The Wall Street Journal (!) editorial board goes there. Of course if you’ve been reading University Diaries you already know that a profound resurgence of American anti-intellectualism, coupled with violent infantilism — see our most recent ex-president’s fantasy-super-powers playing cards, or the fixation with loaded, openly carried guns among several congressional Republican nitwits/coup plotters — accounts for much of the cultural degradation the WSJ‘s been noticing.
The establishment Republicans at the paper are dismayed, to be sure; but lurking just below dismay is fear: Not only are the gunny dumdums ungoverning and ungovernable. Quite a few of them are barking mad.
Stupid, crazy, and fully armed.
***************************** PS: Too meshugah even for the Vatican. Trumpies who pose fetuses on church altars lose their collars.
‘Momma told me to give her the gun, so I gave her the gun. Momma shot the cops and momma was shot. Her eyes are open and she is breathing a little bit. Are you going to hurt me? Momma told me people are trying to kill us. Is momma going to be OK?’
Grieve for the two police who had not yet gotten the memo: Every American, including fragile little middle-aged ladies, is likely to be packing heat. And be highly trained in killing multiple people.
And it’s Mississippi. Of course. Might could be it’s time to change police training down there.
U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman is facing pressure to resign from Democrats in his South Carolina congressional district after a string of text messages revealed the Rock Hill Republican called for a military takeover in order to keep then-President Donald Trump in power after his 2020 election defeat.
In response to this report in the Post and Currier, as well as to the White House comment, Bates has issued a statement:
You wanna talk “disgusting“? Disgusting is the president of the United States choosing a day sacred to people like me, people unafraid to stand up for the right of all Americans to arm themselves with Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S rifles, on which to attack my patriotism.
It will be my pleasure, as leader of the South Carolina Milisha, to blast the brains of the entire Eggzecutive Branch to a pulp. Just watch me.
He thinks his most favorite thing – martial law, which includes lots of guns to wave at women!!! – is spelled marshall rather than martial, and that’s because Bates is soooooooooper stooooooooooopid and now everyone’s laughing at him.
But that part of this story is, you know, okay. You get what you vote for, and folks in parts of SC like stupid people, and that’s democracy, and democracy is a beautiful thing, and UD will defend it as long as she draws run-on sentences.
Howsomever. Bates’s breathless excitement as he demands from Mark Meadows and the president a military takeover of the United States in the wake of Trump’s defeat is not quite as okay as the right of stupid people to be represented by stupid people:
[W]e are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!
Bates’s misspellings and errors and exclamations and caps and all tell you he is really excited, really agitated, really in need of calming himself down by exposing his loaded gun to groups of women, or, lacking that, leading a military coup against the United States.
Is Rep. Bates a threat to our country? He will be until we can find some way of dealing with his shpilkes, his inability to calm himself down in the matter of guns. I see two possible ways to go.
Cyproterone Acetate is a chemical castrator whose tranquillizing effect is well-known.
2. A more unorthodox approach would involve penectomy followed by surgical attachment of an NAA Mini-Revolver or other appropriately portioned piece.
Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech… [We must address] the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible… [An] obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15 [is] a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians.
Do you know how many high school basketball/football games end in gun fights in this country?
Lots; and the numbers are growing. Now watch as the phenom – utterly predictable as all of America resolves tiffs with one of the four hundred million guns available – moves to the college sports scene.
… makes sure its universities share fully in this bounty. Its two highest-profile campuses – U New Mexico, and New Mexico State – are POP POP POP POPPIN away with healthy rivalry, on the basketball court and off! (For the long glorious sports history – there isn’t any other history – of both schools, go here.) Now that both schools’ teams are literally engaged in an ongoing shooting war, the basketball coaches have, uh, started to issue statements and shit.
When your schools are dumpsters instead of colleges, and when your basketball teams are gangs (with the coaching staff apparently part of the gangs), instead of basketball teams, you should…
Oh I dunno. You’re down there with your guns and your gangs, leading your best life now, living out loud, standing in your truth, letting a smile be your umbrella, and ain’t no place of mine to look at the carnage and say one damn word.
About 45,000 people in a central North Carolina county [full of retirees] remained without electricity Sunday afternoon after two electric substations were damaged by gunfire…
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“T’aint nothin,” said Evelina Stanton, 95, a Moore County native, as she packed up a few belongings and moved to an emergency shelter for the week or more it will probably take to get the power back. “I liked to fool around with guns when I was young; we all did. No big deal.”
Indeed a spot poll among county residents showed a majority agreed with the statement GUNS SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN OUT OF THE HANDS OF DOMESTIC TERRORISTS.
