[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.

Good luck with that, lady. Talk to Ocean City, Maryland. You can wave your mayoral wand and declare certain deadly events over, but, by their very nature, groups like bikers are likely to ignore you. There’s a reason they call themselves Outlaws and shit like that: They do what they want.

And they’ll probably want to keep coming back to little Red River and there’s nothing you can do about that.

You’ve whipped yourself up some real sorcerer’s apprentice type stuff, in other words. And it don’t help none that New Mexico is biker gang central. One of the top five states for biker gangs. These killers are your neighbors.

AND it don’t help that the current trend in America is for everyone to own and carry multiple crowd-pulverizers. I mean, way gun-friendly states like your beloved New Mexico don’t get to just rest on their cowboy laurels and enjoy their mass murder toys at gun ranges and all; folks are gonna wanna kill people with them, aren’t they?

****************************

Now, for reasons unknown, your little town kept inviting tens of thousands of heavily armed biker gangs to hang out with you every year. I mean, it was great for business — the bars, the motels. The bars. And I’m sure some of your bar owners are even as we speak saying basically oh okay a few dead guys in the street. Cost of doing business! Don’t shut down the rally. Few bad apples. Get more police protection. Etc. The mayor will ignore them, but, again, it won’t matter. Chances are excellent massive waves of drunken louts with big guns will be back next year.

And lady, not to be mean, but you and your fellow New Mexicans created, and sustain, the gunny gangy world in which the Barbarians thrive. That’s why they choose to live in your state.

They’ll be back next year.

The mayor says they had a heads-up of about 500 Bandidos members heading into town. However, she says there was double that and Bandidos members haven’t even been at the rally since 2019.

********************

After-Action Review*:

 [One visitor said he] had felt uneasy Saturday before the shooting.

”There was so much tension. You could feel it,” he said. “We didn’t really want to walk around. There were wall-to-wall [motorcycle clubs].”

[He] said he walked on the street rather than on the sidewalk, “because if you walked on the sidewalk, every other person you passed, you bumped into. If I see people who wear the [biker gang] colors, I’d rather not bump into them and create anything. I’d rather walk in the street. I’m good with that. I don’t know why they let the colors come back. That was their first mistake, lifting the color ban.”

”It was so thick here yesterday, you couldn’t even walk around, [said another visitor]. They were just posted up everywhere, on every corner. When they’re hanging out like that you just have to be careful.”

************

*Note for next year’s family fun biker rally: Enrich everyone’s experience with multiple bullet-proof barriers/holding pens for each warring gang, surrounded by hundreds of officers holding AK-47s. Along the barrier walls, posters with identifying gang colors should be plainly visible to all visitors.

Local Red River NM pol Craig Swagerty is being too modest. His town’s annual biker rally has long also featured drug arrests (everyone knows about biker gangs and the drug business), fights, property damage, weapons charges, and forced temporary migration/home detention of scared locals …

But, you know… Red River folk consider tens of thousands of fucked up armed bikers packed onto their streets for days as a positive, and they keep welcoming back the boys — and the boys bring their kids, too, so this year the little ones got to be part of the hysterical stampede of people trying to get out of the way of bullets. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said another resident. “I was told not to go out [as soon as the rally began] and so I was staying at a friend’s house. It honestly sounded like a whole clip was unloaded. It was a lot of gunshots at once.” Yep, must be quite a sight for one of the 500 permanent residents of tiny Red River to see/hear 28,000 heavily armed people outside her door. Town sure don’t need to worry about adequate policing with them numbers!

*******************

So now everyone’s talking about this year’s blowout – the bloodbath is all over the national and international news and I mean Craig whodathunkit?? Who could have foreseen that 28,000 drunk assholes carrying 40,000 weapons would shoot some of them off? What’s America coming to?

*****************

In these Great Carnage days, you’d think a few people would look at and think about the lowest hanging fruit, the locations where mass shooting is practically guaranteed. Apart from the obvious – urban drug turf – UD will now helpfully single out two places guaranteed to generate routine atrocity:

1. Hookah lounges
2. Biker rallies

There are plenty of other places you, like the Red River resident smart enough to get the hell out of the way of the rally even before it started, definitely ought to avoid if you dislike open air gun battle. The boardwalk in Myrtle Beach or Ocean City MD… Public high schools in Glocksucker states… etc etc etc yada yada yada. I mean, do you read the news at all? Ain’t it kind of obvious?

NOT that UD‘s offering even a whiff of a suggestion that guns should be restricted or you should have check points in locations guaranteed to kill people repeatedly! Perish the thought that you and your family shouldn’t be free to perish at the hands of a drunk, high POS with a Glock! NOOOOO. I’m only saying we should designate these places, with big easy to read signs, Most Likely to Murder, so people can choose to stay away, or, as some folks in places like Myrtle Beach and Red River do, leave town until event season is over. Rather than the town of Red River promoting bike rallies on its tourism website and promising fun for the whole family (current town policy), you’d have the mayor say something like this (she made the comment to the Taos newspaper — Taos: the classy town, forty miles away from trashy Red River, that along with everyplace else anywhere near Red River went into lockdown right after the shooting):

“Everybody needs to understand that this really isn’t an event that we promote. There’s not really an event sponsor; it’s not a town-sponsored event. It’s something that occurs every year. It’s an event that’s grown and happens and we do our best to manage it.”

Course they do promote it. It’s right there on their website… Oh wait! Someone done taken it down!

Not only that, but lookee here what sober rule-bound Red River’s doing now!

