It’s the little stories, the overlooked minor social interactions, that make gun-gorged America what it is; and ol’ UD definitely sees it as part of her blog-mandate to share some of these with you. Otherwise you’re unlikely to grasp what it actually means to live in a country with five hundred million guns. You’re unlikely to get a feel for the homeland’s daily communal reality. You’re likely to content yourself with being spooked by mass shootings; but there’s so much more to The American Story.
Tiffs over parking spots, for instance, can end in gunplay now.
Perry [Georgia] police say Anna McPherson confronted VanWormer [the article only gives her last name] over a parking spot and pulled a gun during the dispute, aiming it at both the mother and child.
McPherson banged on VanWormer’s window with the firearm and continued the threat… . [At one point, she] looked at VanWormer’s son and said, “You’re about to be motherless.”
‘Course she was bonded out asap without anyone notifying VanWormer, who gets to continue panicking about this fucker hunting her down. And yes the POS faces some charges, but Georgia’s judges love guns FAR too much to put away a nice lady with a Glock.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s editor poses the question – rather undiplomatically – and we all know the answer:
This is America! Hell, yes!
Comments in response to the FB announcement of gunfire at the Cuyahoga County Fair, Ohio.
https://www.facebook.com/cuyfair/posts/1213538350817112?ref=embed_post
Kids are out of control.
Had my one year old with me. Glad we left before this all went down.
Seriously why do people take guns to a fair?
This is so messed up. This is suppose to be a family fun event not for stupid people to be started crap and shooting people up in front of innocent people. Pretty soon there isn’t going to be anything for us to take our kids to because of this. So sad.
Can’t even enjoy fairs anymore. Summit County Fairgrounds had several incidents, with Stark County Fair and several others coming up. Anyway to increase security? “Random pat downs” , metal detector wands?
It was a miserable experience tonight kids out of control
It happened right in front of me. Once in a year thing, ruined.
Their dorms are alive with the sound of murder, all because LSU doesn’t give a shit who it recruits for football as long as they can play the game.
This is a very old story, one that UD has blogged about for years: LSU routinely recruits criminals. It really doesn’t care. Players come from bloody cities like Alexandria LA and bring their big guns with them.
Sometimes they bring their friends, too, like a recent recruit who turned out to be hiding two buddies – both murder suspects – in his dorm room. Big ol’ guns too? Big ol’ guns too.
It must be really wild to teach at LSU.
Coverage only cuz took place in Times Sq.
Next time, look sharp! Fourteen year old massacrist, real body count, mass panic pls.
Mr UD helpfully points out that my confident assumption the Anaconda Montana mass murderer was dead, up in them thar hills, was dead wrong. They’ve captured him.
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His niece speaks up:
“We as people failed… failed to report suspicious behavior because ‘that’s just Mikee’…”
Man, it’s gotta be said that when dangerous people are heavily armed, living in a place where being visibly heavily armed is no big deal, you got BIG problems.
The higher bond happened (a million bucks), but UD thinks the prosecuting attorney means cannot be overstated, cuz it’s hard to know how much higher you can go than 73 unsecured guns, multiple explosive devices, and plenty of methamphetamine all over a house with two kids, in an attached townhouse community.
Barbara, a reader, sent me this story out of Washington State, and UD is grateful she did, since these facts, in this our current USA, don’t add up to a big enough story to have appeared in UD‘s Google News searches…
His four year old son took Neff’s Glock from under his arm while he was sleeping (sleeping here is a euphemism for in meth oblivion), wandered over to the bathroom where his mother was showering, and shot her in the arm. Not sure who called the police (the father was still noticeably out of it when they arrived), but searching the house must have been quite a hoot.
Notice no neighbors have yet appeared before news cameras to say Well, they kind of kept to themselves but they seemed okay because… because why? WHY? I’ll tell you why! They don’t want to get detonated by their very own private Hitler, as in, THEY ARE SCARED FUCKING SHITLESS.
