If a mass shooting happens in the dead of a Saturday night and America has forgotten about it by the time Sunday’s 1 p.m. NFL games kick off, did it make a sound?

Because of his comfort level and presence in the neighborhood, [Anthony Ford] knows a lot of people, including security staff at the bars surrounding [the hookah lounge that was the massacre site,] Hush. And that means he often gets called over to help break up fights.

Ford said he’s broken up fights at Hush Lounge at least five times, and intervened in dozens more arguments. Last fall, he said a patron at Hush ran out, jumped in his car, pulled up in front of the lounge and pointed his gun at Ford.

“I’ve been telling folks that Hush needs to be shut down for a long time, and folks need to get on board,” he said. “We’ve never had this kind of problem. There was never this kind of energy there until Hush came along.”

Why wasn’t Hush hushed? What is wrong with Birmingham?

After crunching the numbers, the large [American] city with the highest cost of crime [for 2023] was Birmingham, Alabama. The violent crime rate – which includes instances of murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault – in Birmingham was 1,682 per 100,000 residents. The property crime rate – which includes burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft – was 4,173 per 100,000 residents.

If you stopped brunching every time people were blown away by machine guns in Birmingham, you’d never get anything to eat. As for the streaks of fresh blood on the restaurant walls, look away look away Dixieland.

People don’t know about Birmingham, cuz, you know, Chicago; but it’s time we paid it some mind. It is trying to tell us about American gun laws and American gun love.

A brunch restaurant [above Hush, the hookah lounge where the mass shooting happened,] was full of guests eating and drinking [on the morning after the massacre].

They were unaware or unfazed by the fact that hours before, people were cleaning blood off the pavement.

Those walking around the streets still closed off to traffic could see the bullet holes.

They were in planters along the sidewalk.

They were going up a staircase along the street.

They were in the walls of Pickwick Place alongside blood smeared on the walls.

… that its mayor scared the shit out of the city council/citizens at a recent meeting by waving around an AR-15 and a Micro Draco (weapons of choice in that blood-soaked setting) and wondering aloud why everyone was shooting at everyone with them.

His bootless cries about the blood were answered last night with atrocity on so grand a scale that it’s all over the international and national press — and since we’re popping off bodies from kinders to coots at a quick clip all day long in this country, you can imagine how atrocious the American body count has to be to snap anyone to any sort of attention. Four have died and at least twenty are lying on emergency room tables.

“The mass shooting, one of several this year in the city…”

Saturday night’s Five Points South shooting outside of Hush Lounge, marks the fourth reported shooting in the City of Birmingham at or near a nightclub in 2024... 38 people have been shot, 11 dead, and 27 injured in the shootings.

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Another day spent hosing gobs of blood off the streets of Birmingham!

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Now, the elements of this massacre are deeply familiar to this blog’s readers. Put them together, in fact, and you’re all but guaranteed piles of young people bleeding out on the pavement.

1. Late weekend night.
2. Entertainment district.
3. Proximity to a university.
4. Hookah lounge (this one’s really important – you’re not going to get the numbers that feature on a headline in Buenos Aires unless you’re gathering shooters/victims in a hookah lounge. From a 2020 review of the club where it happened: “This place is a HOT mess — insert gun shot sounds.”). Also a local government that will not shut down hookah lounges, even when they are notorious abattoirs.
5. Immense armed security in and around the club (this does nothing to avert bloodbaths, and may make them worse/trigger them by throwing out/turning away certain vindictive heavily armed people).
6. An already-criminalized clientele (not everybody, duh, but enough of ’em), many of whom, despite the immense armed security, have figured out a way to smuggle guns into the club. And some of whom are in inane ongoing fights with other gunny attendees.
7. Virtually no gun restrictions of any sort in the state.
8. Glock Switches, which make your weapon vastly more vicious.
9. Bored, stupid, high, violence-obsessed, incredibly young/immature people in tight little gangs, desperate for opportunities to get themselves excited/destroy other people/gangs by shooting the guns they’ve gone to so much trouble/expense to hoard/steal.

