From the iconic 1976 original, through its 2002 and 2023 adaptations, the film ‘Carrie’ continues to frighten and fascinate American audiences. Carrie IV: Carrie Got Her Gun (2024) features the same demented teenager with the same religious mother, but this time it imagines what Carrie might do when she is able ‘to use a 3D printer to make … an AR-style weapon.’

Screenwriters took their inspiration from the Clendaniel story:

Federal prosecutors are seeking an 18-year prison sentence for Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, who pleaded guilty to trying to blow up power stations around Baltimore to destabilize the government in a white supremacist plot… Clendaniel and a confidential informant [were] trying to obtain a high-powered rifle to shoot through substations in Reisterstown, Perry Hall, White Marsh, and more locations.

“If we could do all these in a day…it would completely destroy this whole city,” Clendaniel said in the recordings. 

She told the informant, “It would probably permanently, completely lay [Baltimore] to waste.”

… “No matter where she is, whether she’s incarcerated or not, I do believe god will pour his spirit out on her. His will will be done, and I’m hoping that his will is done in all of our lives in this country,” [her mother] said. …

[If] the plot had not been foiled, it would have caused $75 million in damage to the electrical system and left much of Maryland in the dark. 

… that “gun suicide drives overall suicide rates and make[s] clear that reducing access to firearms is a critical element in helping prevent suicide.”  States where everyone’s got guns in all the rooms in the house dominate – surprise! – all the national suicide numbers.

As in: “AW FUCK,” says a sixtyish MAGA guy in Anaconda-Deer Lodge County**, as he watches some woman mop the floor with his hero on national tv. “WHY GO ON.” Grabs the Glock on the dinner tray.

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** “This is a norm — people die by suicide,” said [child psychiatrist Kelly Irons,] who moved to Anaconda in 2019. “Everyone has someone in their family here who has died by suicide. That boggles my mind. That’s not the same as other places.”

[Lauren] Bolton, an Anaconda native who has been public health director since 2022, said the community has long accepted suicide as a local peril.  

“I grew up knowing that we had high suicide rates,” she said. “There’s a little bit of desensitization. It’s something that we always knew happened.”

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Acceptance, norm, desensitization – get the picture? They love guns more than themselves. Hell, maybe they got a lil romance going with suicide. Be just like the government to try to break it up.

Felipe Rodriguez, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former detective sergeant for the New York City Police Department, slammed the officers who interviewed [mass killer Colt] Gray.

“They walked in there like it was their first day out of the academy,” said Rodriguez of the way the deputies took what the 13-year-old said at face value. “Good cops get facts and you corroborate it. When you don’t corroborate it, that’s when you drop the ball and then we look like idiots.”

A crucial failure, he said, was not getting into the house where they could have verified the elder Gray’s guns were inaccessible or checked the house for cleanliness and whether there was enough food – red flags that would have prompted a call to child services. 

[The] officers failed to ask either Gray for details on their answers or present the elder Gray with facts concerning the family’s own run-ins with the law, from 911 calls to an eviction a year earlier. 

Rodriguez also said Colt fit the profile of a mass shooter: a young, white, male, loner.

“We’re getting mass shooters left and right, you have to do whatever you can,” Rodriguez said. Instead, “they were talking and joshing like the kid stole a cupcake.”

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A photograph of the encounter shows the father wearing a humongous cross on his chest – could the “idiots” have done what George Bush did with Vladimir Putin, and assume that anyone who wears a big cross is too Christian to do anything naughty?

‘[Another family member] said that Colt “was begging for help from everybody around him.”’

Nancy Lanza, Deja Taylor, the Crumbleys, Colin Gray – the crazed, gun-obsessed parents of America’s littlest mass killers/mass killers in waiting — what are we to say about them? Is there anything we can do?

There are so many of them by now. The list of four highlights only the most depraved/pitiable progenitors of the sickest of the shooters; but it’s easy to recall plenty more child/preteen/teen predators with a smaller body count, or with a higher age of slaughter-onset. These are America’s version of Africa’s child soldiers, automata we glance at in court and quickly look away from because we are totally not interested in taking on board just how grotesque a gun culture we have now achieved, how the AR-15 revolution is actively eating its children, how generational gun insanity is upon us. Crazy people with guns produce crazy children with guns; and families and neighbors watch it happen and think none of my business or hey maybe weaponizing this troubled kid will help him.

Gun laws in this country will only become more lax. No point looking there. The only thing that might make a difference is vigilance — people in the orbit of graphically fucked up and highly armed families finding the guts to call the authorities. It take guts cuz duh these are nutty violent people with twenty guns.

And then the authorities must do whatever they can do — remove the guns, take the killer-to-be out of the classroom, detain the parents for other shit they have going on (drugs, illegal weapons, child abuse, disturbing the peace, whatever) — to begin neutralizing America’s emergent children’s army.

… Drunk Brandishing a Gun.

’14-year-olds don’t need AR-15s.’

 ‘Kentucky has some of the weakest gun laws in the country, […] while having one of the nation’s highest gun violence rates.‘

But that’s just words, babe. That’s just words! Here’s what it’s like on the ground. On the road.

Looks like a whole bunch of people were shot down Saturday night on Interstate 75 by a dude arrested not long ago for Terroristic Threatening but you know still out there fully armed. It’s Kentucky!

He’s still at large, still fully armed, so, you know, WATCH YOURSELF.

