes and can turn routine security situations into potential crises. It unequivocally makes it harder for law enforcement to do their jobs, and it puts them at greater risk of harm.
… [V]isible guns at gatherings can intimidate participants, escalate tensions and even deter people from attending altogether, undermining the safety and openness of community spaces — especially when open carry can be, and has been, used by extremist groups as a tool to intimidate others at protests or public gatherings.
[Utah] students as young as 18 can openly carry guns on college campuses … and the state also allows concealed weapons on Utah’s campuses.
[M]ost Americans — including conservatives and gun owners — actually feel less safe when more people are carrying guns in public. [The gun] industry has a singular solution for this fear: Just buy a gun.
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Abundant, visible, guns make the assassin’s job easier.
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‘[A]sk yourself what somebody was doing carrying a large hunter’s rifle around a university campus.
… Did Utah’s weak gun laws kill Charlie Kirk? We can’t say that. But weak gun laws probably made his death more likely. Kirk’s admirers will do his legacy no favors if they continue to oppose gun control. Better that they join the rest of us in working to prevent the next Charlie Kirk from meeting the same awful fate.’
… would I guess be a good poetic form of address to UD’s beloved country at the moment (the phrase titles a 1925 poem by Robinson Jeffers). The Murder of Kirk becomes a singular, symbolizing, culmination, an event that rises above the murk of our bloody country’s bloody every day. Give me back my son; he was only thirty-one wails Kirk’s father at his memorial site, a one-man tragic chorus that cuts through all of it.
Our streets are pocked with juvenile assassins, skinny boys with fat rifles, schizophrenics with steady fingers. Our bottomless gun-greed means we won’t be saving ourselves anytime soon – not under a president who won election based on his own bullet wound. Thus America makes choosing our leaders easy: Not the ones with the fatal neck wounds; the ones with the non-lethal neck wounds.
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No parades, don’t you see; no sunny tented gatherings of the sort that killed Kirk. We Americans must crawl over blood and glass into bunkers while keeping an eye on the roofs and windows from which the Kirk killer and Stephen Paddock and the rest of them aim at us. We must eye one another as potential shooters.
Democracy cannot really survive the absolute death of the public realm, a realm as imperiled by our insane willingness to let incredibly dangerous people roam the streets as it is by our gun-greed. Americans continue to recite the NRA’s mentally retarded litany – “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” – even though Utah Valley University is an open carry campus, meaning plenty of people in Kirk’s audience were armed. Lots of good guys with guns. But hey turns out they can’t do anything about a sharpshooter on a roof! Huh!
What a nice idea. Some gun laws.
Never a dull moment when every insane dipshit in the country has a gun. Don’t know yet whether Kirk, a prominent conservative sitting on a stage waiting to give a speech and then slumped over and bleeding from a neck wound, will survive. Or whether, if he does survive, the bullet has damaged his brain.
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Active shooter, Colorado high school. I think we’re almost up to one a day.
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Kirk has died.
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Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.
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Oh, and the Colorado school shooting: Two students in critical condition. A mother at the scene:
“I think if I’m being honest with myself, I always knew it was ‘When, not if?’”
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Oh, and back to Utah: It’s an open carry state, colleges included, and it’s so routine to see people carrying guns that I doubt the killer – even if his AK 47 or whatever was slung in front of his chest – attracted much interest.
Killing field cities are full of… certain… bars… Bars that do everything they can (you should look at their advertising!) to attract extremely stupid, jumpy, armed, people. The MO is to pack them in very very tightly, make them drunk and high, make them bump into each other (Fuck you for bumping into me BANG), make them fight for the prossies, make them, you know, fight. In the bar world, fighting without a firearm is like a day without sunshine, so mass shooting’s guaranteed.
So now here’s a tussle in Cleveland where a fight at or near one of the skeezy bars shot up six people, three of whom might die. The mayor’s pissed, embarrassed, whatever, and has not only closed the bar in question, but boarded it up. The owner is definitely pissed, and swears all the bullet holes were elsewhere.
