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.
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.
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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.)
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.
Prosecutors identified the suspects as… the chapter president; Eddie “Stash” Latson, 43, the vice president; Lee “Trench” Mole, 58, the chapter secretary; Donovan “Sockit” Scott, 35, the sergeant-at-arms; Joseph “Axel” Leeks, 44, a captain; Labarron “Bootleg” Pollock, 48, a former vice president; [and] Michael “Chop” Randolph, 43…
UD will totally admit she’s enjoying slumming it among America’s naughty bikers.
[A]ccording to … 2020 figures, Texas’s gun death rate is around 67 percent higher than that of California’s, per 100,000 people.
Don’t mess with Deathxas.
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The governor has issued a statement:
“Hell that’s mostly drunk ol cowboys be blowin they haids off. That don’t count.”
Because they don’t want their graduating seniors (their ceremony was scheduled in the same venue, later this evening) shot to pieces, the way the Huguenot High School seniors are currently being gunned down.
What will the end of public life in America be like? Looks as though we’re going to find out.
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What’ll it be? UD‘s putting her money on a student who was expelled and feels disrespected.
Oh, wait. They say there were two shooters. Maybe a gang thing.
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Richmond has long had a humongous murder rate.
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Ok, so now they say it was indeed just one person. Who brought multiple weapons and might have targeted one of the murdered people – a just-graduated student – in particular, but seems to have been happy to spray the crowd too.
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The Graduation Day shooting was just one of a handful of violent acts this week that left 12 people shot in Richmond over a 72-hour span.
The Taos County Undersheriff tries to explain to locals complaining about the quality of policing before and after last month’s mass shooting at Red River’s biker rally (see these posts for background), that he told them decades ago how super-dangerous the event was, but no one listened. Thus it’s a bit rich, after years of criminality and menace finally culminating in what anyone with a brain knew would happen, to listen to locals bitching about all the blood.
After all, ‘who would have thought 28,000 bikers converging in a 1-square-mile mountain town of 539 people for Memorial Day weekend could get out of control?’
[R]ecently filed court documents point toward years of turmoil in the state with two rival gangs — the Bandidos and Mongols — perceiving themselves to be at war with the other.
Ol’ UD could have chosen from a zillion recent bloody gun incidents; why so much blogging about the Red River massacre? Because a town promoted a huge, violent, cult ritual! Year after year, knowing full well they were hosting thousands of cretinous warring sects and calling the event family friendly! Drawing children to the powder keg!
‘These guys all seem likable enough: [people tend to think] that they are misunderstood, outlaws from the old days, and they ride motorcycles instead of horses,’ [one policeman] said. ‘Even cops think, “Oh they are just tattooed long haired guys who like to ride motorcycles.” And the reality of it is they are long-haired tattooed guys who ride motorcycles and sell a hell of a lot of methamphetamine and murder people and steal motorcycles and extort people and beat people up in bars for no reasons.’
When people around the world wonder what peculiar American cultural traits produce daily large-scale gun carnage, they need to look at gunny gangy states like New Mexico, and gun-mad towns like Red River within that state. Here’s a perfectly respectable town – a yearlong tourist destination! – with a chronic violence fetish. Why? If the CDC is serious about studying American gun violence, it needs to dispatch a team of epidemiologists to Red River to ask people questions like Why do you think 28,000 armed bikers are cute? What is it about open powder kegs that makes you want to smoke cigarettes on top of them?
I think part of the answer must be that states like NM, always eager to liberalize their gun laws, proudly perceive themselves to be Badlands. Wild west shootouts have always been part of their frontier history, and in these post-frontier days, biker rallies virtually guarantee the survival of that self-affirming drama. Like their neighbor, whose famous tagline is Don’t Mess with Texas, biker rally states assume as a default position paranoid belligerence – and what better organized group to exteriorize that world view than the Mongols?
If I’m right, then mass murder is baked in to states like NM and Texas. If I’m right, it’s constitutive of state identity. Hell, NM done got MORE gun deaths than TX!
Not to get all Freudian, but the evidence points here: Mass murder isn’t what NM and Texas dread; it’s what they crave.
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Slowly, slowly, at least parts of NM learn.
[Conscience-stricken gunshop owner Jon] Waldman said that if he hadn’t already decided to close his shop, another reason presented itself six weeks ago when a customer wanted to buy 4,000 rounds.
Even 1,000 would have been reasonable, but four times that amount, Waldman said, made him question his field.
“If you had ordered 200 to 1,000 rounds, that’s fine. Anyone who shoots regularly, you’re going through a thousand rounds in a month,” he said.
“But when you order 4,000 rounds, the kind of stuff that goes through engine blocks, refrigerators and vests that police officers wear, I just can’t sell that,” he said.
A rational voice at the Taos News poses the question: WTF????
A violent incident like Saturday’s might not have been an inevitability at Red River’s rally, but it sure wasn’t a remote possibility — and everyone involved in putting it on has known that for years.
Even before this year’s fatal shootout, even when biker gangs haven’t rolled into town, the Red River rally has often been a drunken, perverse, dangerous event that has created major headaches for all county residents and first responders, while benefiting a minority of business owners and public officials, mostly only in Red River itself. In previous years, road accidents involving drunken motorcyclists have been commonplace, and have sometimes been fatal.
Drunken, perverse, dangerous… UD wouldn’t mind knowing exactly what the writer means by perverse (‘Perversion is a form of human behavior which deviates from what is considered to be orthodox or normal. Although the term perversion can refer to a variety of forms of deviation, it is most often used to describe sexual behaviors that are considered particularly abnormal, repulsive or obsessive.’ Do tell!), but anyway the list ain’t pretty and it definitely makes one wonder about the perversion of a municipality that would, year after year, subject its 500 residents to the roar of 28,000 bikes, fatal traffic accidents, the street fights of warring gangs, a constant atmosphere of weaponized menace, the choking smoke of weed and worse (I’m guessing on this one), the need to flee town or lock your doors for the duration. ‘The warning signs were there. Add in excessive alcohol consumption, a little cocaine on the side, and the potential for violence should have been anticipated.’ Red River needs to appoint a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose brief would be to review this inexplicable behavior, find a way to apologize for it, and make a clear break with a long shameful chapter in town history.
UD’s effort to account for the unaccountable goes something like this.
The Red River town council has been colonized by bikers and their allies. Every year rational voices try to curtail/end the bloody mess and are shouted down by the bikers/barkeeps/drug dealers/gun dealers/fleabag hotel owners running the town. They don’t talk about money but rather the beautiful freedom of rebels who to be sure might make some people uncomfortable but this is America we get to be free free free as the wind and if you’re not on board why not remote start your Prius and move to Martha’s Vineyard.