[State Sen. Jeff] Wilson was arrested and charged with unlicensed possession of a firearm in Hong Kong on October 21, 2023, after being found with a revolver at the Hong Kong International Airport. The gun is legally licensed in Washington State, but not in Hong Kong. According to Wilson, he discovered the unloaded firearm in his luggage in his carry-on luggage mid-flight. He alerted airport authorities and was subsequently arrested. After his initial court hearing, Wilson and his family had verbal exchanges with reporters at the courthouse, leading to police mediation. Wilson was said to have verbally abused the reporters and asked them to delete any photos taken outside of the courthouse.  He was ordered to surrender his travel documents and not to leave Hong Kong until his next court date.

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Here’s hoping his next court date is some time in 2028.

Shot that motherfucker into one long line o' cars
Shot it at the Waffle House Decatur Alabam
Got pissed with his buddy and - bang bang bang shazam
Barely outta short pants but God Bless the USA
Packs a AR-15 when he goes out to play

Benjamin Baker, a former police officer who is now policy adviser on public safety to the governor, says the crisis is exemplified by a scene he witnessed in an Albuquerque park in July.

“I had my kid here for football practice — he’s 12,” Baker says. “And people decided to come have a rolling gun-and-stabbing battle within feet of where he was practicing. And it caused a person to be shot. And the ages of those folks were 13, 14 and 15.”

Baker says guns have long been part of everyday life in this Western city, but the nature of the local gun culture is different. He says people now see guns not so much as a tool, but as something “sexy.” And they seem more likely to fire them in anger.

“That should have been a fist fight! At worst!” Baker says of the teenagers in the park. “I cannot recall a time where things were as violent and as bad, and particularly how young the age of the perpetrators has become.”

[One policeman] guesses half the cars in Albuquerque traffic now contain guns, some of which wind up in the hands of felons or children.

Post mass-shooting, people always say stuff like that. They always say mass shootings are a grotesque departure from local social life and make the whole place look bad.

But they need to begin to understand – certainly in our bloodiest states, like Texas – that spilled blood everywhere – football games, parks, churches, highways, schools, state fairs – IS the state of Texas. Blood and guts all over the place is our clearest reflection of places like Dallas. Blood and guts and shrieking families running all over the state fairground IS the news out of Dallas, just as much as massive suicide by gun is the news out of Wyoming.

Like… it’s time to rewrite the state song:

It’s the crimson rose of Texas…

But Texas isn’t ready for this transition, even if this is indeed the stark reality, so until it arrives at an acceptance of its killing fields identity, we are going to have to watch as its citizens draw themselves up in shock again and again and again and again as mass killers shut down public life.

More interestingly: What happens when Texas does eventually realize the elementary truth that when everyone in the state owns shitloads of unlocked guns, someone in the state, purdy much every day, is going to go shooting one of them off in a public place? Eventually, in states like Texas, events like state fairs, without clear defensive barriers/National Guard protection, will be seen as the provenance of shabby stupid pathetic people who don’t know any better than to come in from the blood. No one will be seen outside, except at hyper-surveilled gated community socials. Hell, in time even the gated landscape will become too dangerous. Everyone will move inside.

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Correction: It’s not the state song. UD thanks a reader.

… American youth football.

All of America is way gunny, but certain areas (Balto MD, larger Shreveport, Macon, and Richmond, among others) are just totally insanely gunny. Colleges in these areas are getting all shot up, especially during big, open, outdoor/evening events like Homecoming, which UD, for these campuses, calls Guncoming.

Morgan State has now indeed announced it’s building a wall around itself.

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And look – its not very college-y — everyone knows that. Which is why so many shot up schools are postponing the inevitable. It’s a mark, a stigma, a plain admission that your school sits in a shooting gallery. And so – parents and applicants ask – what does that say about the experience of going out at night to get a pizza? Do we really want to choose this school?

This is a partial list of schools where homecoming features (sometimes year after year) mass shooting on campus. Bowie State’s the latest. I think it’s time to call this a trend.

To call it a trend and think about it. Why is Guncoming (seems a better name for it) a thing?

Here are a few observations.

1.) These are already notoriously shot up locations: Baltimore, Shreveport area, Macon area, Richmond area. The gun crime rate in these locations is astounding; these campuses are unsafe.

2.) I don’t think the campuses quite acknowledge/realize how badly shot up things are around them. I recall Grambling’s president’s comment: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” His campus sits in one of the most murderous metro areas in the US, but he thinks he’s in Arcadia.

I mean, UD gets it that you’re profoundly disinclined to characterize the local bloodletting correctly if you want your institution to survive. Let the murder/injury rate get bruited about, and parents are going to be reluctant to entrust their children to you. I’ve made this point also about whacked out Waco, where parents still send their kids to Baylor, despite knock your socks off gun violence all over town. (Plus some, er, on-campus issues.) When will Guncoming locations become so infamous that people won’t want to go to school there? Things are definitely going to get bloodier.

