[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. 

This spiel now has the status of the Nicene Creed – all adherents to America are learning it by heart.

“Zijie was a wonderful human being. And I also know his family, so as a father as well. I start with that because it was indicative of how he interacted with people,” said Dr. Norbert Scherer, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, where Zijie underwent his postdoctoral training… “Zijie absolutely as a young scientist was certainly on a great trajectory to become a dominant person in his field,” said Scherer… Another postdoc fellow who worked alongside Yan remembered him as “a great researcher, always positive, smiling, and full of new ideas.”

In China Zijie’s jealous insane shooter would have had to content himself with private rage against a more successful (professionally; personally) human being; in Tinderbox USA he jest moseyed on over to the gun store, ammoed up, and blew his better’s fucking head off. No muss, no fuss, and he feels SOOOO much lighter on his feet now.

Just remember: “A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, … but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process. … The discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, [comes ] down to guns.”

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Then there are the emergent social attitudes on the part of Americans as they come to accept their primary existential condition as Sitting Duck.

“It’s been heavy around campus. Physically mentally and everything else we have experienced,” [one student] said. “It’s sad that that this happened on our campus but this is also a reality for us especially growing up.”

Point One: SD is a structural reality, which is one of the most important things you learn growing up in this country.

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“I think we’re just very lucky it wasn’t more than what it was, we’re lucky to have each other, we’re connected well as a team,” [a soccer player] said. “We felt the support and love of each other, just prayers go out to the family.”

Point Two: Coulda been worse. He didn’t rampage through classrooms killing dozens like the guy at Virginia Tech. Plus, this has brought us together.

Looking at the bright side is part of the drill now, too.

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Point Three: ‘“I feel the same anxiety that I believe the students and faculty, other community members feel. The fear of not being able to send our children to school and not worry about them having to face senseless gun shootings,” said Congresswoman Valerie Foushee, a Chapel Hill native and UNC graduate, who represents the district.‘

A nearby elementary school was also locked down, which gave parents an opportunity to remember the pulverized children of Uvalde, and students the opportunity to start learning the ins and outs of SD at a very early age.

… North Carolina.

Such a treat to get pictures of these beautiful bright young people huddled in terrified silence, messaging their parents that they love them and have never been so scared… Wonder what the rest of the year will bring!

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The incident’s over, but no one’s saying anything about the incident. A few outlets are reporting one professor shot dead and another person wounded, but nothing’s been confirmed. Meanwhile, general trauma from having endured hours of lockdown/possible slaughter.

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Confirmation.

The killer’s tweets were, natch, full of paranoia; but a spot of paranoia never stopped anyone from amassing an arsenal in Tinderbox USA. OTC: No way being a maniac should keep a person from his very own AK47.

Local headline: UNC SHOOTING LEAVES ONE DEAD AND A CAMPUS TRAUMATIZED: ANOTHER DAY IN AMERICA.

Thousands traumatized, yes, but think hard too about how much fun it is to die like this. Maybe you’re lucky and you never know what hit you as the madman pumps away. Or maybe you die gradually, in agony, in shock, not knowing what’s going on, totally alone, anguishing in your last minutes of confused existence as you watch your blood pool. At least a dying soldier knows what’s up; at least he’s got buddies.

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The person shot to death in his office was the shooter’s advisor, with whom the shooter had published papers.

Motive? Sounds, if you read his tweets, like a John Lennon murder: A weak, envious paranoid decides to put his idol/nemesis out of business.

… football.

Hey, it’s America. This is what you do when you’re pissed with the old bag.

Suicide is shadowland.  Stark statistics are always available – most recently, that American gun suicides have reached an all-time high (and basically anybody who is anybody who doesn’t want to be anybody uses a gun) – but the act itself is so unaccountable, so extreme, that we consign it to the shadows.  

We can sort of make out how a very old person beset by terminal pain might want to do it; but the vast majority of suicides remain hopelessly obscure.  Most of us are too wedded to life, and too afraid of death, to get anywhere with them.

Suicide shadows lie deepest where gunshots to the head ring most sharply.  Cowboy states like Wyoming and Montana have outrageous rates of gun suicide, and their state legislatures do practically nothing about it.  Just getting suicide hot lines set up in these locations is a battle.  Shine a light on massive firearm self-slaughter, after all, and you risk giving gun control people something to talk about.

