While Las Vegas is no stranger to gun shows, staging one in the same city as a highly visible shooting that occurred just days earlier is heartless and prioritizes the opportunity to profit from the sale of deadly weapons above the basic decency and respect of honoring those lost and those who continue to recover from the tragedy.
Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,375 per year. According to the latest available analysis of data from 2015 to 2019, the US gun homicide rate was 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate was nearly 12 times higher. Mass shootings, defined as attacks in which at least four people are injured or killed excluding the shooter, have been on the rise since 2015, peaking at 686 incidents in 2021. There have been 632 mass shootings in the US in 2023 as of early December, including the Las Vegas shooting, and at the current pace, the US is set to eclipse the 2021 record this year.
Yesterday’s crazy person with a PhD targeted students. But same deal: Both professors were pissed off with the school, and, this being the United States, both had zero trouble getting guns. And so it goes.
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Actually, no. Our most recent maniac with a gun also targeted professors.
Just down the street from the Harvest music festival massacre.
Ryan Fournier, one of the founders of Students for Trump, was arrested last Tuesday on assault charges in North Carolina … Fournier, 27, was accused of assaulting a woman identified as his girlfriend, “grabbing her right arm and striking her in the forehead” with a handgun …
Isn’t something like this more or less a rite of passage for this super-Christian demographic? Along with fraud, driving over the speed limit, and drunk driving? (UPDATE: Plus threesomes and rape?) (Oh, I can hear it now: “Don’t judge us by our highest-profile leaders!”) UD’s gonna assume this latest thing happened cuz godly Fournier got hisself way fucked up one night and reached for the nearest household appliance.
That’s a headline you don’t see every day. Which neighbors was it? The couple that just moved here from Singapore?
Whew! Two Cal Poly students basically spent part of an afternoon, last week, strolling the campus and shooting various guns into occupied buildings and at street signs and at anything else that caught their fancy. But in a bit of luck they had not yet started shooting people (their activities were pretty quickly reported to the police), so that’s good! That’s great!
“During a search of the students’ on-campus residences, police located and confiscated additional weapons and ammunition.” Well I mean of course and I’m sure all indications are that the students are NOT amassing an arsenal for an eventual mass slaughter and this is nothing to worry about. Just a coupla kids.
As for professors: UD would have loved to be on the search committee that decided a permanently disbarred thief who packs loaded heat on campus would be just the thing for the students at Santa Rosa Junior College.
… plays out in Walmart (where else) as we contemplate our many blessings. An ordinary mom in ordinary Ohio searches the shelves for Thanksgiving decorations while her two year old sits in the shopping cart figuring out how to shoot the loaded Taurus PT92 9mm stainless pistol he found in her purse.
It’s such classic Americana that it calls to mind the famous Norman Rockwell painting, “The Runaway” (1958), in which the policeman leans over to the runaway to say Fine kid but take my gun with you.
Back to the Walmart: The baby shoots at the ceiling and mom’s pissed cuz that thing cost close to six hundred dollars and the reason she’s shopping at a discount outlet is that she’s bought like five of them plus other more expensive firepower plus ammo ain’t cheap and if the cops get wind of this she stands to lose the guns at least temporarily and she still owes around five thou on them all.
Of course she’s proud the kid took the hint and started sharing the gunny life with mom (“Shootin before he can walk“) and she certainly had a laugh when she saw all the shoppers around her scatter! “HAHA he’s just a baby he don’t got no sense of direction chill out.”
And fuck now they’re arresting her and talkin nuts about child endangerment (he only got a itty bitty head wound for godsake) and … ok you can have the kid but gimme back my guns.
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Of course, this particular scene in Walmart is nothing:
Walmart Speaks Out After Two Mass Shootings Occur at Stores Within 24 Hours
There’s a whole lot more going on in your Walmart every day besides a two year old shooting a Taurus!
Guns: A thousand and one uses!
The town’s “deputy mayor has been sentenced to eight months in federal prison,” onaccounta LOOK AT THEM PICTURES. Vast unregistered arsenal stashed in his basement.
[He] admitted before Rockland Judge Larry Schwartz to two counts each of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon: silencers, assault weapons, and high-capacity magazines...
The District Attorney’s Office said Downey admitted possessing a Colt Carbine semi-automatic rifle and an Aero Precision semi-automatic rifle; Surefire LLC and an Advanced Aramet Coro M4-2000 silencers; and two large-capacity feeding devices: Magpul magazines that could hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.
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His comment to the authorities had a nice Dr Strangelove spin:
[He] told … agents he believed he was permitted to modify short-barrel rifles. His reasoning was he was a peace officer…
You know… that scene where President Merkin Muffley says “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”
The biggest bloodbath in the United States isn’t skimping when it comes to the kiddies.
A gun shop in Osseo [Minnesota] is under fire for an email it sent out promoting ammunition for customers’ “trip to the hood.”
The Osseo Gun Club and Pro Shop sent out the email last week that said “Remember we have 30 rnd mags for your trip to the hood.”