How quickly will he again be released on probation, so he and his “9mm pistol, loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition in a 13 round magazine” can once more visit Funz Trampoline Park?
As Stephen Dedalus might have put it if he lived in the United States of America in the twenty-first century.
In virtually every case of our prolific young demented mass killers, neighbors, friends, and family members eventually emerge to testify to their obvious mental illness, their obvious violent tendencies, the guns their fucked up parents left lying around the house. They encountered it, they faced it — they did everything but tell anyone about it.
[Ethan Crumbley’s mass killing] weighs heavily on [one of his neighbors] now because she wonders what she could have done differently to help her young neighbor-turned-school-shooter.
“This haunts me, big time,” she said. “I will always wonder, ‘What else could we have done?'”
This woman recognized Crumbley was nuts and his parents gunned and ginned up degenerates, but she didn’t contact family services or the police. She tried talking to the Crumbleys and got screamed at for her trouble, and then she shrank away. She’s probably lucky the family didn’t shoot her.
So I understand. Going to the authorities would make drunk, violent people even angrier at her. Yes. I understand.
‘He was never, ever OK … They would go out and drink and leave him home alone. … He was scared. He would come over to my house and say, ‘I can’t be here because I’m going to get into trouble.’
She never spoke to Jennifer Crumbley again after that argument. …
‘Ethan didn’t have a prayer …’
His school, just as aware of the threat he posed, tried feebly to get his parents to take him away, but in the event administrators failed to stand their ground against the scary Crumbleys.
All of America’s pig-calling states have among the highest number of guns, the laxest gun laws, AND by far the nation’s highest suicide rates. SOOEYcide!
Alaska
Wyoming
Idaho
Montana
Y’all come on down when you’re ready to blow your head off!
Ours went on for fourteen minutes!
These in-state rivalries are adorable. Let’s hear from Chattanooga!!
****************
Wanna play? Make sure your state, like Tennessee, doesn’t have any gun laws.
Whatever you think of the Defund the Police arguments, it’s grotesquely clear that these United States are the last place in the world you want to fuck with a system that produces people who run toward fire and take out shooters. “What’s exceptional about America is that we have sacrificed the safety of our children because letting them die helps gun sales.” You can thank the NRA plus millions of Andrew Ogles for current conditions.
Mad Andy’s instagram.
Apparently Andy and the missus... But them’s just rumors at this juncture.
I’ve grown appalled as parts of the gun rights movement have veered into embracing a form of gun idolatry or gun fetish that treats a gun as a quasi-sacred object. Indeed, Representative Andy Ogles, the congressman for Covenant’s district, sent out a Christmas card featuring him, his wife and two of his kids holding AR-style rifles. Gun fetishists delight in “triggering” and intimidating fellow citizens with open displays of firepower.
*****************************
Scientific American:
[F]etishization of the firearm [in America has grown] to the point that, in the present day, gun owners view their weapons as adding meaning and a sense of purpose to their lives…
‘Copycat behavior is very common, in fact. Anecdotal evidence strongly indicates that threats increase in schools nationwide after a shooting has occurred anywhere in the United States.’ [Professor Mary Ellen] O’Toole encouraged students, teachers, other school staff and police to ‘be more vigilant in noting disturbing students’ behavior’ …
That’s the problem, ain’t it? The massacrist’s best friend knew she was suicidal and generally unstable, but we all have difficulty imagining that being an edgy introverted and self-destructive person with identity issues could ever have anything to do with seeking out children for slaughter. Sue Klebold was aware her son tended toward depression, and, more dire, had as his best friend a person she correctly identified as truly mentally disturbed. Of course she also knew her son had been in trouble with the law. She could never have imagined it added up to Columbine.
Other massacrists, like Adam Lanza, lived in virtually total isolation in their houses; in Lanza’s case, only his dippy, gun-mad, mother had access to the paranoid monster he’d become. And as for in-school monsters-in-waiting, most of us run away from scary people, while the thought of the vengeance they’d exact if they found out we reported them stays our hand.
But these days, when you have in your university class (as I once did when I taught at GW) a student who, session after session, displays in her behavior and comments a rather scary pre-psychotic orientation, you’ve got to think guns. You’ve got to tell campus security.
Here’s another focus for your anger, amid this eerily similar replay of the Adam Lanza massacre eleven-years ago.
Both killers
1. were diagnosed mentally ill;
2. were former students at the shot-up school;
3. were in possession of large personal armories;
4. shot their way through the school’s doors;
5. expressed “resentment” of the school;
6. were in their twenties.
I’m waiting to hear whether the latest killer was, like Lanza, addicted to repulsively violent video games. She was by her own admission a video game addict; it’s not clear about the level of violence.