“When our first two units got to the scene there, they said it was a madhouse: people on the sides of the road, emergency flashers going, bullet holes, windows shot out, nine vehicles shot. Can you imagine that? Just chaotic.”  This sheriff dept spokesman is so silly! Don’t sound like much more than your typical UK tailgate… And it’s so stupid because as Wayne LaPierre says  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun so where was he? Kentucky needs more people to carry more guns so next time there’s a mass shooting on an interstate people can grab a Glock in their glove compartment and shoot right back and neutralize the bad guy. Piece of cake. Clean as a whistle.

Meanwhile yeah thoughts and prayers for the mass casualties for real!

Update: They found the AR-15 but not the shooter. Maybe he killed himself with one of his other 25 or so guns.

Nother: Says he’ll kill himself after he feels he has finished his work.

Yet Another: Found dead.

Opening scene begins with an evangelical preacher, who looks like David Bowie at the nadir of his drug addiction, boarding his private jet; his luggage consists of multiple machine guns and large quantities of fentanyl, of which he is a user. He has flown from North Carolina to Las Vegas to find his daughter, who lives in one of the city’s flood control tunnels.

Police arrive at his hotel room; they assume the guns are part of a mass shooting/terror plot and arrest him.

The preacher himself has called the police to his room to report something of his stolen. It has not occurred to him that his appearance/situation may arouse the suspicion of the police, who begin to ask about weapons. “I have a gun in my guitar case,” he tells them. The police discover the other weapons, which include an AR-15 with a scope. He also tells them about his fentanyl.

The preacher fails to appear for his probable cause hearing.

‘Richard Aspinwall, a math teacher, heard commotion outside his classroom and entered the hallway to see what was going on. When he did, he was shot in the chest by the 14-year-old suspect, according to family friend Julie Woodson, who cited accounts by Aspinwall’s students.

“We had to watch our teacher come back in the classroom holding himself like he’s been shot, and fell to the floor,” 17-year-old Malasia Mitchell said. “And as he kept going, my teacher was shot again.”

Students in the class say they pulled Aspinwall back into the classroom and used the shirts off their backs to try and stop their teacher’s bleeding, according to Woodson.

Meanwhile, the students closed the door and protected themselves with desks and chairs, Mitchell said.

Woodson said Aspinwall “died as a hero trying to save his students’ lives.”’

Learning how to kill students and teachers.

More babies w/ Bushmasters:

Christmas card from a guy who might spend next Christmas in jail.

Lauren Vickers, a neighbor, told the New York Post that the family had been trouble ever since moving into the neighborhood in 2022 and the kids were clearly not being taken care of.

‘There were nights where the mom would lock him and his sister out the house. And they would be banging on the back door, just screaming like ‘Mom! mom! mom!’ and crying. It was absolutely devastating,’ she said. 

She added that Marcee was often clearly intoxicated, even when driving her children [ … ] to school. 

‘I would find her in the driveway, passed out, with the car running and blaring music early in the morning,’ Vickers added.

They keep updating as reams of evidence that this madman should never have been in a public school come in. At 13, he’d already threatened to shoot up a school; at 14, he did it. His father kept multiple huge guns in the home, and UD is pretty confident that one of his ARs – easily accessible to his mentally ill son? – did the deed.

So… we’ve already corralled three probable enablers – negligent parent, indifferent school administrators, and inept law enforcement. Mes petites – you’d think in a country with 450 million or so guns, and routine mass killings, some effort would be made to identify likely mass killers. But guns are considered beautiful here; a 14 year old handling an AR is a beautiful thing. His classmates report he never spoke – completely alienated, it seems. Completely out of it. Rarely attended. Pity the teachers compelled by idiot administrators to harbor a student who probably frightened them.

The local county is Trumpian. God forbid you’d vote for anyone who talks about any form of gun legislation. The county got what it wished for: virtually no control of weapons. Check it out. Scroll and keep scrolling until you get to Georgia.

Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them, Adam Gopnik writes.

UPDATE: Oh – and get ready for the lawsuits. Abigail Zwerner’s forty million dollar suit against the Newport News Public Schools is humming along.

ANOTHER UPDATE: As with so many other school shooters, blatant mental health problems, fucked up parent, fucked up school administrators, fucked up law enforcement, guns all over the place. Dad let this child – at age 13, and probably before – handle all the weapons.

A perfect storm here, and a perfect idiot could have seen this before it broke. It’s very easy to see the father in court, and it’s even easier to see the school district sued for tens of millions of dollars. The monster the father made (it’s not clear the mother is at all involved – the parents are divorced, and it looks as though the shooter lived with his gun-totin’ pa) will never get out of prison. Might even get the death penalty.

AGAIN AN UPDATE: Mother a career criminal. Howdy.

La Dee Dah.

Wotta shocker. Daddy’s been arrested. Let’s see…

[F]our counts of involuntary manslaughter, two of second degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children.

The Crumbleys also got involuntary manslaughter. They’re both serving ten year sentences.

Boy, 8, Dies after Shooting Himself with Gun

Left in Mum’s Car while she Shopped

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And even better!

‘The state of Utah, where the shooting took place, does not have any laws to prosecute those failing to secure an unattended firearm... The state also has no laws requiring unattended firearms to be stored in certain ways.‘ I mean, you know, just go to it!

“There’s like a whole section of downtown Minneapolis that they call Little Mogadishu … People are frequently hatcheted to death in the street.” J.D. Vance

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The frequency of hatcheting in downtown Minneapolis

Baffles sociologists and other urban analysts

The normative behavior is mass murder with a gun

What motivates these deviants who don’t know how it’s done?

Talk about a candidate for re-education camp. Go here, lad:

‘[T]he occasional crackle of the firing range is almost soothing.’