… really shone in South Carolina last night, with the home crowd shouting GUILTY and LOCK HIM UP at one of three Bama players involved in gunplay/a fatal shooting not long ago in Tuscaloosa. There was also a fight in the stands.
Now, since the player those mean people shouted at didn’t actually himself shoot the fatal shot (I mean, yeah, he provided the gun; and he’s spending most of his off-court time talking to authorities; but he didn’t you know SHOOT the woman; his teammate did), he remains a player in excellent standing at that excellent institution.
And, you know, Gun Normalization being what it is around here, I’m sure all three players will soon be reinstated. I mean, young people hanging out on the street at night with guns YAWN. As for … mmm… let’s call it… killing some woman who in some way irritated them well think of it like this: The mere possession of a gun is liable to escalate … consequences… in these situations. People use the implements available at stressful times. If they’d had knives, the woman might have survived. Unfortunately, they had a gun. No one’s fault.
South Carolina lost the game, by the way; and who’s surprised? BAMA HAS THE BEST SHOOTERS. Now that DC isn’t using it, Bama’s changing its team’s name to the Bullets.
UPDATE: This guy thinks murder and provision of a gun for murder are enough to shut down a program! And not just any program: BAMA.
It would be a major step for the No. 2 team in the country to suspend its season. At some point, though, [given an ongoing team-related] murder investigation, student well-being and simply doing the right thing must prevail.
LOL. Look, babe. High-powered, heavily recruited college teams assembled by rich cheater coaches always yield some naughty lads; and the lads’ teamwork may run to more than shooting baskets together. How many stories have we covered, on this blog, of college football and basketball teammates raping and robbing and hazing ensemble? Guns have always been around these programs – you’ll find them in players’ cars, frat houses, and dorms. And the guns are multipurpose: Football hero Tyler Hilinski’s suicide was made possible by dormmates who, at the moment Hilinski was really feeling down, just happened to have had an AR-15 style rifle in their room. High-level drug distribution conspiracies operating out of a bunch of San Diego State U frats wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without a cache of weapons to protect the merch. What I’m trying to say is that, exactly as in the larger culture, guns are everywhere on many campuses, especially in the Greek/football/basketball subculture. Bama’s unscandalized response to a shooting death apparently facilitated by one of its active players is what you get when everyone’s owning and carrying and shooting. No big deal.
The now-fired Texas school superintendent who left his gun in an elementary school bathroom, where it was found by one of the tykes, uttered this immortal statement.
And, as this local points out, they’re still stiffing suicide prevention in the state which boasts by far the highest rate of self-slaughter.
The only thing baffling about the local’s commentary is his calling legislative indifference to rampant head-shooting-off in his state “baffling.” Nothing could be less baffling. Wyoming loves violence, and especially gun violence. Wyoming hates government. The two things that frighten Wyomingites the most are
A losing season at UW footballl.
Any form of government interference in anything any Wyomingite wants to do with a gun, up to and including his sovereign right to blast his fuckin head off with one. Got it? Now fuck off.
You got a zillion guns and very little police enforcement in the city with the highest murder rate in America – who wouldn’t carjack? It’s got to the point in New Orleans that just, say, beating up an old guy and taking his car doesn’t rise to the level of a crime.
Michael Casey, owner of Liberty Cheesecakes, was on a date in a wealthy area of the city when he witnessed an older man being beaten during a carjacking.
Chekhov’s nineteenth century directions are in severe need of updating in our time, most potently on view in the ongoing Murdaugh familicide trial. Taking the stand on behalf of his father, who is accused of murdering his wife and son, the surviving Murdaugh son describes hundreds, if not thousands, of guns of all kinds scattered about the three Murdaugh properties.
Buster, who is testifying even as we speak, says no one put guns away properly; all three of these alcoholics (plus Alex has a twenty-year-long drug addiction) constantly used them, played with them, shared them, threw them in unlocked cars, got them stolen, lost them. These are not what you’d have considered irresponsible people – highly educated, influential attorneys from way back in the long family history, they are one of the first families of the state of South Carolina.
But – well – all the details here, if you can stomach them.
Poor Paul Murdaugh, raised by drunken savages. Amazing he made it to 22.
So maybe we rewrite Chekhov for our time like this:
If there are two hundred loaded guns of every imaginable kind lying around the house in act one, scene one, you must kill your family with two different ones (the very likely murderer, Alex Murdaugh, used one gun for his wife and another for his son) by act three, scene two.
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There’s also the Wyoming variant of these directions:
If you have more guns than any other state in act one, scene one, you must also have the highest suicide rate in the country by act three, scene two.
