So after the latest bloodletting at the school’s 100th homecoming a few days ago, officials have closed the campus, and everyone’s gotta wear an i.d. at all times. The tyke who likes to shoot his machine guns into crowds at events like homecomings has been arrested, while sixteen people try not to die of the wounds he inflicted. One person has already died.
Ooh, wonder what his motive was! I’m thinking someone inadvertently shoved him. It was crowded and all.
This blog, recognizing that fatal shootings are standard at university homecoming events, now calls homecoming guncoming, that special time of year when young Americans gather, get excited, and do what they do when lots of them are armed.
For Tuskegee’s all-important one hundredth guncoming the other day, bang went the weapons and down went the students, faculty, alumni, and other celebrants. One dead, multiple serious injuries. And of course PLENTY of raw footage from various vantage points for you to enjoy. “The amount of bullets shot last night in Tuskegee amidst their homecoming weekend celebration is terrifying,” writes one audience member. “I couldn’t even finish the video.” (Reminder from SOS: The correct word is NUMBER, not AMOUNT.)
The world’s press is covering this latest guncoming. American rituals are so interesting.
See you next year, Golden Tigers! Crouch low.
— PLUS as a special bonus you get to live down the street from Cletus Spuckler and his AR15.
Cletus don’t right know why he sits on his porch shooting off a pistol and the AR but he just do it and neighbors call the cops and Cletus shoots at the cops even though they very clearly and loudly tell him to put the guns down.
Maybe he celebrating the election. Maybe he just all drunk as a skunk.
UD thinks most likely his thinking was something like “Paid 4 thou for these fuckers and gonna use em.” An economic decision.
Adam Gopnik has in mind people like raving lunatic John Sawchak, who for fifteen years — thanks to the give-a-shit Minneapolis police — terrorized his neighbors and finally shot one of them. The cops’ argument seems to be that they didn’t arrest him because they’re afraid of him, which is one hilarious argument, mes petites, but anyway, incredible as it is, the city authorities just let Sawchak endlessly slash and burn his way around the streets surrounding his house despite everyone begging them for help.
Only when he almost shot to death a guy trimming a tree did the police sit up and take a little notice.
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Sawchak’s just like that crazed old dude who brought Atlanta to a halt the other day while blasting various guns off his balcony. Neighbors confirmed he was a well-known, very heavily armed, berserko, but the apartment/city decided the best thing to do was continue allowing him to arm himself and only act when he did a Charles Whitman. One thinks also of Stephen Paddock, who carried an army’s worth of guns and ammo to his Las Vegas hotel room without anyone stopping him and asking why he was taking so many enormous packages over many days onto the elevator.
See my thing is if you WANT 450 million guns (and growing) and no serious gun laws, something’s gotta give. And that thing is personal liberties. The country can’t afford non-militarized high schools. It can’t afford non-institutionalized aggressive crazy people. Fifteen year olds didn’t back in the day carry loaded guns to school; now they do, on a very routine basis. Crazy people didn’t routinely amass armories and take aim at crowds of people from balconies and other locations.
Charles Whitman used to be something of a novelty.
If Paddock wasn’t as overtly nuts as those other guys, he was a well-known weirdo at the casinos, and he was known to own massive numbers of guns. He should have been under active surveillance before he killed sixty and wounded 413. It’s amazing that gun-mad America ignores its gunny and mad population.
Dahm really helps us put this in perspective.
Mississippi’s rate of firearm-related violence (28.5 per 100,000 people) was nearly double that of Haiti (15.1 per 100,000) in 2021, when mercenaries assassinated the country’s president, unleashing a fresh round of gang warfare which pushed the country into a state of civil war… Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico all have higher firearm mortality rates than Mexico, where decades of violence between state forces and rival drug cartels has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and left more than 115,000 people missing… [F]irearm-related death and injury is not synonymous with an increase in crime [in the US]. Violent crime fell 15% from 2023 to 2024, according to the FBI. More than half of all firearm-related deaths (56.1%) in 2022 were from suicide.
It’s an All-American Halloween, featuring an insane heavily armed Nazi wearing a scary mask and shooting his guns off left and right from the balcony of his well-appointed apartment.
It’s fun to think of this guy going violently mad and accumulating weapons in the privacy of his residence while all around him neighbors are paying one to four million for the privilege of going into lockdown and listening to an hour of crazed screams and booming gunshots from his unit. Talk about amenities! You get a fully loaded schizofascist down the hall – a man with well-known mental issues – who no one – until this rather striking event – considered enough of a threat to evict.
That’s what happens when everyone packs a lot of heat. It doesn’t ever seem a strange or risky sort of thing, even when the heat packer is an obviously dangerous lunatic.
UD‘s trying to figure out precisely how gunny the massacred Humiston family was. Do a lot of Americans bring their guns to work? Washington State employers are allowed to prohibit weapons at the workplace, but maybe Humiston worked at a place where it was okay to carry…?
As for the highly populated death scene that greeted a detective, he describes a “splintered” bathroom doorframe, “as if it had been locked, then forced open,” so we know that the killer’s mother got to hear him kill her husband and children, and then got to hear her son/killer forcing the bathroom door she’d locked in a desperate effort to keep living.
