Barbeque in the local park, American-style!
Tens of millions of Americans have been shivering, AR-less, by their hearths, awaiting the court’s critically important decision on whether they can keep stockpiling semi-automatic rifles.
A local reporter chats with frightened, anonymous business owners along the deadliest stretch of Murder Beach. Most cite large numbers of menacing, armed, high teenagers as their least favorite thing about life on the boardwalk. The sense of menace, and the big police presence that scary people draw to the area, more and more discourages folks looking for a relaxed good time with their kids.
What sucks is there’s no solution. South Carolina prides itself on having just about the weakest gun laws in the nation, and I guess the legislature is working every day to make them even weaker. Says here SC also (natch) “suffers one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the nation,” but if it really were suffering it would take a look at laws insisting that every tyke in the state get a big effing gun and tote it around. Maybe it could tweak the laws so that armed teenyboppers stop bopping everybody.
It’s almost always an argument at a large private house party, almost always a paid admission party; and as the gunfights proceed, many bloodied screaming people almost always pour out onto the driveway, the yard, the street, and the neighbors’ yards. If there’s a continued exchange of fire (likely), pedestrians and neighbors had also better run.
When (five minutes later) forty police and emergency vehicles race to the location, many groaning dying bullet-riddled bodies greet them. This week’s mass shooting took place in cute l’il Hickory NC, and at least twelve high school students were shot. UD’s gonna guess the killer was a 17 year old guy.
It’s like a battle scene. It’s also like a movie, since reporters have also arrived, and they are watching and filming.
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Since the people who run the towns, cities, and states of this country know with total assurance that jammed late night paid admission house or boat parties, and of course jammed late night sleazy lounges, are prime mass shooting locations, you might wonder why officials don’t shut down/curtail open-all-night sleazy lounges full of local gun-bearing criminals. You might wonder why they don’t respond to neighbors’ complaints about the parties. Why do they wait for the gunfights and the dead bodies? Once they know what houses are being rented out to crazy gunnies, why don’t they shut down their business?
The answer is obvious. Gunlove in America looks the other way when children are massacred by known madmen with guns at our elementary schools; gunlove looks the other way every bloody Saturday night. Remarkably, most Americans really don’t care.
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Multiple shooters; at least eighty shots fired.
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“[W]e don’t believe that this was random in a circumstance that might endanger the community.”
Also like clockwork, local authorities announce that hundreds of people running through your neighborhood, desperately trying to elude multiple AK-bearing shooters, in no way endangers your community.
Like high school graduations.
“To say it’s not a threat to the community is a big reach,” said [Jeremy] Evans.
I mean, on the most literal level, one or more people shooting wildly into crowds is an obvious threat to any local community; and in this latest case the police haven’t arrested anyone, so the threat remains.
And after all shooting is not uncommon in notorious Myrtle Beach and environs, so a general menace remains. UD can understand the comical tendency of local officials everywhere to declare, after big mass shootings/killings, that yay! our community is safe but yeah we keep getting these isolated, totally not dangerous events… but she’s with Jeremy Evans – a spot of honesty would help.
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Update: They’ve made an arrest. A 19 year old.
… but for you, only the best: A golf course in super-exclusive Jupiter Florida – typical residence along the course – where four golfers were shot at by a guy who lives in one of the residences. They piled into their golf cart to escape. Must have been cursing all the way: Fucking golf cart! Next time I’ll park my Hennessey Venom F5 on this hole!
Mayor [Errick] Simmons stated, “Over the past several days, our community has been deeply shaken by a surge in violent crimes, including multiple shootings, acts of gun violence, and senseless killings.”
In the same statement, the mayor declared an “immediate State of Emergency.”
The Greenville [Miss.] City Council voted on the curfew. According to the mayor, the curfew will be effective immediately from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. Additionally, nightclubs and other similar businesses must close by midnight.
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Gettin too bumpy with all them guns, and now with this Alex Foster thing bloody Greenville’s all over the national media. Now everyone knows our little town’s a bloodbath. Let’s try something.
Short of doing anything about the guns, of course. It’s Mississippi. “Single worst rate of gun deaths in the country.”
In Myrtle Beach, in Philadelphia, mass gatherings and rapid gunfire from weapons modified with gun switches guarantee many fellow Americans for us to memorialize.
Or twenty miles north; I’m figuring the local shooters moved this weekend’s fun away from Murder Beach proper cuz it’s crawling with cops.
This distance from the boardwalk, they were free to shoot eleven people. An impressive number, even by American standards.
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UPDATE: Happened on a party boat! Did people jump into the water? And eleven shot because it’s hard to run away when you’re drunk, high, and on a boat.
Police are searching for “a motive.” Hm, hm, what could it be. Cram a bunch of drunks, several of whom are armed, on a boat. Motive would be, you know, someone pushed someone aside while reeling around trying not to fall over. BANGBANGBANG
ANOTHER UPDATE: When you go to Facebook, you get all kinds of video and commentary. Some say it was an argument. Some say it was a hate crime. Some say some people drowned. We’ll see.
AND ANOTHER: For all the fervid imaginings of Facebookers, it sounds as though our latest mass shooting was exactly what you’d expect: Too many drunk/high assholes packed into a closed space. Someone always seems to get pissed off (or just pissed) and start shooting everybody.
Summer comes to the Jersey Shore!
GUNS.
Read this pathetic editorial up down over and out and you’ll never ever encounter even one mild parenthetical reference to all them guns.
Okay well, based on what I’m reading, most of them – a thousand? – should go, sans délai, to Louisiana, by far America’s most dangerous state.
You’re just thinking Nawlins, but Alexandria, Monroe, Baton Rouge, and tons of others are really really dangerous. UD has often wondered aloud on this blog why anyone would send their kid there to college.
Banker scum. LOL.
And for the umpteenth time I ask you: Tragic? The dean at Grand Valley State says tragic?
Some drunk asshole shot multiple bullets from an upper floor down to a lower floor during a party. The kid killed was at the lower floor and got one of the bullets in his brain.
Note to dean: The proper language for stupid drunken gun deaths is this: “The Grand Valley community is appalled by this senseless death, the sort of death you get when drunk teenagers have easy access to firearms. We’re ashamed to be the school where this happened.”