The problem is that this person is only thirteen years old, living with parents who haven’t bothered to enroll him in school, much less stop supplying him with weaponry. The juvenile justice system is hopeless with thirteen year olds who are already hardened criminals. It will fuss therapeutically with him during his brief incarceration (assuming he gets any jail time at all) and then release him to the very same degenerate parents.
He’s so breathtakingly young! Many decades of gun massacres ahead of him.
… gun range suicide. Nobody’s paying much attention, but GRS’s (as UD calls them) are becoming a social fact, a thing. Range owners are of course aware of the deepening problem, but what can they do? Shooting ranges HAND you a gun, babe, and it don’t get no better than that if you want to die. Just pick up the firearm and point. No at-home trauma for your family. No need even to pay for a gun.
We have oodles of suicides in this country, with some states (Montana, Wyoming) veritable self-killing fields. And these tend to be the same states with shooting ranges on every street corner. Watch as the GRS phenom becomes A Major Social Problem.
Nevada is in crisis amid a catastrophic statewide freeze on gun sales due to a cyberattack. Two weeks on, the still-unresolved shutdown has The Silver State seeing red, with one state senator calling it “the worst disaster I’ve seen here since the 2018 Martin Fire.”
Inadequate fire power has kept so many Nevadans sheltered at home that schools across the state have shuttered, and mental health professionals report an increase in psychiatric holds as the situation overwhelms more and more people. “I thought it’d be a day or two and they’d fix it,” said Gladys Spangler of Eureka. “Two weeks later I’m like what in God’s name am I supposed to do?”
“Let us spray.”
Although gun dealers have urged patience, hundreds of thousands of citizens are becoming more and more militant. In the highest-profile response, believers all over the state now spend Sundays jammed into megachurches, where pastors hand out surplus pistols to parishioners and lead so-called Packing Prayers, in which worshippers shoot the guns upward while chanting Lord hear our recoil.
- Zen Lounge – 5316 Washington Ave
- Bar 5306 – 5306 Washington Ave Ste C
- XO – 5023 Washington Ave
- Lincoln Bar – 5110 Washington Ave
- Luxx – 5002 Washington Ave
You wanna lop off some of the country’s gun crime, you shut down the clubs. Clubs are where fuckwits with Glocks get drunk, start fights (usually over the club girls), and pull out weapons. And babe, it happens ALL THE TIME. Almost every Saturday, fuckwits and Glocks, Glocks and fuckwits.
Note that in Houston (see above list of now-shut clubs) most of it happens in Fuckwit Central, Washington Avenue. The folks who actually live around there have dreamt for years of a life without bullet holes in their bassinets. (Why isn’t supergross, supergunny Lounge 33 on the Houston closure list?) (Oh, okay. Already closed.) And wa-a-a-a-ll the mayor’s been doin this and been doin that but ain’t nothing changed see and who knows why maybe they don’t want federal troops but now they’re actually doing something.
Much of the crime has been associated with nightlife. Houston Mayor John Whitmire (D) last month announced the formation of a “club unit” of the Houston Police Department designated to target bars and clubs with citations.
His effort resulted in five club closures in a three-day period…
That’s so not enough closures, but, because the clubs represent a large and influential subculture, no city’s gonna have the balls to really get rid of them. They’ll shut them for awhile and then pretend to believe the bullshit the club tells them about new superduper hightech security (leaving open the question why an entertainment venue needs anti-terror level security) and reopen them. They’ll let them reopen under new names. And of course as to the guns — it’s Texas, folks! The more the merrier.
Tannerite, an explosive that goes boom – big boom – when hit by a high-velocity bullet, is part of the fun at a gun range near a housing development.
He is one tough son of a bitch; but what do you want? He’s a southern sheriff! Blythewood SC’s lawman, Leon Lott says, “It is legal for people to shoot guns on private property, but [I] draw the line when homes are being hit by bullets.” All over a nearby residential neighborhood, bullets shot by some dude and his friends at a homemade gun range are piercing walls and chairs and tables and NOT people yet, but hold on jest a bit and they’ll kill some kid playing outside.
