He is one tough son of a bitch; but what do you want? He’s a southern sheriff! Blythewood SC’s lawman, Leon Lott says, “It is legal for people to shoot guns on private property, but [I] draw the line when homes are being hit by bullets.” All over a nearby residential neighborhood, bullets shot by some dude and his friends at a homemade gun range are piercing walls and chairs and tables and NOT people yet, but hold on jest a bit and they’ll kill some kid playing outside.
… [The latest mass murderer] seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed…
Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.
If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill. They don’t have much in the way of ideological commitments—as the confusing hodgepodge of aphorisms Westman scrawled into his rifle, pistol, and shotgun makes clear—beyond a commitment to chaos and evil themselves…
[Let me pause here and say yes. Lots of people are rummaging in this guy’s writings/statements for this hatred/that cause; but since the man was manifestly, classically, paradigmatically insane, this is a waste of time. His was a literally fractured psyche. One can learn things – most of them already known – about psychosis from him, but that’s kind of it.]
“The kind of person that we’re seeing today,” Martin Gurri, the author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, told me, “is not promoting a cause.”
He added that they were propelled by a general, wide-ranging fury…
[W]hy [have] so many Americans … become so susceptible to the void?
*******************
To the void, and to the rage that the sense of the void generates.
One can feel free-floating nihilism without the destructive rage. Albert Camus, one random evening in Prague, suddenly felt overwhelmed by “the death of the soul.” James Agee, alone on a broiling Sunday in Alabama, felt
… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…
This is writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything.
Don DeLillo, in Libra, imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling nihilistic one hot afternoon in Texas:
He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.
But Oswald’s angry nihilism, like that of the jihadis and McVeigh, emerges into the light with a particular ideology that justifies slaughter, whereas the NVE is more insidious because ideologically he remains largely underground, unconnected to a group or group identity. He may be discoverable in this or that online violence cult, but basically unless the people closest to him – parents, friends, teachers – are sufficiently alarmed by his accumulation of weapons, or increasingly wild behavior, to report him to the police and/or try to get him committed, he’s free to mass slaughter.
***********************
And this is UD’s thing: People have to report. And the report has to go somewhere. Why aren’t these manifestly, frighteningly, sick people on our radar? Part of it is indifferent, protective, deluded, or themselves crazy, parents. Some of these parents pay a very high price – their kid kills them before heading off to the local preschool; or, if they survive, some of them go to prison.
I ain’t claiming that in every case parents should have suspected something and acted on that suspicion; what I’m saying is this: It’s a new world in the US; hundreds of millions of high-powered guns are around, and anyone can get plenty of them. The pope calls this “a pandemic of arms.”
Which makes having even a mildly disturbed, mildly in trouble with the law, child/adolescent (look at what Sue Klebold, mother of a 17 year old mass murderer, has said about this) very worrisome, and at the very least our schools (where every day loaded guns are discovered in backpacks) should be ready to expel people who give evidence of being dangerous. It’s obscene that it’s still quite hard, in our public schools, to remove fledgling gunnies; in all respects — family, school — we have to toughen up.
We all know that the 15 year old in Washington state who killed his family with a gun to which the father gave him access didn’t just wake up one night and do this; but because by many accounts the household had little do with the outside world, no one beyond the immediate family could judge how nihilistic/enraged he was. This isn’t an argument for an intrusive, freedom-constraining state, but it is an argument for far greater social/familial awareness/responsiveness around the now-toxic mix of adolescence, mental disorder, and guns.
*****************
All of this is necessary because of a much larger nihilism: In this nation, we assign no particular meaning or value to death by gun. It’s something that triggers a thoughts and prayers tweet. It doesn’t even have meaning when children are pulped. We just continue working to make it easier for everyone to get and carry guns. “Everyone dies. That’s life,” says an Oklahoma state senator in response to a question about his state’s astounding gun suicide rate.
That’s very strange, that he says that, but we can’t afford to waste time analyzing it. As we speak, the next insane teenager with a high capacity arsenal prepares.
It’s very much local news, but see how parents got together and petitioned and packed meeting rooms at this Arlington Washington high school and succeeded in throwing out a pistol packing menace? “The gun had a bullet in the chamber, the safety off and an additional full magazine of bullets.” Insane public school rules make exile very difficult to achieve, but under humongous pressure school administrators got this person’s parents to agree to move him online or something.
Meanwhile, after a junior high school student brought a loaded gun to a Springfield Mo. school, one of the parents there said something rather quotable.
“A student shouldn’t be scared to go to school. Really, they shouldn’t. It’s supposed to be fun. Not death.”
We should soon expect to see this new motto on school buildings all over the US: FUN. NOT DEATH.
And she’s lawyering up.
Here’s a possible reason why.