3.) Big, open, often late-night homecoming events are just asking for it. Penetrate the crowd with ease and find the guy/group that has dissed you in some way and let it rip. Maybe you don’t know your victims, but someone jostled you and you’ve been itching to give your Glock a test run. Don’t make it easy for the gunnies: Close your campus, and I mean seriously close it. Don’t do late-night events.

This blog has long followed the way gun-mad America has ritualistically gunnified more and more of our public events, especially those involving parties and football/baseball/basketball games. Gather large numbers of excited people pretty much anywhere now. Make some of them drunk or high; piss some of them off because they lost a game or an object of sexual interest or indeed any sort of competition/argument.

Or hey maybe just make one of them plain ol’ celebratory and what better way to express your exuberance than to shoot your AK into the air, or into a crowd? Once guns are always and ever there, and once they take on massive symbolic/expressive significance, it seems pretty obvious that Morgan State and many others will, year after year, feature gunfire as a crucial part of homecoming.

And the logic of escalation/tradition means that by the third gun-year, five people will be shot (five people were just shot at Morgan State’s homecoming) rather than one or two. It also may mean groups of shooters: Baltimore’s mayor has announced that “It’s believed there were three shooters firing into the crowd, none apprehended or ID’d at this time.”

Getta loada that! THREE shooters.

Hysterically racing away from the shots; lockdown; weeping with your loved ones when lockdown’s over and you’ve survived — it’s a full-grown postmodern metanarrative now, self-defining and even somehow cathartic. We’ve come through! We’ve cheated the reaper again this year. On to next year.

Question: How do they relax in Wyoming?

Answer: By having lots of loaded guns loose around the house.

… Chapel Hill.

Every week they sprint.

And of course down there “People are armed to the teeth.”

And from the comment thread on a 2021 NYT story that asks in its headline “WHY DOES LOUISIANA CONSISTENTLY LEAD THE NATION IN MURDERS?” :

Combine the [nation’s] highest rate of gun ownership with the lowest rate of education, sprinkle in some STRONG white supremacy and insurrection and that spells doom for all Louisianans.

There are close to five hundred comments on the article, many of them from Louisianans, and most commenters agree that while you’re free to consider variables like a history of violence and an engrained distrust of government and its institutions, the crucial element is simply stunning numbers of guns in the hands of hyperemotional (the motive is often ‘disrespect’) and unschooled people.

Equally stunning but absolutely predictably, the killers are getting younger and younger, as in the latest story out of the blood-soaked Baton Rouge area, involving a high school kid blowing away one schoolmate and injuring two.

Zat all you got? 2.5 kids a month plus at least one adult gun death a day by homicide or suicide? Give me a call when citizens’ brigades are mopping up twenty buckets of blood every morning in Civic Plaza and getting shot at while doing it! Okay?

Meanwhile, Guv, if you think a few pulverized brats justifies seizing our AKs, you are looking at a world of pain.

America’s Number One most dangerous city!

“It’s very scary, and then you’ve got police officers telling you don’t come down here without a gun. I just won’t come anymore because if you have to go somewhere with a gun, why do you go?” the witness said.

Another man, who did not want to be identified, brought his wife and three small children downtown to enjoy the new playgrounds in Tom Lee Park. He said he heard a gunshot while they were walking back to their car, and when they got to the parking lot on Wagner Place, he saw the shooting victim next to his vehicle.

“It’s actually normal down here. It’s crazy in broad daylight,” he said.

Far out: New Mexico’s gun-splashed city is so unstaunched at this point that the governor has declared a health emergency! As in like you can’t leave your house, man, without some chance of being pulped; and that goes for your kids, too — so parents are increasingly reluctant to send their kids to school.

A pretty dire outcome for America’s dumbest state, and recent winner of Worst State Overall in which to live.

Suicidewise as well NM vies with The Headblaster Three (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) for Berettas to the brain. It’s right up there (this is from 2020), almost always securely in the top five.

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So for 30 days the cowboys can’t carry their guns in public, says the governor, and ‘course they’re all pissing their high-waisted Y-fronts at the news. ‘Course the governor’s a fucking dictator and when Trump comes back he’s putting her in front of a firing squad.

[The] official GOP platform … accepts widespread, preventable death and suffering. I don’t actually believe most Republican voters accept that … , but the GOP apparatus does — not because party officials do not comprehend the gun-created, blood-splattered abattoirs in community after community, but because they need the votes of everyone who believes that any constitutionally reasonable laws to reduce gun-related deaths and injuries are a coordinated conspiracy [among] Democrats, RINOs, communists, socialists, globalists (aka a global Jewish cabal), Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the Marxists. 

... Was a nation awash in guns what the framers of the Constitution intended?

… We are now a nation held hostage by trauma entrepreneurs who wield and brandish firearms as weapons of holy war. Believe it or not, the vast majority of my fellow firearm owners will broadly agree that [serious gun] reforms are necessary.