… shows that we’ve moved from late night sketchy gunfight locations (hookah bars) to wholesome kids’ dance class locations. Look at the Facebook page for this once-wonderful, now utterly bloodied, place.
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Four dead, many injured, most in their teens. UD‘s gonna go ahead and guess that what got the fight going was the same old shit – two guys arguing over a girl. But now, along with fists, lots of kids have got a gun.
And it was so innocent a place – a dance studio for kids – that I’m sure no one thought they’d need to pat people down for weapons.
Yet surely they knew that everyone in this story lives (died) in the seventh most gun-friendly state in America. Guns per capita: 33.15. Look at this list! Do people in Alabama look at these lists??
Not to be mean, but what the fuck sort of thing do people think is going to happen.
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Keenan Cooper, the DJ at the party, told WBMA-TV that the party was stopped briefly when attendees heard someone had a gun. He said people with guns were asked to leave, but no one left.
See how it is? No security. “Asked to leave.” WTF. Alabama has to accept what it is – 33.15 guns per capita – and act accordingly. No place is even a little safe with 33.15 per capita. Get it?
Nope. Deadville’s nihilist mayor says “trying to control guns would prove … futile … .”
A Nashville, Tenn., florist is refusing to serve a Republican National Committee (RNC) fundraiser featuring former President Trump in protest over lack of action on gun control laws… [The shop calls for] other Nashville businesses to refuse money from the RNC “until they begin to make the changes to gun laws that most Americans are calling for. … Our community has just lost seven people, including three young children, to yet another school shooting. At this moment I cannot ignore the work that the RNC has done to create this tragedy and so many others like it… The Republican Party has wasted taxpayer money and precious legislative will on banning drag shows, rather than assault rifles that are being used to murder children in their classrooms.“
… where gun ownership is mandatory, has begun to attract attention from social theorists as well as policy makers due to its sudden, exponential, growth.
The so-called ‘Flakellants’ (pronounced “flak,” not “flake”) derive their identity from the medieval Flagellants, groups of religious fanatics who marched – and march: flagellants continue to exist – through the towns and cities of Europe half naked, scourging themselves bloody with penitential whips in a public, masochistic act of self-mortification.
Contemporary “Flak”ellants – in a behavior reflecting what David French describes as “a form of gun idolatry or gun fetish that treats a gun as a quasi-sacred object” – march semi-nude in public thoroughfares while scourging themselves with guns in the shape of crucifixes.
Last week, a three thousand-strong contingent of Flakellants took to the streets of Provo (for modesty’s sake, women Flakellants wear flak jackets), their numbers increasing as local citizens spontaneously grabbed their own guns, attached heavy ropes to them, and pistol-whipped themselves.
All Flakellant marches end with at least one public suicide as an act of ultimate sacrifice/penitence; these are apparently never planned but rather the result of an overflow of spiritual/gun-bearing fervor. “Of course, it’s a sin,” one of the Provo marchers commented to a reporter covering the event, “but you can’t stop someone determined to bow to the power of the gun. For us, the pouring out of their blood in front of us is a communion as powerful as the Blood of the Lamb. We wet our fingers with this sacred outpouring and mark our foreheads and our gun crosses with it.”
The next Flakellant march (co-sponsored by the Catholic organization Rifle-Scopus Dei) will be in two days, in Salt Lake City, led by Tennessee Representative Andrew Ogles. It is expected to attract at least ten thousand participants.
… involved a six-year-old obviously disturbed kid who almost killed but only badly wounded his teacher (she’s suing the school board for forty million dollars, but details of the virtually criminal neglect on the part of administrators suggest she should sue for sixty million) … Wounded, she still managed to save all the children in the room from the shooter.
Do you remember this case? I know all them massacres in Nashville and Louisville are crowding out your memory of this one and hundreds of others. But you probably remember this one because six-year-old gun-bearing would-be murderers are – even in this country, where the blood comes sweepin’ down the plain – pretty fucking amazing.
So, the latest is that, following in the footsteps of the bone-chilling Crumbleys, the woman who birthed this severely mentally ill little boy and left her gun lying around for him to take to school, has been indicted by a Newport News grand jury.
That’s very good news; but in both cases – and the tons of others on their way – we must send these people, once found guilty, to prison.
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From the wonderful family that brought you Alex Murdaugh on down, oodles of American assholes are currently leaving loaded guns all over the place. When their one year olds find them and kill their two year olds it barely makes the news, cuz it happens all the time. The babes need to shoot up a school to get our attention.
But they still don’t have our attention. Not sose you’d notice.
From prison, the Crumbleys and Deja Taylor need to be incentivized to star in a joint public service announcement, in which, sadder but wiser, they encourage other Americans to lock their guns and put them away.
But in announcing the launch of his new organization – Gunning for Granny – Kirk went on to say that there’s something we can all do right away to stem the tide of school massacres.
“With the support of the NRA, we are today rolling out Gunning for Granny, a grassroots movement aimed at redirecting shooters’ rage from elementary school settings to assisted living communities. We all mourn the senseless shattering of little ones just beginning their life journey, whereas the massacre of the elderly – just as easily accomplished within the confined and concentrated setting of dementia care facilities – is a far more tolerable, rational, and achievable event. If we can make the case – via PSAs, viral memes, and interviews with thought leaders – that the effect of assault weapons on an eighty year old body can be every bit as satisfying as their effect on an eight year old body, we can, to quote Shakespeare’s play about the senile, “show the heavens more just.” Gunning for Granny will use humor and humanity to target the most burdensome among us, while at the same time rescuing that most precious gift of all: our children.”
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!
Whatever you think of the Defund the Police arguments, it’s grotesquely clear that these United States are the last place in the worldyou 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.
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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…
