… 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.

I guess that time is now.

Though of course this body is left far more intact than the AR-15 must have left the real ones in Nashville.

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UD thanks Al.

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.”

How quickly will he again be released on probation, so he and his “9mm pistol, loaded with 12 rounds of ammunition in a 13 round magazine” can once more visit Funz Trampoline Park?

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!

Ours went on for fourteen minutes!

These in-state rivalries are adorable. Let’s hear from Chattanooga!!

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Wanna play? Make sure your state, like Tennessee, doesn’t have any gun laws.

1 in 4 Colorado teens can access a

loaded gun within 24 hours, study finds

Sold out in Tennessee. Waiting list orders accepted. As American as apple pie.

Whatever you think of the Defund the Police arguments, it’s grotesquely clear that these United States are the last place in the world you 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…

‘Copycat behavior is very common, in fact. Anecdotal evidence strongly indicates that threats increase in schools nationwide after a shooting has occurred anywhere in the United States.’ [Professor Mary Ellen] O’Toole encouraged students, teachers, other school staff and police to ‘be more vigilant in noting disturbing students’ behavior’ …

That’s the problem, ain’t it? The massacrist’s best friend knew she was suicidal and generally unstable, but we all have difficulty imagining that being an edgy introverted and self-destructive person with identity issues could ever have anything to do with seeking out children for slaughter. Sue Klebold was aware her son tended toward depression, and, more dire, had as his best friend a person she correctly identified as truly mentally disturbed. Of course she also knew her son had been in trouble with the law. She could never have imagined it added up to Columbine.

Other massacrists, like Adam Lanza, lived in virtually total isolation in their houses; in Lanza’s case, only his dippy, gun-mad, mother had access to the paranoid monster he’d become. And as for in-school monsters-in-waiting, most of us run away from scary people, while the thought of the vengeance they’d exact if they found out we reported them stays our hand.

But these days, when you have in your university class (as I once did when I taught at GW) a student who, session after session, displays in her behavior and comments a rather scary pre-psychotic orientation, you’ve got to think guns. You’ve got to tell campus security.

Here’s another focus for your anger, amid this eerily similar replay of the Adam Lanza massacre eleven-years ago.

Both killers

1. were diagnosed mentally ill;

2. were former students at the shot-up school;

3. were in possession of large personal armories;

4. shot their way through the school’s doors;

5. expressed “resentment” of the school;

6. were in their twenties.

I’m waiting to hear whether the latest killer was, like Lanza, addicted to repulsively violent video games. She was by her own admission a video game addict; it’s not clear about the level of violence.

We’re sick – we should be sick – of the sweet quiet no criminal record bs we sometimes hear about the massacrist in the immediate aftermath. Oh, she was a lovely shy thing in high school! What a lovely quiet neighbor – I can’t believe all this time she was in there amassing an armory and writing her mad manifesto…

Lanza – who like the latest killer squirreled away in his house plotting his revenge – pumped four bullets directly into his mother’s head before going to the school. The bullets were in a gun his mother had gotten him as a gift. This woman got her head blown to bits because of her nutso denial — the same denial that got Kip Kinkel’s parents ripped to shreds by the guns they got Kip as gifts because they thought it would be therapeutic.

We’re sick – we should be sick – of an American culture so twisted that parents who know – must on some level know – that their kids are disturbed/dangerous either get them guns or don’t seem to make any effort to take their guns away. And certainly don’t seem to confide in anyone whatever they might know/suspect/fear about their kid’s murderous thoughts/intentions.

I’m just saying that I don’t intend to believe the bullshit we’re about to hear from this person’s parents.

Given what was done, UD will go with “it.”

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And remember: It keeps happening because, as Nicole Hockley puts it, millions of Americans “love guns more than children.”