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.

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

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. 

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

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 …

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

The largest number of gun-indebted Americans are the tens of thousands of dead depressives in our vast Suicide Belt.

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

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 happening at Albany State!

Background on Guncoming here.

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.

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

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?

You can dress a guy up in a Cybertruck, but when push comes to shove, it’s that most venerable form of American self-expression!

To the long list of shootings/mass shootings during homecoming festivities we can now add Tennessee State University, whose parade fireworks turned out to be – natch; it’s Tennessee – guns. Various celebrants are currently bleeding out in local hospitals.

Well. Yes. A traumatized resident of bloody Birmingham poses the essential question. What sort of city routinely grants operating licenses to establishments expressly designed to attract killers?

This is a city with not even 200,000 people. Turns out nobody likes to get shot. And Alabama is ALL about guns.

A Washington Post survey of 51 of the country’s largest school systems showed that 58 percent of [gun] seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations... Even an exhaustive review of local news sources cannot account for guns carried into schools undetected, gun seizures never disclosed by districts and guns found on campuses located in communities underserved by news organizations... In many communities, the number of guns found has more than doubled, a trend that mirrors a precipitous rise in school shootings. [That’s found, mes petites.]

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

Here’s the beginning of an official communication from a typically gun-soaked American high school: “While any weapon found in our schools is not a positive thing…”

Not a positive thing. Do you know how many principals don’t tell students and parents when a gun is found? Lots of ’em. I mean, it’s not a positive thing…

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

Hot off the press, here’s today’s high school killing field report, complete with all the blithering idiocy/pathetic denial that keeps kids going in for the kill.

America’s long luxurious gun-soak has reduced the reality of some high schools to that of hookah lounges in the deep south: Choked with human and techno security (which makes the experience of being there creepy and oppressive), they are nonetheless incredibly dangerous, as ways continue to be found to smuggle in weapons.

When there are five ill-secured guns inside many of your students’ homes, do you really think students are going to leave them alone? There are 450 million smokin’ hot guns in this country – whaddaya expect some sixteen year olds to do with that? Leave them alone?

So you’ve got this sick toxic thing of high school principals stubbornly thinking they’re high school principals rather than bouncers, and meanwhile students die or almost bleed to death or run screaming from armed psychos in restrooms pretty much every day all over America’s public school system.

The future is fucking obvious. In the next few years, we’ll get to 500 million guns – or more. And the weaponry will be much more lethal. Every news story about an insane sixteen year old blowing ten peoples’ brains out will inspire many more insane sixteen year olds to try their hand at it. Only insane parents will keep their kids in creepy oppressive public school. Private school/home schooling will be the only way out, and public high school as such will cease to exist.

[W]hether you’re the firearm owner yourself or anybody who lives in the home [where] there’s a firearm present, their risk for death by suicide goes up three to five times.

And it’s not that the firearm makes them vulnerable to thinking about suicide. It’s just that if someone is thinking about suicide and they have quick and ready access to the most lethal method, then they’re at greater risk of dying. If you take all the other suicide attempts together in the United States to combine them, less than 5% of those attempts to result in death. There’s nothing that compares to firearms in terms of how deadly they are in a suicide attempt.

A Birmingham AL politician gets it said.

Weeks later, the police can’t find the killers.

I…. dunno. When does Birmingham Alabama become so blood-soaked that, well, it ain’t really what you’d call a great city? The letter to the editor from which I’ve drawn this post’s headline is written by a person who has made sure to live well outside the bloody city limits; so it’s not really his great city. He moved out years ago.

And, as I say, Birmingham doesn’t really strike UD, who has seen multiple videos of police hosing gobs of blood off of its main streets, as a great city. The people who gunned down 24 souls the other night, killing four, only wanted to kill one particular guy standing with the crowd outside a club — this was a standard-issue gang vengeance killing, apparently. So what kind of city produces people who say hell since I’ve got a machine gun I think I’ll kill that guy plus everyone else? Not a great city.

This is far from Birmingham’s first mass shooting. And of course the numbers killed and injured all over Birmingham all the time keep rising. The letter writer seems to think that letting teenagers open carry any old gun without needing a permit or anything is maybe a mite unwise…

“Soon applications to our UAB University and Medical School may be affected.”  Yeah, and just when everyone is bleeding out all over the street. Since Alabama also has a punitive, total ban on abortion, I can imagine potential students and medical staff explaining to UAB that “Welp, after I get out of prison for providing maternal health care, I’ll be gunned down in front of my favorite brunch spot. I think not.”

NRA says: WHOOHOO. Let’s go for 10.

UD gets how you don’t want to admit– smiley-face principal that you are — that the high school you lead is a very violent institution which needs to be militarized (nothing smiley-face there) in order to continue to function without killing people. Vicious fights are common at Oregon’s Gresham High, and now loaded guns stalk the halls, in the possession of sixteen year old sociopaths.

The combination of a doofus who thinks all conflict can be resolved by chats/hugs, and plentiful weaponized assholes, will almost certainly produce beatings/mass shootings galore.

Parents, teachers, and students beg the principal to see their school as the killing field that it is becoming, rather than the Experiment in Loving Co-Learning that her narcissism seems to want it to be.

Guns being what they are in America, this country can no longer afford to assign school leadership positions to feel-gooders who are on their way to enabling the shooting deaths of students and teachers.

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

Today’s walkout.