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And what to do with the children? Hm hm hmmmm. They love Daddy Demento! They love Dishrag Mom who, you know, KNOWS there’s something… uh, WRONG with Daddy and the guns and the meth and the bombs and the sketches he draws of murdering the neighbors but she loves him and he needs her and after all he’s not wrong that life sucks and killing yourself and your family I mean he’d never DO it but she can understand how …
What to do with the children when it’s actually hard to imagine a more disgusting domestic setting? Everyone hates the idea of foster care, so we have to hope there’s at least one non-degenerate family member or very close friend who knows and loves the children… ?
On the up side, Master Meth is out of the picture; someone else is going to have to clean and care for his 73 weapons while he’s in jail for the next ten years. But state officials have sympathy (we all do) for Women Who Love Not Wisely But Too Well, and while she will be facing drug/negligence/whatever charges, she probably won’t get any jail time…
OTOH it’s only a matter of time before she falls in love with someone even worse (let’s assume she’s also addicted to meth) and invites him to help raise the little ones plus he’ll knock her up a few times. No good options for the two innocents.
We’re revisiting the Red River massacre of 2023 — after which the town of Red River NM, population 500, decided no longer to host the Red River biker rally, attendees 28,000 — because the Sturgis SD biker/GUN rally is just wrapping up… And UD wouldn’t mind knowing how that went, public safety-wise.
This was Day One. How did the rest of the week go? I’ll try to find out.
SOOO not my world. (Although Anaconda’s county voted – just barely – for Kamala Harris!) But give me a Montana minute here; let a blue coastal elite take a gander at our country’s deep red, Number One For Suicide, state, as one of its towns grapples with a mass murder.
Lane “Shorty” Ruegamer, a regular at the Owl [Bar, site of the massacre], said he doubted Brown would attempt a return to Anaconda.
“He knows that every person down at the bottom of that hill has guns, and there’s no doubt in my mind that every person does,” Ruegamer said.
Yeah but see here Shorty you’re thinking rationally; the paranoid schizophrenic who killed your buddies is a maniac who does not think rationally, ja? He comes bombing back into town, naked, trailing the dead birds he’s been snacking on, and announcing he’s a visitor from the neolithic era; and before you can say Heckler & Koch HK G11 ACR he’s killing you and your kids.
That’s the problem with arming crazy people – don’t make no never mind how many weapons you’ve stored up. They’re going to surprise you. It took a raving lunatic to just park his car in the middle of Park Avenue and just walk up to folks in a Manhattan lobby and just powpowpow … That’s fucking nuts and that’s why it worked so well. Your local killer’s not going Oh everyone’s got guns so I better stay clear. He doesn’t think the way you do, and maybe if your local police/medical establishment had hold of that fact a little earlier…
[David Jabarek] isn’t afraid of the prospect of [mass shooter Michael] Brown returning [to town].
“Everybody around here has two dozen firearms in their house, and right now they’re within hands reach,” Jabarek said.
‘Adam Turck, 35, was shot Saturday morning while intervening in a domestic dispute he came across while walking his dog in Shockoe Bottom. When Turck intervened, a 19-year-old male produced a gun from a backpack and shot him.‘
Turck was a high-profile, much-beloved actor in the local theater scene; Shockoe Bottom is the most notorious neighborhood in a bunch of notorious violent Richmond neighborhoods. Note that his killing took place in the morning; you don’t have to wait until dark to get blown away in Richmond.
Read this for the cultural reality behind the killing.
‘Many [young people] aren’t coming for the clubs or bars. They’re just there, hanging out in the streets and often armed. There’s no event, no promoter, no leadership. Just music, cars, and open carry.
From a public safety standpoint, it’s a mess. From a business standpoint, it’s a slow death.
… One of the biggest changes? Guns.