The local loon who killed sixty and wounded for life hundreds and hundreds and hundreds six years ago didn’t shut down the place. Most of the killed were tourists at an outdoor concert; maybe if his ultrapowerful weaponry had shredded people strolling residential Henderson, there would have been a bit of an exodus. But big metropolitan areas are incredibly resilient. Look at the slow-mo daily murder/wounding rates in Oakland, Balto, etc. The core of the city of UD‘s birth has indeed lost population, but just outside the city, in bedroom communities, population rates seem steady.
Universities are different. True, current applications at Virginia Tech are up; but it’s been fifteen years since its massacre, and the campus, in the wake of the event, has become one of the most highly secured in the world.
The Va Tech massacre occurred before America began experiencing daily mass murders, before certain locations became notorious carnage hubs. Only a fucking idiot, for example, would wander into a hookah bar late on a weekend anywhere in the States or Canada; and more and more of us know this.
As for universities, most remain insanely open locations – unlocked doors, large milling crowds, young heedless people, a massacrist’s delight. This is why essays about Michigan State this morning have titles like Requiem for the Spartans; people know that at least for awhile that show’s over.
Many students are leaving campus – who knows for how long. Everyone assumes universities are, in Bartlett Giamatti’s words, free and ordered spaces, but the free part begins to bite the dust as every hopelessly insane paranoid in America is issued an arsenal.
A Michigan State student who spent hours terrified, hiding in the dark, while one of many Americans working out his personal issues via mass slaughter killed people around her, registers her loss of innocence. Oh. Here too.
Here there everywhere. Everything everywhere all at once.
Also perhaps that particular American accounting: We only lost three. Virginia Tech was 32.
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Her partner rejected Va Tech because of the unbearable pathos/enduring stigma. You can’t forget the way that 76 year old professor died for his students… Or the sickening gun-toting photograph of the madman – mad boy – who did it… Maybe you know enough to know about yet other murders and lockdowns on that campus.
Enough already. Who needs it. Go someplace with at least a lower body count. Better chance to get out after four years alive, or not critically wounded. It’s like figuring out your chance of getting out of Baylor not raped.
Oh well. Enough of that. Back to the Murdaugh trial.
New York’s Williamsburg Charter points the way: Students enjoy multiple school-based mass shootings over the course of the school year, with all the opportunities they offer for small group discussions of violence, firearms, conflict resolution, the role of the police, and so on. As faculty who try to intervene are picked off, discussion is enriched with explorations of mortality.
The twenty-first century televised adaptation of William Faulkner’s Snopes family saga – As Murdaughs Lay Dying – proceeds apace, but the prosecution, which should easily take down Big Daddy Murdaugh, the obvious murderer, has run into a shrapnel of trouble.
Used to be all sorts of firearm evidence – stuff like gunshot residue – could put a case over the top; but now that all-American clans like the Murdaughs own forty trillion guns which they’re always toting around and shooting off, almost any piece of gun evidence is, er, shot down. When your entire house, car, wardrobe, fields, and gardens are gun-residue saturated, it’s hard to determine which residue comes from family-slaughtering and which comes from, you know, jest reglur family fun.
Although Scathing Online Schoolmarm is eager to introduce the Toscano Law Group, Newport News, to the semi-colon (there’s no problem with the sentence I’ve quoted in my headline, but throughout the letter the absence of the semi-colon is a problem), she nonetheless acknowledges that, effective-exposition-wise, its extended letter about the public elementary school system, to which you entrust your little ones every day, rocks.
You begin to understand homeschooling when you read about daily life at Richneck Elementary School. When your six year old tyke’s classmates aren’t smacking at/spitting on the teacher, they’re on the playground fingering their Glocks. Put aside curricular questions; your family definitely stands a better chance of not being reduced to multiple quivering mounds of blood if you stay locked in your house.
The key to transforming your school to Lord of the Flies With Firearms is the school’s administrative team. Without a strong shared commitment to violence among the principals and vice-principals you are getting nowhere in terms of mass slaughter.
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Violent cultures make violent toddlers, so for optimal school slaughter you also need a critical mass of parents who leave loaded guns lying all over the house, the way the Richneck shooter’s parents did.
Do you think, knowing all too well they had a psychotic would-be killer on their hands, these parents were “negligent”? How many guns do you think they had at home — again, knowing their kid wanted to kill? Ten? Twenty?
Babe, it’s not negligence, is it? Nor is it negligence when an assistant principal rejects desperate begging from multiple teachers and students that she check a psychotically violent student for weapons.
Let’s call it what it is.
Large swathes of the country are shooting off guns all the time. They like to. It’s exciting and satisfying, as America’s finest news source reminds us. American flag pins in Congress have been replaced by AR-15 pins. From the highest to the lowest forms of civic life in this country, guns are everything. They are everywhere. You’re a bloody fool (literally) if you don’t know this and begin to act accordingly.