We’re sick – we should be sick – of the sweet quiet no criminal record bs we sometimes hear about the massacrist in the immediate aftermath. Oh, she was a lovely shy thing in high school! What a lovely quiet neighbor – I can’t believe all this time she was in there amassing an armory and writing her mad manifesto…
Lanza – who like the latest killer squirreled away in his house plotting his revenge – pumped four bullets directly into his mother’s head before going to the school. The bullets were in a gun his mother had gotten him as a gift. This woman got her head blown to bits because of her nutso denial — the same denial that got Kip Kinkel’s parents ripped to shreds by the guns they got Kip as gifts because they thought it would be therapeutic.
We’re sick – we should be sick – of an American culture so twisted that parents who know – must on some level know – that their kids are disturbed/dangerous either get them guns or don’t seem to make any effort to take their guns away. And certainly don’t seem to confide in anyone whatever they might know/suspect/fear about their kid’s murderous thoughts/intentions.
I’m just saying that I don’t intend to believe the bullshit we’re about to hear from this person’s parents.
Given what was done, UD will go with “it.”
****************
And remember: It keeps happening because, as Nicole Hockley puts it, millions of Americans “love guns more than children.”
Don’t you dare pray, @GovBillLee. My son’s on lockdown at the school where your wife & I taught your kids. God spared your child a gun death. You thanked him by putting a man who sold school shooting ammo on the State Board of Education. Go to the devil.
Only anger is going to get people off their asses and make something happen. Anger will get people into voting booths to rid the body politic of Glocksuckers like Lee.
Anger expresses an unmitigated refusal to accept the daily display of blood-soaked innocents in the world’s sickest gun-owning nation. Don’t hold back.
I mean this morning. The day is young.
Get used to these sorts of statements.
“Three pediatric patients were transported to Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, all having suffered gunshot wounds. All three were pronounced dead after arrival,” officials said.
*************
Got two adults too. Will the number rise? Injured?
And let’s play that game where we try to figure out just what precise sort of well-known lunatic gun obsessive did it. Ready?
So, the school was pre-school to grade six. We can go the Newport News shooting way and say it was a demented 5th or 6th grader. We can go the Sandy Hook way and say it was a demented former student in his twenties. We know the shooter was male, and we know he was young, and we know he was insane, and we know people knew he was insane. I mean, we don’t actually know anything at all yet, but we can be pretty sure of these things. He probably lived with his parents, who made multiple guns freely available to him. He probably practiced shooting in the backyard and annoyed and frightened the neighbors.
*****************
Another one. Three adults dead.
I’m going to guess the shooter entered a classroom or a pre-school room and killed the adults first to keep them from trying to save the children, and then went after the children. We can expect the numbers of fatalities/injuries to rise.
******************
Wow. I was wrong. Shooter was a female teenager.
School was one of many which has not yet realized it is an armed camp and must begin to look like one. And getta load of the weaponry!
The suspect entered the school through a side entrance and was armed with at least two assault-type rifles and a handgun.
Everyone needs a role model. Hers was Stephen Paddock. It takes a heap o’ AK-47s to make a real Dead Zone!
How the fuck do you carry that much weaponry on you? She must have had a couple of suitcases and a backpack.
And now America’s demented gunny girls who’ve been itching to kill five year olds but lacked the courage will take heart from this now-famous massacrist and start planning.
*******************
The shooter was 28 years old.
*******************
Authorities clearly know who she is, but aren’t saying until they deal with her family, plus make sure she didn’t dispatch a few people she knew before slaughtering strangers. Popular objects of pre-massacre attention include parents, roommates, ex-spouses, and psychiatrists.
******************
She was a former student. Adam Lanza playbook.
It’ll be real fun finding out how someone that insane got hold of all that weaponry.
We know how Lanza got his: Gifts from Mom. Who he shot four times with a.22-calibre rifle on his way to Sandy Hook. Let’s see how this killer got hers.
And I mean. If you’re looking for patterns. Kip Kinkel shot his parents to death just before he killed two and wounded 25 at his high school.
A Temple professor neatly sums up Spring Break USA, which leaves the rest of us to wonder why it keeps happening year after year, since cities have known for quite a few years that with absolute certainty several people will be shot, several police will be assaulted, scads of guns will be confiscated, riots or near-riots will break out, etc., etc. Every year is significantly worse than the last, and with every year normal tourists who find the terrifying, nationally broadcast, sleazefest offputting decide to stop coming altogether to Spring Break cities. A real win/win, ja?
UD’s thing is that drunk armed breakers and their drunk buddies should be directed via social media, incentives, etc., to America’s most insanely gun-friendly locales for their fun. These cities are begging for it. The local gunnies will welcome the incoming gunnies with open arms, and open-air festivals of the gun, with shooting into the air and elsewhere, will be scheduled nightly. No curfews or closed bars, and plenty of supercheap hotel rooms. If there are fights under these fight-friendly circumstances, that’s presumably the very outcome insane-gun-city has been dreaming of. BIG BIG GUN FIGHT!
Let it all come down, babe. You’ve been waiting for it, storing up ammo and armaments and protective gear and a week’s worth of grub.
Galveston!
Galveston.