If true, witches’ brew.

*****************

Kind of interesting to think about … You’re a concerned uncle (like the guy who just testified to the stuff in my title), and you know those kids are being fucked up… OTOH it’s clear from the father’s employer’s statement (he was valued, respected; his “leadership and vision were integral”) that he was perfectly capable of acting normally in the world…

As a family member visiting occasionally from out of state, you perceive the armed paranoia and the miserable children, let’s say. But you also perceive great affluence – the American success story – and an absence of overt dysfunction in the home. Clearly, you’re not going to intervene in a dramatic way.

************

Will the defense try something like this? It was only a matter of time before the father – like Lindsay Clancy – instructed each of his kids to “Go to God” before murdering them, his wife, and himself. The oldest kid was the only one old enough to perceive this threat. He acted to take the parents out.

Prosecutor: So he killed everybody?

Terrified by what he had done, he just kept shooting…

***************

Or take it the other way. So thoroughly, so anxiously, had the son absorbed the father’s Armageddon lesson that he took it upon himself to transport the family Godward.

Prosecution: Why didn’t he kill himself?

Good question.

… boasts half a million dollar residences in close proximity to a gun range with late night shooting and automatic weapons.

Pock-marked parlors and bullet-rich carpeting complement the whirrbizzbang that makes PP a unique setting for the sound of freedom.

And here are the hard-won rights Arkansas citizens have scored with their gun laws:

A 23 year old with a loaded FN FNX-45 .45 ACP handgun got pissed because he was barred from an Arkansas State University party. Pulled out the gun and threatened to kill the hosts.

A truly cosmic convergence in this my beloved country: At one of Philly’s trendiest, most expensive, outdoor cafes, a guy on the sidewalk shoved a big black gun in a diner’s face with one hand and took his laptop with the other. All of it was filmed.

The gun guy was arrested.

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This one has everything – our affluent luxe leisure … SO luxe and leisured it forgets to add to the equation killers lining the luxe …

A sweet simple transaction. You give me the laptop or I kill you on this lovely late summer afternoon in front of these people sipping La Colombe. So Don DeLillo.

The Guardian looks at our exploding familicides.

”The parents had several guns, including an AR-15 rifle, that were stored unsecured.”

Cuz you never know when the final battle’s gonna blow, so you need the big artillery at the ready.

*************

But, see, guns are many things. Aren’t they? Your paranoid parents see them as apocalypse-busters; you, not so much. As you get more and more pissed with ma and pa, you eye the family arsenal with affection, for therein lies your revenge for the disciplinary shit the folks dish out.

Maybe to a non-15 year old, slaughtering the whole family seems excessive, but presumably the thinking here is that once you’ve reduced your primary targets to shuddering humps of blood, you’ll need to deal with four hysterical children running around shrieking while one of them calls the police or runs to the neighbors. They’ll have to go too, which means that you create a scene every bit as apocalyptic as your parents predicted.

I mean, they had in mind government and social, while you meant domestic, but the result, as far as your parents went, was the same: the sudden bloody shutting down of their entire world.

*************

As for what the legal system representing by far the world’s most gunned-up location will do with an unstable kid who plucks an unsecured household annihilator and does a doomsday… Well, it’s a slow process. Two years after he did his thing, the courts are just beginning formal proceedings. Should he be tried as an adult? That’s the latest, and UD assumes the answer will be yes. But what does she know.

Hm. Hm.

… Florida Man.

The most galling part of their argument is the recurrent invocation of—and self-righteous cloaking of their argument in—the language of democracy. “The decision whether a type of arm is too dangerous for ordinary Americans to possess,” they wrote, “is one that the people are entitled to make, not one that courts are empowered to make for them.” They say this, to be clear, in a brief asking the judges of the Supreme Court to make the decision about what weapons can be possessed over the decision of voters. Because the lower courts upheld these laws, the challengers want the justices to tell the citizens of Connecticut, Chicago, and other jurisdictions like California and New York that they cannot make fundamental judgments about public peace and safety...

It seems that judges are empowered to second-guess the decision of the American people if, and only if, gun-rights proponents don’t like it. After all, the American people voted for these laws in more than a third of the country. Connecticut citizens saw an AR-15-style weapon slaughter innocent 6-year-olds and acted to expand their law. The challengers, on the other hand, would have the Supreme Court foreclose that pathway of democratic choice...

It distorts the concept of democracy to cloak oneself in the rhetoric of protecting decisions by “the people” while urging an insulated cadre of educated attorneys to tell the parents who buried their children and then devoted their lives to the prevention of gun violence to shut up and sit down; your voice and your vote do not matter here, the challengers demand the court to decree...

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson expressed the matter best when he wrote for a majority of judges upholding Maryland’s assault-weapon ban: “We shudder to imagine the hubris with which a court would disable representative government at the very moment that lethal technologies are proceeding at an accelerated and indeed unprecedented pace.”

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Spectacular writing.

By this dude.

They just passed a law lowering the age for gun possession, so teens can rest easy that they can join the bloody back and forth that is civic life in Louisville. And for those who love the spectacle of the state’s little ones bleeding out on Main Street, there’s good news and bad news.

The good news is that social media types are more and more frequently filming and posting the last breaths. Just show up with your camera along Whiskey Row on a weekend night and you’ll probably get something.

The bad news is the summer’s almost over! With cooler weather come fewer bleed outs.

Odd enough that the chair of the Sussex County Republican Committee is gaming out the apocalyptic American warfare coming to New Jersey; more perilously, he brought his gun to a recent road rage incident and scared the shit out of some people.

He’s in custody facing multiple charges.

—matic gunfire.

Louisville is way bloody, and the other night the blood was featured in a video someone took of the shooting death, on the street, of a seventeen year old.

He died outside a restaurant whose liquor license the city has suddenly suspended — says it was “noncompliant” … meaning, I guess, they let in the tyke, and his sixteen year old … friend? killer? and served them alcohol or something.

The place stays open til one AM, and I know you’re wondering not just why the tykes had guns, but also why they were out and about at 1:30 AM, which is when they were shot.

The 16 year old is in critical condition.

A whole new set of rules.

It’s heartland America – Oklahoma – where folks leave their kids alone with loaded guns.

Resulting in the rather odd outcome of an eleven year old girl arrested for second degree murder. Of her brother.