Go here for an earlier post.
He gave himself the name Phoenix in 2020; he was born Christian Gunnar Eriksen. He has always had developmental and psychological problems, not helped by three nutty parents fighting about him for years.
‘“I don’t think it’s a nuisance,” he said.
The laughter from the audience following that comment temporarily paused the hearing.’
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It isn’t just communities having to fight gun ranges down the street; more importantly, it’s the faith of the gun range owner that daily life permeated by shattering machine gun fire is fine, akin to the ordinary fact of traffic noise. He expects the rest of us to share his faith in the great god Gun, that this god be constantly in our ears. He expects us to sacrifice our peace of mind to that god. Guns in America are the universal god, with us always, blasting away.
After Sandy Hook, Gary Wills wrote:
We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily. … The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence… Adoration of Moloch permeates the country, imposing a hushed silence as he works his will. One cannot question his rites, even as the blood is gushing through the idol’s teeth. … We are required to deny that there is any connection between the fact that we have the greatest number of guns in private hands and the greatest number of deaths from them. Denial on this scale always comes from or is protected by religious fundamentalism… [T]he Supreme Court has been cowed, reversing its own long history of recognizing that the Second Amendment applied to militias. Now the court feels bound to guarantee that any every madman can indulge his “religion” of slaughter… So let us celebrate the falling bodies … as a demonstration of our fealty, our bondage, to the great god Gun.
Our constant mass murders are religious events, ritual reenactments of the sacrificial blood we offer the great god Gun. Each massacre – today’s, tomorrow’s – prompts this prayer: O Lord, make us truly worthy of this our sacrifice for your bloody majesty.
American universities should have drills on what to do when there isn’t an active shooter on campus.
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Says here they’ve arrested someone. Four people are being treated in hospitals.
Let’s see if we can’t draw a picture of the shooter. Male. Very young, like 19. Psychotic, has been undergoing treatment for years. Name either excruciatingly Mayflower (Randolph Higginbottom The Fourth) or way ethnic (Alfredo Ibn Gandhi).
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You remember, right? The last shooting at FSU?
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[A] student who lived through the Parkland shooting entered [a room where students were sheltering]. “He was like, ‘Man, I never thought this would happen again.'”
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Hoping against hope this is inaccurate: Five dead, four injured. Two shooters, one of them dead.
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Thinking of that gun billboard on the streets of Oakland. Suggested slogan: USE IT TO KILL EVERYONE BECAUSE YOU HATE THE WORLD.
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“[N]ormal college dude” … a white man with light hair, wearing an orange t-shirt and khaki shorts.
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Apparently the five dead/two shooters report is incorrect.
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I was off by one year: The tyke was just 20. I was right about the funny name: Phoenix Ikner. His parents – they’re in law enforcement and have mucho guns at home, very convenient for their troubled son – gave him [I’ve corrected this; see a later post on Ikner] that wondrous, grandiloquent first name, regarding their babe I guess as a great beautiful mythic bird reborn from its own ashes. They probably didn’t anticipate that he’d reduce everyone around him to ashes. Maybe they were blinded by that name; maybe, less blinded, they would have made an effort to keep him away from guns. They may face prosecution.
No, that’s Ivory Soap. Suicide attempt by gun is however 90% sure to kill you, which is also an impressively high figure.
[A]ccess to a gun made my dad eight times more likely to die by suicide, primarily because firearms are the most lethal suicide method, according to a 2020 study by researchers at Stanford University. When a gun isn’t available, suicide attempts are typically “not fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to die in a future suicide,” the researchers wrote. Owning a gun, in other words, can turn an intrusive thought into a death much faster and more effectively. It is impossible, then, not to place some of the blame for my dad’s death on the gun, and to wonder if he would be alive now if he hadn’t inherited it from his grandfather thirty years before...
In the early 1990s, the rates of gun-induced suicides and homicides in America were about equal. But in the three decades since, gun homicides have fallen sharply while the gun suicide rate has remained steady. In 2022, the rate of suicides involving guns in the United States reached the highest level since officials began tracking it more than 50 years ago...
Of suicide attempts using a gun, nearly 90% result in death, while only 4% of suicide attempts by other means are fatal. Because suicidal crises are often short-lived, restricted access to the most lethal self-harm methods saves lives. In states with the strongest firearm safety laws—including background checks, waiting periods, and secure storage requirements—gun suicides fell over the past two decades, while states with the weakest laws experienced a 39% increase…
This one’s in Oakland, after all, where guns more than dollars are the neighborhood currency. Might as well transfer that fact from the political unconscious to blaring daylight awareness.
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What do you expect? There are four hundred million guns in private hands in this country.
So what about this
surprises, shocks, amazes, and offends you? Do you think it degrades your neighborhood? Depresses property values? Do you think a miles-long lineup of gun/ammo billboards (broken up by booze and breastaurant ads) would be a bad thing? A bad look?