You really can’t do anything about any of this if you’re Alabam. Hell, their United States Senators are stupider, I promise, than any of the shooters (who the police can’t find), so don’t go looking anywhere in Bama for anyone willing to close a deadly hookah lounge or restrict guns or educate people or anything. You want that sort of shit, move to Massachusetts.

After their son was arrested, the parents were taken into custody on outstanding warrants…

The sixteen year old planned mass shootings at schools all over town; acting on a tip, police found him at one of the schools, toting a backpack with a fully loaded gun.

The parents were reportedly present when the teen was taken into custody, and … they went back to the father’s home to take their son’s backpack full of ammunition and hid it in the mother’s home in an attempt to conceal it during the police investigation… [The] backpack … “held multiple high-capacity magazines and ammunition.”

Police say they interrupted another “Uvalde.”

But this story – career criminals enabling a son just on the verge of a mass shooting – will never rise above very local news coverage because it’s a real yawn. Something like it happens every day. Even if he’d carried out the killings uninterrupted, it might have made a few NYC papers. Certainly not the BBC.

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And… police didn’t check the criminal background of the parents when they first arrived to arrest the son?

Former Secret Service agent and gun range owner Thom Bolsch said it’s not uncommon for gun owners to forget they’re carrying a gun in their purse, backpack or luggage.

Mes petites: You can go ahead and say tens of millions of Americans are dumb as fuck. But forgetting a deadly weapon in your purse, backpack, luggage? THAT dumb? On a not uncommon basis?

They shut down the high school and all; I mean… your sheriff is a cold blooded killer, guys…

Nobody saw anything a little… off… about Sheriff Stines?

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And now everybody’s like what was his motive? Why did he do it?

And mark UD‘s words: It’s onaccounta the judge disrespected him. Wait and see if I’m not right. Dude surrendered at the scene, so we’ll know pretty soon.

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I mean, it could also be a George Moscone sort of thing:

Dan White’s motive for assassinating San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on November 27, 1978 was anger at Moscone’s decision not to reappoint him to the city board.

And just like White, Stines will probably, in the fullness of time, kill himself.

‘[W]e’ve essentially dumped a now virtually impossible task on the lap of federal agents and told them to figure it out. That task, to guard the lives of their protectees in outdoor settings, including in the 31 states that allow citizens to walk around displaying a gun, in a nation with 20 million assault-style rifles, defies logic. 

… [P]eople who should never have a gun are walking around with high-powered weapons… The man arrested in Sunday’s incident had been charged more than 100 times by police in North Carolina, including charges of possessing a weapon of mass destruction and a fully automatic machine gun, resisting an officer, and hit and run. 

… Donald Trump in February promised at the NRA convention that if re-elected, “No one will lay a finger on your firearms,” and, boasted that while president he “did nothing” to curb guns. Now, Trump has been the target of two attempted assassinations in close to two months, with both assailants carrying an assault-style weapon. 

From the iconic 1976 original, through its 2002 and 2023 adaptations, the film ‘Carrie’ continues to frighten and fascinate American audiences. Carrie IV: Carrie Got Her Gun (2024) features the same demented teenager with the same religious mother, but this time it imagines what Carrie might do when she is able ‘to use a 3D printer to make … an AR-style weapon.’

Screenwriters took their inspiration from the Clendaniel story:

Federal prosecutors are seeking an 18-year prison sentence for Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, who pleaded guilty to trying to blow up power stations around Baltimore to destabilize the government in a white supremacist plot… Clendaniel and a confidential informant [were] trying to obtain a high-powered rifle to shoot through substations in Reisterstown, Perry Hall, White Marsh, and more locations.

“If we could do all these in a day…it would completely destroy this whole city,” Clendaniel said in the recordings. 

She told the informant, “It would probably permanently, completely lay [Baltimore] to waste.”