… [The latest mass murderer] seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed…
Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.
If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves…
[Let me pause here and say yes. Lots of people are rummaging in this guy’s writings/statements for this hatred/that cause; but since the man was manifestly, classically, paradigmatically insane, this is a waste of time. His was a literally fractured psyche. One can learn things – most of them already known – about psychosis from him, but that’s kind of it.]
“The kind of person that we’re seeing today,” Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, told me, “is not promoting a cause.”
He added that they were propelled by a general, wide-ranging fury…
[W]hy [have] so many Americans … become so susceptible to the void?
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To the void, and to the rage that the sense of the void generates.
One can feel free-floating nihilism without the destructive rage. Albert Camus, one random evening in Prague, suddenly felt overwhelmed by “the death of the soul.” James Agee, alone on a broiling Sunday in Alabama, felt
… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…
This is writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything.
Don DeLillo, in Libra, imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling nihilistic one hot afternoon in Texas:
He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.
But Oswald’s angry nihilism, like that of the jihadis and McVeigh, emerges into the light with a particular ideology that justifies slaughter, whereas the NVE is more insidious because ideologically he remains largely underground, unconnected to a group or group identity. He may be discoverable in this or that online violence cult, but basically unless the people closest to him – parents, friends, teachers – are sufficiently alarmed by his accumulation of weapons, or increasingly wild behavior, to report him to the police and/or try to get him committed, he’s free to mass slaughter.
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And this is UD’s thing: People have to report. And the report has to go somewhere. Why aren’t these manifestly, frighteningly, sick people on our radar? Part of it is indifferent, protective, deluded, or themselves crazy, parents. Some of these parents pay a very high price – their kid kills them before heading off to the local preschool; or, if they survive, some of them go to prison.
I ain’t claiming that in every case parents should have suspected something and acted on that suspicion; what I’m saying is this: It’s a new world in the US; hundreds of millions of high-powered guns are around, and anyone can get plenty of them. The pope calls this “a pandemic of arms.”
Which makes having even a mildly disturbed, mildly in trouble with the law, child/adolescent (look at what Sue Klebold, mother of a 17 year old mass murderer, has said about this) very worrisome, and at the very least our schools (where every day loaded guns are discovered in backpacks) should be ready to expel people who give evidence of being dangerous. It’s obscene that it’s still quite hard, in our public schools, to remove fledgling gunnies; in all respects — family, school — we have to toughen up.
We all know that the 15 year old in Washington state who killed his family with a gun to which the father gave him access didn’t just wake up one night and do this; but because by many accounts the household had little do with the outside world, no one beyond the immediate family could judge how nihilistic/enraged he was. This isn’t an argument for an intrusive, freedom-constraining state, but it is an argument for far greater social/familial awareness/responsiveness around the now-toxic mix of adolescence, mental disorder, and guns.
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All of this is necessary because of a much larger nihilism: In this nation, we assign no particular meaning or value to death by gun. It’s something that triggers a thoughts and prayers tweet. It doesn’t even have meaning when children are pulped. We just continue working to make it easier for everyone to get and carry guns. “Everyone dies. That’s life,” says an Oklahoma state senator in response to a question about his state’s astounding gun suicide rate.
That’s very strange, that he says that, but we can’t afford to waste time analyzing it. As we speak, the next insane teenager with a high capacity arsenal prepares.
It’s very much local news, but see how parents got together and petitioned and packed meeting rooms at this Arlington Washington high school and succeeded in throwing out a pistol packing menace? “The gun had a bullet in the chamber, the safety off and an additional full magazine of bullets.” Insane public school rules make exile very difficult to achieve, but under humongous pressure school administrators got this person’s parents to agree to move him online or something.
Meanwhile, after a junior high school student brought a loaded gun to a Springfield Mo. school, one of the parents there said something rather quotable.
“A student shouldn’t be scared to go to school. Really, they shouldn’t. It’s supposed to be fun. Not death.”
We should soon expect to see this new motto on school buildings all over the US: FUN. NOT DEATH.