Open carry is legal in Virginia. And the kids know it. The result is a flood of social media videos: AR-15s slung over shoulders, Glocks waved on Snapchat, drill videos filmed just blocks from where someone might be trying to have a date night.
“It’s not even about protection anymore,” [says one observer]. “It’s status.”
… . “People don’t feel safe,” he [says]. “And when that happens, nobody comes downtown.”
The deeper fear, though, the one no one wants to say out loud, is that one of these nights, it won’t just be posturing. It’ll be a shootout.‘
And speaking of suicide, I’m thinking the reason the shooter hasn’t, hours later, been found may be cuz he done did the deed and it’s harder to find a half-buried corpse or whatever than a live guy driving (what else) a white Ford F-150 pickup.
Motivewise, why does a guy who lives next door to a bar kill four people in it at ten AM?
I’m thinking this is the way you handle ongoing noise ordinance issues in Montana. There’s a presentation to the city council, and there’s The Way of the Glock.
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He had “mental issues for a long, long time,” says a neighbor. Same neighbor also says he saw the dude coming out of his house this morning with an AR 15…
Crazy guy with a semi… Call the cops…?
Why, no ma’am. This is Montana.
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You have to admire their capacity to be shocked.
Says here they’re even in shock.
Weawy? Open carry, permitless concealed carry, everybody armed to the teeth, drifts of drunk depressed delusional army vets dotting the hills like a host of golden daffodils … My dears, you’re awfully easily shocked…
And now that they’ve found his ditched pickup, are you going to be super shocked when they find his body?
And let’s say they don’t find him. Presumed dead.
How long does Anaconda/environs stay locked down?
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Oh plus everyone’s saying he was elaborately ostentatiously mad as a hatter but simply couldn’t find a mental hospital, therapist, psychological help OF ANY KIND.
He “suffered from significant mental health challenges, including schizophrenia and PTSD from serving in the Army.”
Says here there are three veteran-focused public mental hospitals in the state, and though a lot of the people listed here are all wrong for a vet with trauma, the list is very long. I understand the distance problem, but he clearly should have been resident in a hospital while getting treatment and of course someone should have taken his guns away if he was so dangerous to others. Are we going to be hearing from any of his family?
Okay. Family claims relevant hospitals turned him down. Need for more detail here. No primary care doc to prescribe meds? And why does a delusional schizophrenic who scares his family have guns? Why did the NFL shooter have guns? Why did this absolutely insane woman who killed her four daughters have guns?
Fact is, states like Montana get their high gun violence (suicide and homicide) rate because people there care much more about personal liberty than community safety. There’s a reason we call it the wild west.
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Leftwing version of this.
[A]ny intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...
… comes another trial. Another dazed degenerate shuffles stripe-shirted into court to explain why gifting his insane issue multiple semiautomatics was just what the doctor ordered.
UD covers gun news closely and can assure you that all over America every day men, women, and children walk easily about with small medium and large guns all over them. Of course some of this happens in open carry states, where everyone sees the gun, but no one (cough) responds…
As for the lack of response in midtown Manhattan — the area immediately around the shooter in the plaza is curiously devoid of people, so I’m assuming the response was run away. My response would certainly have been Give this person PLENTY of room.
I would also have called 911, and I’m assuming some people in fact did, but there wouldn’t have been a quick enough response to 911 to stop him.
Psychologically, there may have been denial/disbelief/maybe someone is filming a movie scene here... There may have been, in other words, human all too human tendencies to normalize/vaporize a twilight zone sight in the middle of the day.
Just as more Americans need training in active shooter drills, so more Americans need to be taught to lead their daily public lives with a heightened degree of paranoia.
Introduction, THE SHITS ARE TRYING TO KILL US, PEOPLE. GET IT INTO YOUR HEAD THAT THERE ARE FIVE HUNDRED MILLION GUNS IN THIS COUNTRY. Meets Wednesdays, basement of St Mark’s Episcopal, 7:00. Refreshments served.