There seems to be a house rather close to the death house. Did no one next door hear her screaming? She must have been screaming.
I’m going to assume the state will try him as an adult. I’m not feeling too confident about his attorneys, whose first public statement shares that he “enjoys mountain biking.”
Shooters in Memphis don’t even need other people to shoot. If nobody’s around, they shoot buildings. America’s most dangerous city begins to look like Warsaw after the Uprising: bullet holes everywhere.
Well, you know what they say. Firearms in the home are far more likely to kill you than save your life by allowing you to kill an intruder. Here’s a rather blatant example – you grant your dumb fucked up 15 year old access to your weapons and watch him slaughter all of you cuz he reasons that the best way to deal with flunking a test is familicide.
Dumb? He tried to palm the massacre off on his younger brother, telling police the kid killed himself after blowing everyone away. Except that his head had ‘several’ holes in it.
The hapless Gresham High School principal unable to perceive, and respond to, the carnage over which she presides has resigned. (Background here.) Certes, whoever replaces her faces the same appalling violence and gunplay; but almost any form of leadership is better than Blanche DuBois sashaying around, spraying perfume, throwing paper shades on bulbs, and insisting everything is peachy.
An Arizona prosecutor said the man arrested in the shooting of a Democratic National Committee office in suburban Phoenix had more than 200 guns and over 250,000 rounds of ammunition in his home, leading law enforcement to believe he may have been planning a mass casualty event.
Maricopa County prosecutor Neha Bhatia said at Jeffrey Michael Kelly’s initial court appearance on Wednesday that federal agents told her about the large seizure made after Kelly’s arrest. Scopes, body armor and silencers were also found, she said. A machine gun was discovered in the car he was driving.
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A teenage boy allegedly killed his engineer father, his mom and three of his four siblings in their home …
Mark Humiston, 42, his wife Sarah and three of their children were found shot dead on Monday inside their rustic mansion in Fall City by Lake Alice, about 30 miles east of Seattle …
A 15-year-old boy was taken into custody after allegedly murdering five of the family’s seven members.
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When Olmos Park police obtained a search warrant for [a] residence on Monday, authorities found an AK-47 manufactured in China [hidden from police] behind a TV mounted inside of [a] bedroom, the affidavit stated. A video obtained of a walk-in safe room full of guns inside [presumed wife-murderer] Brad Simpson’s house showed what appeared to be the same weapon.
Through further investigation, authorities confirmed that the gun was an AK-47 that could switch between full and semi-automatic …
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The largest number of gun-indebted Americans are the tens of thousands of dead depressives in our vast Suicide Belt.
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UPDATE on the fanatic:
“A rough calculation estimates that this guy spent somewhere between $75,000 and $100,000 on ammunition. It’s hard to imagine it was to defend his life and property, unless he was preparing to defend them against the North Korean army. And I don’t think he spent it for sportsman’s purposes, unless he was hunting a T. rex for Thanksgiving dinner.
This country’s insane affection for its firearms is enough of a problem in normal times. But finding a guy with his own personal heavy-weapons platoon in his bedroom at this particular time in history makes me want to hide under the couch until it all passes.”
It’s impressive to see Americans finally perceive the reality of much of the amazing bloodshed around here. Literary types like UD know this as a variant of Chekhov’s Gun Principle:
“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”
If you’re going to hang weapons in every corner of your state, the weapons are going to be fired. We tend, like traditional playwrights, to affix motives to this firing, but the world has moved well past Chekhov and Ibsen, into Beckett and post-Beckett, and this is a world in which people just do things. No reason.
“Vladimir: What do we do now?
Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows.
Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That’s why they shriek when you pull them up.
Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!”
What about shooting into a crowd of people?
News reports … said the city could be short as many as 300 police officers… Birmingham was [in fact] short [only] 63 “patrol officers,” [insisted the mayor]… [Later that day he admitted] the number was actually 172 patrol officers… That number didn’t include other officers such as homicide detectives responsible for investigating the city’s record-setting murders.
… Between 2021 and 2023, the city lost 200 police officers.
That’s 24% of its police force gone in just two years.
The department is losing civilian employees, too, but more steadily and over a longer period. Between 2014 and 2023, the department dropped from 277 civilian staff to 177.
By the summer of 2023, combining sworn officers and staff, the Birmingham police department had at least 294 vacant positions.
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Bama thinks it can pass laws making guns of any kind available to people of any kind, at any time, and NOT have trouble attracting police to its municipalities. You got idiots shooting off guns all over the place, and you think rational people will take jobs that put them in the way of all those bullets every single day? Bama is SOOOO STOOOOOPID.
In Howard County – a locale mere miles from UD‘s Montgomery County – Howard High has among its students a seventeen year old who wears an ankle monitor because of unspecified criminal activity, carries a loaded gun in his backpack, and just got arrested for murder! If he makes bail, will Howard High put him back in class – loaded gun, ankle monitor, murder arrest, and all?