… “No matter where she is, whether she’s incarcerated or not, I do believe god will pour his spirit out on her. His will will be done, and I’m hoping that his will is done in all of our lives in this country,” [her mother] said. …

[If] the plot had not been foiled, it would have caused $75 million in damage to the electrical system and left much of Maryland in the dark. 

… that “gun suicide drives overall suicide rates and make[s] clear that reducing access to firearms is a critical element in helping prevent suicide.”  States where everyone’s got guns in all the rooms in the house dominate – surprise! – all the national suicide numbers.

As in: “AW FUCK,” says a sixtyish MAGA guy in Anaconda-Deer Lodge County**, as he watches some woman mop the floor with his hero on national tv. “WHY GO ON.” Grabs the Glock on the dinner tray.

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** “This is a norm — people die by suicide,” said [child psychiatrist Kelly Irons,] who moved to Anaconda in 2019. “Everyone has someone in their family here who has died by suicide. That boggles my mind. That’s not the same as other places.”

[Lauren] Bolton, an Anaconda native who has been public health director since 2022, said the community has long accepted suicide as a local peril.  

“I grew up knowing that we had high suicide rates,” she said. “There’s a little bit of desensitization. It’s something that we always knew happened.”

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Acceptance, norm, desensitization – get the picture? They love guns more than themselves. Hell, maybe they got a lil romance going with suicide. Be just like the government to try to break it up.

Felipe Rodriguez, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former detective sergeant for the New York City Police Department, slammed the officers who interviewed [mass killer Colt] Gray.

“They walked in there like it was their first day out of the academy,” said Rodriguez of the way the deputies took what the 13-year-old said at face value. “Good cops get facts and you corroborate it. When you don’t corroborate it, that’s when you drop the ball and then we look like idiots.”

A crucial failure, he said, was not getting into the house where they could have verified the elder Gray’s guns were inaccessible or checked the house for cleanliness and whether there was enough food – red flags that would have prompted a call to child services. 

[The] officers failed to ask either Gray for details on their answers or present the elder Gray with facts concerning the family’s own run-ins with the law, from 911 calls to an eviction a year earlier. 

Rodriguez also said Colt fit the profile of a mass shooter: a young, white, male, loner.

“We’re getting mass shooters left and right, you have to do whatever you can,” Rodriguez said. Instead, “they were talking and joshing like the kid stole a cupcake.”

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A photograph of the encounter shows the father wearing a humongous cross on his chest – could the “idiots” have done what George Bush did with Vladimir Putin, and assume that anyone who wears a big cross is too Christian to do anything naughty?

‘[Another family member] said that Colt “was begging for help from everybody around him.”’

Nancy Lanza, Deja Taylor, the Crumbleys, Colin Gray – the crazed, gun-obsessed parents of America’s littlest mass killers/mass killers in waiting — what are we to say about them? Is there anything we can do?

There are so many of them by now. The list of four highlights only the most depraved/pitiable progenitors of the sickest of the shooters; but it’s easy to recall plenty more child/preteen/teen predators with a smaller body count, or with a higher age of slaughter-onset. These are America’s version of Africa’s child soldiers, automata we glance at in court and quickly look away from because we are totally not interested in taking on board just how grotesque a gun culture we have now achieved, how the AR-15 revolution is actively eating its children, how generational gun insanity is upon us. Crazy people with guns produce crazy children with guns; and families and neighbors watch it happen and think none of my business or hey maybe weaponizing this troubled kid will help him.

Gun laws in this country will only become more lax. No point looking there. The only thing that might make a difference is vigilance — people in the orbit of graphically fucked up and highly armed families finding the guts to call the authorities. It take guts cuz duh these are nutty violent people with twenty guns.

And then the authorities must do whatever they can do — remove the guns, take the killer-to-be out of the classroom, detain the parents for other shit they have going on (drugs, illegal weapons, child abuse, disturbing the peace, whatever) — to begin neutralizing America’s emergent children’s army.

… Drunk Brandishing a Gun.

’14-year-olds don’t need AR-15s.’