But that’s nothing! Look at his carry-on luggage!
Sorry about that, babe. You can take out all the restraining orders you want, but this is America. Vicious insane drunks still get to keep 50 to 60 guns in their room and annihilate their family.
You don’t pay any attention to Hastings, Nebraska. Hell, you don’t pay any attention to Nebraska. But it’s itty bitty news stories like this one out of Hastings that tell you what’s going on in gun-blast USA.
Time was a punk revving his car a million miles an hour up and down the street where he lives would respond to complaints about that behavior by spitting on complainants or kicking the air and saying fuck you. Now, however:
Anthony Copley, 20, pulled a rifle on one of his neighbors, threatening to kill them.
The dispute came after one of the neighbors complained about Copley speeding through the residential area.
Police arrived on scene and arrested Copley for terroristic threats and use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony.
“Terroristic threats” is a new one; I guess it allows the court to increase jail time. But anyway, the wee lad no doubt owns lots of big guns and this is no doubt far from the first time he’s pulled the rifle he has on him at all times and stuck it in the face of someone bold enough to confront him about his behavior.
So this describes the new normal inside the blast furnace: Terrifyingly, terroristically, no place in America is safe from a rifle in your face because no place in America is without guns in everyone’s hands. You always have to assume that any complaint you make to any stranger or neighbor under any circumstance could eventuate in a rifle in your face.
Every locality in America has tons of stupid angry assholes like Anthony Copley, and almost every asshole has a rifle. Certain states – Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama – pretty much guarantee you’ll get a rifle in your face at some point. Everybody’s got guns and I guess everybody’s an asshole in those states. Enter at your own risk.
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And yet our bloodiest gunniest states, like Texas, absolutely refuse to blame all the guns for all the blood. Too dumb to grasp correlation, they cannot see that the gunniest states are, overwhelmingly, the bloodiest states. So here’s the poor desperate mayor of Bryan, Texas begging citizens to help him at least slow the gun bloodbath.
“If you see something, report it. If you know something, report it. The problems we are having right now is with youth with guns. It’s not the guns that are bad, it’s the person holding the gun, pulling the trigger,” [Bobby] Gutierrez said. “Please, I’m asking on behalf of our council here. Do your part as well and report and make sure the police aren’t there by themselves to do this by themselves cause if everyone is there during a shooting in the middle of a park, and no one sees anything, and no one’s giving them anything, they can’t do their job.”
It’s not the guns that are bad, folks! It’s the person pulling the trigger. Plus we have a moral issue with all the people standing around watching a shooting in the middle of a park who don’t say anything to the cops about what they saw.
Wonder why witnesses don’t talk. Wonder why blast-furnace states have large populations of silent terrorized people too afraid of all the assholes with guns even to give police a description of someone depraved enough to shoot guns in a public park.
“The person holding the gun” has always lived in Texas; assholes are always around. What’s changed is exactly the number, the normalization, the open carry, and the ease of purchase, of guns. What’s changed is the breakdown of civility and the emergence of paranoia in regard to all other people.
Deja Taylor admitted to lying on a federal form about her drug use, which would have barred her from owning a firearm, when she purchased the gun [her six year old son] used [to shoot his teacher]. Documents filed with the plea also appeared to undercut Taylor’s claim that the gun was safely stored, asserting that investigators found no lockbox or trigger lock while searching homes where she stayed. She is still facing state charges of child neglect and recklessly storing a firearm so a child could gain access to it.
Wonder why your kid’s so fucked up he’s shooting people with your gun at the age of six. Wonder why his public school system kept accommodating you and the shooter. Wonder why you didn’t give a shit when drugs messed you up so badly you left your gun lying around. Wonder why you still have custody of the shooter. He’s young enough that with other people raising him he might not, at the age of eighteen, spend his life in prison after killing a bunch of people.
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With one thing and another, she’ll get, maybe, one year in jail. During which, with luck, her son will benefit from being in the care of a non-negligent non-liar.
Prosecutors identified the suspects as… the chapter president; Eddie “Stash” Latson, 43, the vice president; Lee “Trench” Mole, 58, the chapter secretary; Donovan “Sockit” Scott, 35, the sergeant-at-arms; Joseph “Axel” Leeks, 44, a captain; Labarron “Bootleg” Pollock, 48, a former vice president; [and] Michael “Chop” Randolph, 43…
UD will totally admit she’s enjoying slumming it among America’s naughty bikers.
