More guns means more murders … Murders carry some of the stiffest criminal penalties and are more likely to result in an arrest and imprisonment than other crimes. As a result, some experts draw a line between America’s large number of guns and its incarceration rate, which is among the highest in the world.

… [There’s a] hiring crisis for police officers. People don’t want to start a career in a field that seems so dangerous. “This proliferation of civilian weapons makes policing much less attractive,” John Roman, a criminal justice policy expert at the University of Chicago, said. (A similar argument, he added, applies to teachers, given the proliferation of school shootings, although the on-the-job death rate for teachers is, of course, much lower than it is for police officers.)

Steve Dillon directs the UW School of Culture, Gender, and Social Justice, but said he spoke Thursday as a citizen and teacher. 

He said that when he first moved to Laramie he encountered men in orange hats with guns at a trailhead. They’d asked him what he was doing, and he told them he’d just moved there and wanted to go for a hike. 

“They raised their guns, pointing them at my chest and said, ‘You just moved here? Go the F back where you came from,’” Dillon said. 

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Part of a campus discussion about whether concealed carry should be allowed on campus.

Looks as though strong majorities don’t want to go to a school where anyone you see might be carrying a big gun. But they’ll get concealed carry. Will they ever get it.

Year or two after that, they’ll get open carry at the University of Wyoming. Already got it in the rest of the state. Permitless. Only gotta be 18.

Big ol’ rap sheet, just a really dangerous person, and he has a kid who’s allowed to live with him? He got ten years in 2016 for malicious wounding etc etc, and he’s not in jail? Thinks it’s funny to put a loaded gun in his six year old kid’s school backpack? Why does this convicted felon have guns?

Lemme tell you. It’s hard enough for gun-soaked Americans to protect themselves from quiet schizy little nobodies who decide to shoot up schools; shouldn’t it be easier for us to defend ourselves from shriekingly rampant criminals among us? Easier to defend innocent children from them? WTF.

If you’re in a hurry to get your pain pills and you pull your car in front of other people waiting in the pharmacy drive-through and the people in one of the cars object to what you have done, you can brandish your loaded gun right in their faces as they approach your car window! That’ll shut em up. HAHAHAHAHA

‘Kinda tricky and gross cuz lots of glass and blood at the scene plus two messed up and I’m pretty sure dead bodies but main thing is FREE GUN IN ONE OF THE CARS.’

“While this incident occurred on a school campus, it was not directly related to Skyridge Middle School activities,” officials wrote in a press release Wednesday.

Whew. I can’t stand middle schools where 11 year olds brandishing guns is part of official school activities.

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.