Since Lake Charles is just about the most dangerous place in the country, itty bitty clubs like the VVS1 Hooka Lounge have EIGHT security guards. Eight! How many people can be in a hooka club on a Tuesday? Thirty? But so many of them carry guns and shoot em off that a itty bitty club on a Tuesday night has 8 – count ’em – 8 – armed guards.
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Now, even though they say right there on their website that they have outdoor as well as indoor spaces, in the harsh light of last week’s mass shooting there, the owner seems surprised that
That’s what I mean by can-do. You close off one avenue, we’ll find another. Then we’ll kill everybody.
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One more thing about can-do. The club owner will be paying out millions in damages. The city can in principle shut the abattoir down. The owner could close the place. But the place won’t close!
Lake Charles Strong. We’ll come back from this tragedy better armed, with much bigger guns in the hands of younger and more insane people, courtesy of gun-friendly Louisiana.
Did I say gun-friendly? We can do better than that! Louisiana has the highest murder rate of any state in America. VVS1 can’t shut down. We have a record to uphold.
… killing is something this blog has followed for a long time. (Feast your eyes.) Usually it’s guns, but sometimes students (see the marching band) just beat the shit out of people until they die.
“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t surprised. [E]very time you turn around, there’s a shootout,” notes a person who lives across the street from the school. FAMU in particular, and Tallahassee in general, is just a mad wild ongoing BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG lately — guns galore, and they’re going off all the time and killing everybody. And hey lookit all they’re doing about it! Everything but anything about guns. Guns are sacred, and such a fine thing for our young people. Florida is WAY gun-friendly.
It’s a strange way, thinks UD, to go to college; but that is just your clueless elitist eastern seaboard dumdum speaking, isn’t it. I’m sure everything’s fine down there.
Due to the [two] shootings that have occurred at my apartment complex, as well as the on-campus shooting, I am saddened to say that I will be leaving the University of New Mexico. My family and I feel this is the best decision for me and my safety. I will be entering the transfer portal …
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[Brooke] Berry’s mother, Amy Berry, told Ken Sickenger from the Albuquerque Journal that Saturday’s incident was “the last straw.”
“Brooke really likes the basketball team, and she wanted to stick it out, but she was scared,” she said. “She called us Sunday morning crying and said, ‘I want to come home,’ so her dad and I drove down 14 hours to get her. If something happened to her, we’d never forgive ourselves.”
Berry arrived in New Mexico from Billings, Mont. She lived at Lobo Village, a student-housing complex just west of the UNM basketball arena, otherwise known as The Pit. The two previous incidents happened close enough to Berry for her to be concerned for her safety.
“Brooke called when a shooting was happening, and she was hiding in the bathtub,” the mother told the Journal. “I was thinking, ‘This is crazy.'”
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The university has released a statement.
Brooke’s being a real GIRL about this… Everyone at UNM has hidden in a bathtub during a gunfight outside their room! BFD! What a baby.
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The traditional New Mexico State/University of New Mexico men’s basketball rivalry game has been cancelled. The latest dorm killing was between members of the rival teams, and since NMSU killed a UNM guy the rivalry’s been settled: NMSU wins.
The two schools are working out a new money-saving arrangement in which the big game will not take place at all anymore. The schools will share the cost of weapons and ammo and let the guys work out the rivalry by killing each other every year at this time.
‘Whatis an established fact is that Jones had previously drawn the attention of law enforcement and university officials.
There was agun conviction officials at the state’s elite flagship university only recently learned about as a result of a hazing probe, the details of which were unknown. There were also attempts to buy a rifle and a pistol that placed Jones under the scrutiny of Virginia State Police.
… University Police Chief Timothy Longo told reporters the university’s “threat assessment team” had learned about Jones in September after a third party, who was not a student, reported that he spoke about having a gun. He said the school’s student affairs office interviewed Jones’ roommate, who had not seen the suspect with a gun.
It wasn’t clear if the school’s internal investigation of Jones possibly having a gun ended with that roommate’s interview.
Jones had also been involved in the campus hazing probe, which was closed due to uncooperative witnesses, Longo said.
… [U]niversity officials admitted they learned Jones had been convicted of a misdemeanor for a concealed weapons violation in 2021.
… [O]fficials said they realized only after Sunday’s shooting that the report of his conviction was never relayed to the University Judiciary Committee.
… [Said one observer:] “It’s like a series of cracks that he slipped through.”’
But this certainly makes the University of Virginia look – if possible – even worse. This is a student who had an active university judicial case pending against him (and pending… and pending…) for gun stuff. He’d been engaged in other criminal activity, but for some reason it was all suspended sentences. His father knew he was “extremely paranoid,” and I’m thinking people on campus had noticed too. Professors? Others in his dorm?
To ask the bloody obvious: Why didn’t the school do anything about this heavily armed paranoid with a rap sheet?
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Details here about how any fucking asshole can buy an arsenal in the gun-happy state of Virginia.