[A]ccording to … 2020 figures, Texas’s gun death rate is around 67 percent higher than that of California’s, per 100,000 people.
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The governor has issued a statement:
“Hell that’s mostly drunk ol cowboys be blowin they haids off. That don’t count.”
Because they don’t want their graduating seniors (their ceremony was scheduled in the same venue, later this evening) shot to pieces, the way the Huguenot High School seniors are currently being gunned down.
What will the end of public life in America be like? Looks as though we’re going to find out.
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What’ll it be? UD‘s putting her money on a student who was expelled and feels disrespected.
Oh, wait. They say there were two shooters. Maybe a gang thing.
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Richmond has long had a humongous murder rate.
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Ok, so now they say it was indeed just one person. Who brought multiple weapons and might have targeted one of the murdered people – a just-graduated student – in particular, but seems to have been happy to spray the crowd too.
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The Graduation Day shooting was just one of a handful of violent acts this week that left 12 people shot in Richmond over a 72-hour span.
The Taos County Undersheriff tries to explain to locals complaining about the quality of policing before and after last month’s mass shooting at Red River’s biker rally (see these posts for background), that he told them decades ago how super-dangerous the event was, but no one listened. Thus it’s a bit rich, after years of criminality and menace finally culminating in what anyone with a brain knew would happen, to listen to locals bitching about all the blood.
After all, ‘who would have thought 28,000 bikers converging in a 1-square-mile mountain town of 539 people for Memorial Day weekend could get out of control?’
[R]ecently filed court documents point toward years of turmoil in the state with two rival gangs — the Bandidos and Mongols — perceiving themselves to be at war with the other.
Ol’ UD could have chosen from a zillion recent bloody gun incidents; why so much blogging about the Red River massacre? Because a town promoted a huge, violent, cult ritual! Year after year, knowing full well they were hosting thousands of cretinous warring sects and calling the event family friendly! Drawing children to the powder keg!
‘These guys all seem likable enough: [people tend to think] that they are misunderstood, outlaws from the old days, and they ride motorcycles instead of horses,’ [one policeman] said. ‘Even cops think, “Oh they are just tattooed long haired guys who like to ride motorcycles.” And the reality of it is they are long-haired tattooed guys who ride motorcycles and sell a hell of a lot of methamphetamine and murder people and steal motorcycles and extort people and beat people up in bars for no reasons.’
When people around the world wonder what peculiar American cultural traits produce daily large-scale gun carnage, they need to look at gunny gangy states like New Mexico, and gun-mad towns like Red River within that state. Here’s a perfectly respectable town – a yearlong tourist destination! – with a chronic violence fetish. Why? If the CDC is serious about studying American gun violence, it needs to dispatch a team of epidemiologists to Red River to ask people questions like Why do you think 28,000 armed bikers are cute? What is it about open powder kegs that makes you want to smoke cigarettes on top of them?
I think part of the answer must be that states like NM, always eager to liberalize their gun laws, proudly perceive themselves to be Badlands. Wild west shootouts have always been part of their frontier history, and in these post-frontier days, biker rallies virtually guarantee the survival of that self-affirming drama. Like their neighbor, whose famous tagline is Don’t Mess with Texas, biker rally states assume as a default position paranoid belligerence – and what better organized group to exteriorize that world view than the Mongols?
If I’m right, then mass murder is baked in to states like NM and Texas. If I’m right, it’s constitutive of state identity. Hell, NM done got MORE gun deaths than TX!
Not to get all Freudian, but the evidence points here: Mass murder isn’t what NM and Texas dread; it’s what they crave.
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Slowly, slowly, at least parts of NM learn.
[Conscience-stricken gunshop owner Jon] Waldman said that if he hadn’t already decided to close his shop, another reason presented itself six weeks ago when a customer wanted to buy 4,000 rounds.
Even 1,000 would have been reasonable, but four times that amount, Waldman said, made him question his field.
“If you had ordered 200 to 1,000 rounds, that’s fine. Anyone who shoots regularly, you’re going through a thousand rounds in a month,” he said.
“But when you order 4,000 rounds, the kind of stuff that goes through engine blocks, refrigerators and vests that police officers wear, I just can’t sell that,” he said.
