Trying to help keep you safe, Toms River NJ and environs: Today’s coverage of Randolph Tashman, a local dude who dropped his gun IN CHURCH (which prompted a call to police), fails to mention another newsy incident featuring RT. He was fired from his city job couple years back for posting truly vile racist vileness; and he offered this caption for a pic of people waiting in line:

“A line at the gun range! Silent majority won’t always be silent be careful libs”

And the guy in favor of conceal carry on the U Wyoming campus then cited what study in response to the pushback? What study told him that more guns, in any setting, do not in fact increase suicide rates? UD would dearly love to see it.

UW alumnus Sandy Rees received a less [than] enthusiastic response when she spoke out in favor of allowing concealed carry firearms on campus.

“You need to follow the statutes and the laws, not squishy feelings and surveys,” she said.

Okay, first about that favorite word of gunnies, ‘squishy.’ UD’s been reading about this subject forever, and she’s noticed that gunnies LOVE this word, which designates people who… uh… read surveys?

Yeah cuz the problem there is that when you survey the UW community a vast majority opposes campus conceal carry. So don’t get all squishy on me and listen to what people say when you ask them!

And then of course mainly squishy designates anyone who goes all damp and feely after suicides and massacres and for fuck sake man MAN UP. Remember what State Sen. Dahm said – EVERYONE DIES THAT’S LIFE. Maybe you’re five and you die clinging in perplexity and terror to your elementary school teacher as a man’s bullets tear through your organs. Tough titties. Saddle up, cowboy, life’s a bumpy ride, and those “events” are just staged to make us go squishy.

But UD – without getting too Freudian about it – thinks gunnies reach for squishy so often because the brain thousands of Wyomingites blow out of their heads is famously squishy. Any number of brain-based kids’ toys are called squishy.

For example. You can’t blame these folks for having ‘squishy’ on their minds. In their world, brains are always going squish squish squish.

[M]y fraternity brothers and I walked over to our plot in Greek Bowl to … sing [a] hymn. When we got there, the music was so loud and the marijuana smell was so thick that you could have confused it for Woodstock. We couldn’t even see our plot.

We turned around and walked back to our RV.

About 15 minutes later, the first round of shootings occurred. 

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Finally someone’s writing a general piece about the recurrent phenomenon of shootings – sometimes mass shootings – at HBCU homecomings. The writer doesn’t go beyond vivid descriptions and handwringing, but it’s a start.

This year, [North Carolina A&T University] officials reported 131,000 people attended events throughout their homecoming weekend, pumping millions of dollars into the Greensboro economy.

Getta loada that. A school with 14,000 students, and this is their homecoming, with tens of thousands of strangers there getting high and getting excited and getting trigger-happy. Some schools are responding with closed campuses and mandatory i.d. cards, etc. Some are happily continuing to walk into bloodbaths year after year. But all must know that when you concentrate enough people and enough partying in one space, there’s a good chance some stupid fucker’s gonna haul out the AR15 just for the hell of it.

Datz gunny America, folks, and denial only kills more people.

Yes, a tad more good news, especially with The Onion having bought Jones’s trash publication, Infowars, with plans to turn it into a parody of itself.

Yet the larger story, for anyone with the stomach to track incoming federal appointments, is obscenely bad.

… American-style.

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.