“For everyone, there will be zero tolerance from this point forward,” [the local police captain] said at a [post-massacre] news conference. “That is traffic violations for 1 mile an hour over, seat belts, jaywalking. We are going to stop and talk to everyone if they violate any law — traffic or criminal.”

Look sharp, lad! From now on we fuckin promise it’s gonna be Pyongyang around here! And cut your hair!

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Fun for the whole family signage in Red River.

1. New Mexico – 95.0′

UD‘s been blogging about NM for years and ain’t surprised it came out on top on this and on other intelligence measures; but it’s always good to be able to point to evidence, and the recent decision to stage a huge public rally in a tiny town among warring biker factions will do nicely.

The mayor of Red River is shocked at the mass shooting (three dead so far, several injured) that ensued, cuz you’d NEVER expect fine folk like these to have gotten drunk at Red River’s bars and to have used their big big big guns to kill each other. Unprecedented!

How could such a thing have happened? Bikers were supposed to be at “a live music event by Warning Shot” (not making this up) but instead just blew past the whole warning thing and started killing each other. Coulda knocked the mayor and tourism director over with a feather: 28,000 armed bikers that hate each other! And now you tell me this didn’t bode well. Hidesight is 50/50 dude!!!!

Newly released Uvalde footage shows police “vomiting and sobbing” after entering the abattoir.

Everyone’s tired of “thoughts and prayers,” but no alternative has emerged. Until now. Sobs and Vomits.

1. No mass shootings.
2. 230 arrests.
3. Hundreds of injuries.
4. NO MASS SHOOTINGS!
5. Thousands of drunks puking in the ocean, revving their engines, playing screamingly loud music, injuring themselves and each other, endangering an army of police, frightening and disgusting the locals.
6. NOT ONE SINGLE MASS SHOOTING

‘That this kind of weapon is a favorite of school shooters, and these are schoolchildren, only adds to the disgusting character of the events here. Carrying a gun like this in the public square is a way to constantly communicate the threat of deadly force to those around you. A gun like this exists for two purposes: to maim and kill, and to communicate the threat thereof…

 [R]ight-wingers [routinely] show up heavily armed to statehouses in an explicit communication of the threat of deadly force if they do not get their way on matters of public policy. This is not normal political expression…’

This happened in Severn, Maryland, not far from UD‘s ‘thesda.

 ‘From 2011 to 2020, people [dying] at the hands of firearms in Tennessee increased by 48%.’

[Sing it.]

If you’re young and armed.

For it’s hard with your skills

To resist random kills
If you’re young and armed
You can go to extremes
With big massacre schemes

You can laugh when your dead
Have a hole for their head
And life gets more exciting
With each passing day
And hate is either in your heart

Or on its way
Don’t you know that it’s worth
Every treasure on earth
To be young and armed
For as rich as you are
It’s much better by far
To be young and armed

And if you should survive to 105
Look at all you’ll destroy
You adorable boy
And here is the best part
You’ve had a head start
If you are among the very
Young and armed

An eight year old with a loaded handgun. Big deal. The six year old in Newport News didn’t just smuggle in a loaded handgun — he shot his teacher with it! Maybe Grand Rapids is eyeing the forty million dollar lawsuit she’s filed against the N.N. school district; maybe Grand Rapids figures if it’s caught four handguns it’s almost certainly failed to catch another twenty or so.

Whatever. It has made the right call by banning backpacks: As UD has been saying, our public schools are currently living in a fool’s paradise, and until they look like armed camps they’re asking for a bloodbath. Guns are all over the schools; and of course they’re all over the schools’ surrounding communities. Inside and out, everyone’s a target, and as the wee Nashville massacrist demonstrated (using the same technique as the wee Sandy Hook guy), all you have to do is shoot out windows to get into a locked building. Which means the schools might want to take a look, first of all, at their windows. The safest schools won’t have windows at all (don’t laugh: did you think we’d see the end of backpacks?) but will look like the medieval fortresses they now need to be. Adding to the pre-modern feel will be a general arming of teachers and administrators, all of whom will now be able to solve work squabbles via shootouts.

And you know what? We’re going to see a large rise in home schooling — motivated not by any particular ideology, but simply by a desire to see your kid not be eviscerated by an AR-15. I mean, broadly speaking, the saturation of public life by guns means the end of public life – public schools, public shopping malls, public libraries – too dangerous. America is already overrun by gated communities with extensive private security. Get ready to see much, much more of that.

 “He’s off the wall. Doesn’t sit still, ever,” says the mother of the violent six-year-old who routinely beat up his fellow public school students and, as a special treat, took out the gun his mother had left lying around and shot his teacher because “he felt like he was being ignored.”

UD trusts that those parents who can are removing their kids from a system run by idiots. As for the others – tell your kid to keep her head down. And pray.

… takes us to the bustling, dynamic, city of Atlanta, Georgia, where a few hours ago a guy walked into a Midtown building and mowed down several people.

He remains at large; only one of his targets has died so far, but UD assumes others will succumb to their wounds.

Did you know that Bay St Louis, site of today’s mass murder, is a charming Gulf Coast destination, and the birthplace of noted historian/plagiarist Stephen Ambrose? Voted Best Place to Live in Mississippi, BSL has also got berserk, bullet-spraying, teenagers. They own all kindsa guns, they know how to use ’em, and they like to kill lotsa people. Y’all come down now, y’hear? We got the “friendliest gun laws in the nation.”

MMT, a new way to travel the highways and byways of our amazing country. Stay tuned!