A rational voice at the Taos News poses the question: WTF????
A violent incident like Saturday’s might not have been an inevitability at Red River’s rally, but it sure wasn’t a remote possibility — and everyone involved in putting it on has known that for years.
Even before this year’s fatal shootout, even when biker gangs haven’t rolled into town, the Red River rally has often been a drunken, perverse, dangerous event that has created major headaches for all county residents and first responders, while benefiting a minority of business owners and public officials, mostly only in Red River itself. In previous years, road accidents involving drunken motorcyclists have been commonplace, and have sometimes been fatal.
Drunken, perverse, dangerous… UD wouldn’t mind knowing exactly what the writer means by perverse (‘Perversion is a form of human behavior which deviates from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. Although the term perversion can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are considered particularly abnormal, repulsive or obsessive.’ Do tell!), but anyway the list ain’t pretty and it definitely makes one wonder about the perversion of a municipality that would, year after year, subject its 500 residents to the roar of 28,000 bikes, fatal traffic accidents, the street fights of warring gangs, a constant atmosphere of weaponized menace, the choking smoke of weed and worse (I’m guessing on this one), the need to flee town or lock your doors for the duration. ‘The warning signs were there. Add in excessive alcohol consumption, a little cocaine on the side, and the potential for violence should have been anticipated.’ Red River needs to appoint a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose brief would be to review this inexplicable behavior, find a way to apologize for it, and make a clear break with a long shameful chapter in town history.
UD’s effort to account for the unaccountable goes something like this.
The Red River town council has been colonized by bikers and their allies. Every year rational voices try to curtail/end the bloody mess and are shouted down by the bikers/barkeeps/drug dealers/gun dealers/fleabag hotel owners running the town. They don’t talk about money but rather the beautiful freedom of rebels who to be sure might make some people uncomfortable but this is America we get to be free free free as the wind and if you’re not on board why not remote start your Prius and move to Martha’s Vineyard.
Good luck with that, lady. Talk to Ocean City, Maryland. You can wave your mayoral wand and declare certain deadly events over, but, by their very nature, groups like bikers are likely to ignore you. There’s a reason they call themselves Outlaws and shit like that: They do what they want.
And they’ll probably want to keep coming back to little Red River and there’s nothing you can do about that.
You’ve whipped yourself up some real sorcerer’s apprentice type stuff, in other words. And it don’t help none that New Mexico is biker gang central. One of the top five states for biker gangs. These killers are your neighbors.
AND it don’t help that the current trend in America is for everyone to own and carry multiple crowd-pulverizers. I mean, way gun-friendly states like your beloved New Mexico don’t get to just rest on their cowboy laurels and enjoy their mass murder toys at gun ranges and all; folks are gonna wanna kill people with them, aren’t they?
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Now, for reasons unknown, your little town kept inviting tens of thousands of heavily armed biker gangs to hang out with you every year. I mean, it was great for business — the bars, the motels. The bars. And I’m sure some of your bar owners are even as we speak saying basically oh okay a few dead guys in the street. Cost of doing business! Don’t shut down the rally. Few bad apples. Get more police protection. Etc. The mayor will ignore them, but, again, it won’t matter. Chances are excellent massive waves of drunken louts with big guns will be back next year.
And lady, not to be mean, but you and your fellow New Mexicans created, and sustain, the gunny gangy world in which the Barbarians thrive. That’s why they choose to live in your state.
They’ll be back next year.
The mayor says they had a heads-up of about 500 Bandidos members heading into town. However, she says there was double that and Bandidos members haven’t even been at the rally since 2019.
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After-Action Review*:
[One visitor said he] had felt uneasy Saturday before the shooting.
”There was so much tension. You could feel it,” he said. “We didn’t really want to walk around. There were wall-to-wall [motorcycle clubs].”
[He] said he walked on the street rather than on the sidewalk, “because if you walked on the sidewalk, every other person you passed, you bumped into. If I see people who wear the [biker gang] colors, I’d rather not bump into them and create anything. I’d rather walk in the street. I’m good with that. I don’t know why they let the colors come back. That was their first mistake, lifting the color ban.”
”It was so thick here yesterday, you couldn’t even walk around, [said another visitor]. They were just posted up everywhere, on every corner. When they’re hanging out like that you just have to be careful.”