Even the little we do know about suicide is so upsetting that we avert our eyes.  Can it be that there are many people so lonely, so rejected, so alcoholic – and so bitter and angry about this condition – that they derive their last bit of pleasure from the thought of how they’re abandoning and wounding the few people who do care about them?  Or say their motive isn’t quite this ugly.  Can there really be people whose self-disgust is so intense as to make them pull the trigger?  

Yes, and yes.  

Can it be that there are many people so encased in clinical depression, and so resistant to medication, that no pill or therapy regime will be able to free them from it?  

Absolutely.

So we also press suicide into the shadows because we cannot accept the thought that suicidality often eludes cure.  The best doctors, the most loving families, may jolly it away for a while, but people who have come to hate themselves, or hate their lives, to this extent, may despite all try to do the deed.  And a gun makes it so much easier and more certain to cause death than any other form of self-destruction.  

A gun sits in a drawer by the suicide’s bed, beckoning him (statistics again – it’s overwhelmingly men) to do it.  That’s what it’s for – to kill.  It’s not like pills or ropes — innocent objects which you must struggle to make lethal.  Guns positively sing of unconditional easeful escape from anguish.  In a chorus 450 million weapons strong, they sing of instant surcease.  They even have an anthem, if you like: Bach’s Come, Sweet Death.  

Guns are the kingdom of death on earth, and their preeminent kingdom is America.  In our privileged country, we get pretty much everything we want, including a rich array of death-promisers from which to choose.

… AmmoFest.

They’ve already gotten a jump on things in Baltimore, city of UD‘s birth; but you gotta figure there will be more Independence Day public slaughter as we approach the actual date.

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

A whole lotta bullshit gets said about mass killings in this country, and UD might as well scroll through the latest crapola statements outta Balto.

And why should she do this? Because as long as everyone lies about the way legions of public events in this country are getting shot up, we’ll never get anywhere.

So let’s see what’s being said. Start with the headline in USA Today‘s reporting: VICTIMS OF BALTIMORE MASS SHOOTING etc. Since this was almost certainly a gang revenge event, we can expect that some of the dead/injured are perpetrators – an important distinction no one ever seems to make. It’s like calling Eric Harris a victim of Columbine.

A lot of what we feel in the wake of these routine large-scale murders needs to be disgust at the assholes who commit them. If we’re not allowed to cast a cold eye at the people who start the shooting, and the people they’re fighting with who continue the shooting and turn it into a massacre, the event dissolves into an emotional puddle.

The killing “marred the holiday weekend.” Marred? “Spoiled to a certain extent; made less perfect, attractive.”? Other than your MARRED evening, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?

Let us start describing these pathetic, terrifying events honestly. The killing destroyed not only a holiday weekend, but was one more nail in the coffin of many communities ever being able to gather in celebration, mourning, commemoration, graduation, etc. Ever. The killing once again graphically demonstrated the absence of police personnel in a city far too dangerous to attract enough applicants to the force. The killing is a humiliating admission of the failure of a once-significant American city to live a normal communal life.

The violence in Baltimore comes as federal prosecutors there this week touted their efforts to reduce violent crime in the city. 

Where’s the word “ironically”? Why does the writer not insert “even” between comes and as?

“I want those who are responsible to hear me, and hear me very clearly,” Mayor Brandon Scott said at the scene. “We will not stop until we find you, and we will find you. Until then, I hope that every single breath you take, that you think about the lives that you took, think about the lives that you impacted here tonight.”

If I were the killers, who I assume successfully accomplished their mission of killing some of their rivals, I’d be giggling at the would-be tough-guy mayor of a city that can’t stop everyone from killing everyone. “Lives you impacted” – wow. Impacted. Strong stuff.

I mean, kiddies, the street certainly ran with blood after this, didn’t it? ‘“The shots were just going on and on and on,” [one observer] said.’ The streets must have turned RED after thirty injuries and deaths. Is “impacted lives” the best we can do?

The governor’s statement was even worse. We’re doing everything we can…

But you can’t do anything; you can’t even hire a functional police force.

A police union official said in an email Sunday there were no officers specifically assigned to the gathering.

“There were only three officers assigned to the Brooklyn area of Baltimore City’s Southern District. This is a large area, and to police it safely and effectively you need about seven to eight officers per shift,” said Mike Mancuso, president of the Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 3.

Mancuso said about 2,800 officers are needed to effectively police the city, but staffing is down to about 2,100.

I mean, there’s your lead right there, and instead it’s at the end of your article: no officers assigned… Start with that, and ask why a large gathering in a bloody mess of a city included no police presence.