Or do you just dislike being reminded by a huge roadside graphic that guns blanket your city, with many more always on the way?
You live in the heart of gun culture, babe. Why should billboards confirming that fact bother you? Advertisers advertise to their markets.
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It’s part of this growing trend toward gun ads in general culture (not just in sporting magazines, etc.) media. We’re well past the time the NFL banned a gunny spot meant to run during the Super Bowl. I mean, note who won the presidency. Whole new world. If you’re not ready for billboards along our major highways advertising guns, you might want to get ready.
That was made official in 2021; more recently:
Texas Sen. Bryan Hughes, R-Mineola, [has] authored a resolution to make the cannon the official state gun of Texas. On April 10, the resolution passed the Senate with a 28-2 vote.
Official gun, rather than handgun, which, again, Texas already has.
And most recently, Texas Sen. Vergil “Rip” McCoy, R-Beaver Creek, authored a resolution to make the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast the state’s official large-yield bomb.
Trashy Panama Beach, the very reddest part of the Redneck Riviera (‘Panama City Beach makes tailgating at a NASCAR infield appear hoity-toity.‘), is among the last truly gun-friendly spring break locations. While other once-popular killing fields, tired of blasting blood off main street, have launched police-state measures that make you think twice before mustering your M16, PCB, a short drive from supergangbanger Dothan AL, screams go ahead and unload ra cheah. Trash bars, hotels, and stores; gun-love; and a police force that doesn’t give a shit — it all adds up to the best spring break of your life uh ah mean death and yall come on down.
UD predicts PCB’s about to dump its police chief, who’s fucking up the fun, calling the gangbangers “stupid,” and naming/shaming town ultratrash spots (Hammerhead Fred’s) designed to make fifteen year olds with .950 JDJ Fat Macs feel at home. He’s, like, against all this, which will make the local merchants extremely angry, and they will demand his ouster.
UD calls Wyoming The Amy Winehouse State. Dark. Dark. The darkest. HALF in love with easeful Death? You don’t know the half of it.
State Song:
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
GO WYOMING!
A neutral palette (grays, whites) makes the eye-popping yellow coverlet and its rich array of guns really stand out in this East Harlem bedroom. “They’re there during the day to make a statement,” says the owner of the apartment; “obviously, at night, I put them in my safe, unless I plan to be out using them.” The new Unsecured Firearms aesthetic has taken America by storm, and interior designers are rushing to be part of the movement. “The days of the good ol’ boy in rural Texas hanging the odd hunting rifle on the wall above the fireplace are over,” says Reka Farkash, principal at Farkash Armamental Designs. Farkash is known for her so-called AK Circles, where she stages a gun-owners’ AK47s in a rough circular pattern on dining tables and other surfaces.
However you arrange it, the point is to take the gun out of hiding and make it a prominent part of domestic American space.
This is the fourth shooting [by a 15 to 17 year old] to happen on the Coronado Mall premises over the last year, explains an Albuquerque reporter; and it’s just a wee snapshot of the state with the nation’s highest crime rate.
No surprise, then, that New Mexico’s governor yesterday called in the national guard. Parts of Albuquerque are the wild west, and the gunslingers are fifteen years old.
Dude can’t help himself, and things get worse for him; but as long as he can play at a high level, things won’t get too bad.
Unlike his surly fictional precursor, he seems to have come from a stable loving middle-class sort of background; but he also seems mentally unstable, and guns/defiance look to be a crucial part of his shaky self-care.
Beyond all this, there’s his hugely powerful symbolic resonance in the gunsickest country in the world. Ja Morant is America’s gunsickness right out there on the world’s biggest screen for all the world to see. Look out, world, here we come!
… for public schools to use in issuing statements to parents when – as so often happens – students are found on campus with loaded guns. Either you call the weapon an “inappropriate item,” or you gesture vaguely in the direction of “police activity.”
Fort Worth ISD sent … a letter … to parents, reading in part, “our campus was briefly placed on lockdown due to police activity near the school.” The letter did not mention why there was police activity or explain that there were guns recovered.
Three guns, from three tykes.
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UD proposes further euphemisms:
Extremely short words that have other meanings: GAT. ROD.
Extremely obscure words no one will recognize: HARQUEBUS. CULVERIN.
What’s shocking is that 18 year old cutoff age. It seems unfair and arbitrary, in a country where millions of 15-17 year olds currently buy/carry/trade/threaten with/injure with/kill with guns, to suddenly disenfranchise this large group of citizens. In the present American context, an 18 year old with a gun is a seasoned marksman. It’s absurd to think of disarming 18-20 year olds.
The Milwaukee public school system comes up with a new phrase for “loaded gun.”