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*Note for next year’s family fun biker rally: Enrich everyone’s experience with multiple bullet-proof barriers/holding pens for each warring gang, surrounded by hundreds of officers holding AK-47s. Along the barrier walls, posters with identifying gang colors should be plainly visible to all visitors.
Local Red River NM pol Craig Swagerty is being too modest. His town’s annual biker rally has long also featured drug arrests (everyone knows about biker gangs and the drug business), fights, property damage, weapons charges, and forced temporary migration/home detention of scared locals …
But, you know… Red River folk consider tens of thousands of fucked up armed bikers packed onto their streets for days as a positive, and they keep welcoming back the boys — and the boys bring their kids, too, so this year the little ones got to be part of the hysterical stampede of people trying to get out of the way of bullets. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said another resident. “I was told not to go out [as soon as the rally began] and so I was staying at a friend’s house. It honestly sounded like a whole clip was unloaded. It was a lot of gunshots at once.” Yep, must be quite a sight for one of the 500 permanent residents of tiny Red River to see/hear 28,000 heavily armed people outside her door. Town sure don’t need to worry about adequate policing with them numbers!
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So now everyone’s talking about this year’s blowout – the bloodbath is all over the national and international news and I mean Craig whodathunkit?? Who could have foreseen that 28,000 drunk assholes carrying 40,000 weapons would shoot some of them off? What’s America coming to?
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In these Great Carnage days, you’d think a few people would look at and think about the lowest hanging fruit, the locations where mass shooting is practically guaranteed. Apart from the obvious – urban drug turf – UD will now helpfully single out two places guaranteed to generate routine atrocity:
- Hookah lounges
- Biker rallies
There are plenty of other places you, like the Red River resident smart enough to get the hell out of the way of the rally even before it started, definitely ought to avoid if you dislike open air gun battle. The boardwalk in Myrtle Beach or Ocean City MD… Public high schools in Glocksucker states… etc etc etc yada yada yada. I mean, do you read the news at all? Ain’t it kind of obvious?
NOT that UD‘s offering even a whiff of a suggestion that guns should be restricted or you should have check points in locations guaranteed to kill people repeatedly! Perish the thought that you and your family shouldn’t be free to perish at the hands of a drunk, high POS with a Glock! NOOOOO. I’m only saying we should designate these places, with big easy to read signs, Most Likely to Murder, so people can choose to stay away, or, as some folks in places like Myrtle Beach and Red River do, leave town until event season is over. Rather than the town of Red River promoting bike rallies on its tourism website and promising fun for the whole family (current town policy), you’d have the mayor say something like this (she made the comment to the Taos newspaper — Taos: the classy town, forty miles away from trashy Red River, that along with everyplace else anywhere near Red River went into lockdown right after the shooting):
“Everybody needs to understand that this really isn’t an event that we promote. There’s not really an event sponsor; it’s not a town-sponsored event. It’s something that occurs every year. It’s an event that’s grown and happens and we do our best to manage it.”
Course they do promote it. It’s right there on their website… Oh wait! Someone done taken it down!
Not only that, but lookee here what sober rule-bound Red River’s doing now!
“For everyone, there will be zero tolerance from this point forward,” [the local police captain] said at a [post-massacre] news conference. “That is traffic violations for 1 mile an hour over, seat belts, jaywalking. We are going to stop and talk to everyone if they violate any law — traffic or criminal.”
Look sharp, lad! From now on we fuckin promise it’s gonna be Pyongyang around here! And cut your hair!
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Fun for the whole family signage in Red River.
- New Mexico – 95.0′
UD‘s been blogging about NM for years and ain’t surprised it came out on top on this and on other intelligence measures; but it’s always good to be able to point to evidence, and the recent decision to stage a huge public rally in a tiny town among warring biker factions will do nicely.
The mayor of Red River is shocked at the mass shooting (three dead so far, several injured) that ensued, cuz you’d NEVER expect fine folk like these to have gotten drunk at Red River’s bars and to have used their big big big guns to kill each other. Unprecedented!
How could such a thing have happened? Bikers were supposed to be at “a live music event by Warning Shot” (not making this up) but instead just blew past the whole warning thing and started killing each other. Coulda knocked the mayor and tourism director over with a feather: 28,000 armed bikers that hate each other! And now you tell me this didn’t bode well. Hidesight is 50/50 dude!!!!