UD doesn’t claim cold honesty/vivid language about streets dripping with blood will make all the killing go away. But it can certainly help concentrate the collective mind. The vague crap we keep getting is worse than nothing.

Twelve drowned in two weeks on Panhandle beaches! Quite a few of them because, apparently, they ignored big red flags/shouted instructions to stay away from rip tides.

Rescue crews probably don’t want any more drownings, so lifeguards will, I guess, double down on the shouting, leading beachgoers, in irritated response, to pack heat. (Useful tips here.)

… headline.

But that’s nothing! Look at his carry-on luggage!

Sorry about that, babe. You can take out all the restraining orders you want, but this is America. Vicious insane drunks still get to keep 50 to 60 guns in their room and annihilate their family.

You don’t pay any attention to Hastings, Nebraska. Hell, you don’t pay any attention to Nebraska. But it’s itty bitty news stories like this one out of Hastings that tell you what’s going on in gun-blast USA.

Time was a punk revving his car a million miles an hour up and down the street where he lives would respond to complaints about that behavior by spitting on complainants or kicking the air and saying fuck you. Now, however:

Anthony Copley, 20, pulled a rifle on one of his neighbors, threatening to kill them.

The dispute came after one of the neighbors complained about Copley speeding through the residential area.

Police arrived on scene and arrested Copley for terroristic threats and use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony.

“Terroristic threats” is a new one; I guess it allows the court to increase jail time. But anyway, the wee lad no doubt owns lots of big guns and this is no doubt far from the first time he’s pulled the rifle he has on him at all times and stuck it in the face of someone bold enough to confront him about his behavior.

So this describes the new normal inside the blast furnace: Terrifyingly, terroristically, no place in America is safe from a rifle in your face because no place in America is without guns in everyone’s hands. You always have to assume that any complaint you make to any stranger or neighbor under any circumstance could eventuate in a rifle in your face.

Every locality in America has tons of stupid angry assholes like Anthony Copley, and almost every asshole has a rifle. Certain states – Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama – pretty much guarantee you’ll get a rifle in your face at some point. Everybody’s got guns and I guess everybody’s an asshole in those states. Enter at your own risk.

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And yet our bloodiest gunniest states, like Texas, absolutely refuse to blame all the guns for all the blood. Too dumb to grasp correlation, they cannot see that the gunniest states are, overwhelmingly, the bloodiest states. So here’s the poor desperate mayor of Bryan, Texas begging citizens to help him at least slow the gun bloodbath.

“If you see something, report it. If you know something, report it. The problems we are having right now is with youth with guns. It’s not the guns that are bad, it’s the person holding the gun, pulling the trigger,” [Bobby] Gutierrez said. “Please, I’m asking on behalf of our council here. Do your part as well and report and make sure the police aren’t there by themselves to do this by themselves cause if everyone is there during a shooting in the middle of a park, and no one sees anything, and no one’s giving them anything, they can’t do their job.”

It’s not the guns that are bad, folks! It’s the person pulling the trigger. Plus we have a moral issue with all the people standing around watching a shooting in the middle of a park who don’t say anything to the cops about what they saw.

Wonder why witnesses don’t talk. Wonder why blast-furnace states have large populations of silent terrorized people too afraid of all the assholes with guns even to give police a description of someone depraved enough to shoot guns in a public park.

“The person holding the gun” has always lived in Texas; assholes are always around. What’s changed is exactly the number, the normalization, the open carry, and the ease of purchase, of guns. What’s changed is the breakdown of civility and the emergence of paranoia in regard to all other people.

Deja Taylor admitted to lying on a federal form about her drug use, which would have barred her from owning a firearm, when she purchased the gun [her six year old son] used [to shoot his teacher]. Documents filed with the plea also appeared to undercut Taylor’s claim that the gun was safely stored, asserting that investigators found no lockbox or trigger lock while searching homes where she stayed. She is still facing state charges of child neglect and recklessly storing a firearm so a child could gain access to it.

Wonder why your kid’s so fucked up he’s shooting people with your gun at the age of six. Wonder why his public school system kept accommodating you and the shooter. Wonder why you didn’t give a shit when drugs messed you up so badly you left your gun lying around. Wonder why you still have custody of the shooter. He’s young enough that with other people raising him he might not, at the age of eighteen, spend his life in prison after killing a bunch of people.

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With one thing and another, she’ll get, maybe, one year in jail. During which, with luck, her son will benefit from being in the care of a non-negligent non-liar.