Of course the madman (read his manifesto) had lots and lots of guns; and this being the States he probably got most of them himself, legally. But what if his mother provided some of them? Is this going to turn out to be a version of Adam Lanza or Kip Kinkel, homicidal madmen whose parents (one or both of them) believed that giving their psychotic, gun-obsessed children guns would be therapeutic?
Surely the latest shooter’s mother is aware that parents of mass murdering people are going to prison for providing some of their weaponry; and it may be that, you know, she’d rather not go to prison.
Original play, 1895: ‘I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.’
**************************
2025: [Ibn Demps’ lawyer told the court that he shot a fellow card player in the stomach at point-range due to] “some sort of misunderstanding.”
‘Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them.’
Only America.
Only America.
Only America.
Only America.
Only America.
*******************
In every country, people get into arguments, suffer from mental health issues and have extreme views — all common explanations for shootings. But in America, these people can much more easily pick up a firearm and shoot someone. When a country makes something easy to do, people are more likely to do it.
Children! During Catholic mass! Sounds as though the shooter killed a lot of them. This sort of thing the bullet-addled American press will notice.
********************
Addition to the engraving on the building:
THIS IS THE HOUSE OF GOD AND THE GATE OF HEAVEN AND THE HELLSCAPE OF GUNS
[photo tim evans reuters]
**********************
“Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.”
*********************
“We are dealing with gunshot wound injuries from a high-velocity weapon.” Good to know that people are working hard as we speak to make and sell much higher velocity weapons. They’re particularly explosive on the bodies of young children. At Uvalde, there was very little left of some of the children. Pulverized.
******************
“The sheer cruelty and cowardice of firing into a church full of children, it’s absolutely incomprehensible.” Oh fuck you police chief. You’re the police chief. This is the sort of thing that happens in this country, so comprehend. Grasp mentally. Understand. Minneapolis doesn’t pay you to flutter your little handkerchief and say you don’t get it. If you don’t get it, get another job. Stop using words every bit as empty as thoughts and prayers. State that you are angry that violent psychopaths have access to military grade weapons in America, and that everyone should be angry. Say something that means something.
*****************
Minneapolis has seen a string of violence in the past 24 hours. The shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church was the fourth in the city since Tuesday, and the second near a school. In total, the attacks have left at least five people dead and 25 injured, according to the police.
It’s adjacent to an RV park and a golf course, and the bullets whizzed by the golfers and pierced the RVs and people got upset by this. So I enlarged my berm, and I paid for the RV damage.
A lot of us hadn’t even had our coffee yet, and right next to our local Jesuit high school a kid stops his Kia, steps out with his high-velocity .223 caliber rifle, and sprays a crowd of kids.
Now nighttime “blood showers” (as one observer put it) is one thing. That’s normal. Midday, it’s devastating to watch the streets of Minneapolis turn into the streets of Port Au Prince. At night, you really don’t see it… Not as vividly… not as, you know, in cold blood, as you see it in the afternoon…
To be killed in Mississippi is so common as to be a banality. It’s number one in the nation for homicides, with 23.7 killings per 100,000 people. Basically, entering into a conversation with anyone anywhere on any subject in the state of Mississippi stands a reasonable chance of blowing you away.
Um. Why wouldn’t they be? Why is this a headline? Why is this news?
Oh because another nut with a gun fired shots outward from inside the club.
The bullets spew fast and furious at Cincinnati’s Roselawn neighborhood hookah joints, where a gunfight broke out on Saturday at one bar, and another gunfight broke out at another bar on Sunday.
The [Sunday] shooting scene is only a few feet away from another shooting that happened at a Roselawn bar around 3 a.m. Saturday morning.
Only a few feet away! And gunfire both weekend nights right there!
Do you think the city of Cincinnati has a little bit of interest in vaguely acknowledging what they’ve got going there? You have to figure there have been tons of fights at those bars that don’t end in gunfire and therefore don’t make the papers… And it’s just a remarkable fact about gunny USA that city councils don’t do shit.
But of course they’re waiting for a real body count. Two or three injured doesn’t cut it.
Mass murder, of course. They’ll be on that right away.
Who knew that some of them are unstaffed? And who knew that giving Gomers unsupervised freedom to shoot would turn out badly?
But they ain’t too dumb to figure out that the best place to shoot their head off is a gun range.
The Bullet Play. Happens routinely now.
… they’ve got one in a spanking new high school in Charlotte NC cuz the football team cut a guy and he was pissed so he shot his gun (totally. lots of students with guns on campus every day.) into a room. But he didn’t hit/kill anyone, so why should the school bother telling parents about it? Kid with gun. Yawn. Kid attacks school with gun but no one’s hurt so wazza matter with you? Shaddap this doesn’t count nothing happened.