… and now, only a few months later, we get a guilty verdict and a life sentence for his girlfriend, who Adelson apparently paid to put together the conspiracy to murder Florida State University law professor Dan Markel.
Markel had to die because he sought shared custody of his children by Adelson’s sister, and this annoyed Adelson. He allegedly had two thug friends of his girlfriend blast his head off.
Ja, ja, wheels of justice… UD only hopes they nail Adelson (and his mother?) before Markel’s elderly parents die.
When a fifteen year old in America’s jest-about gunniest state takes his parents’ gun (why wasn’t it locked away?) and annihilates three of his siblings and then himself, it generates a lot of interest. National coverage has been extensive because even high up in our mass murder madlands fifteen is remarkably young for such extensively lethal gunplay; and, you know, he killed his sibs and not his high school buds as per usual; and I mean just in terms of the whole leave an entire house a blood-splattered mess thing the killer exhibited noteworthy precociousness.
Now this all went down three days ago, and as this article notes, absolutely nothing has issued forth from the Alaska authorities. Just the bare minimum. No names. No explanation as to why a house full of little kids (a bunch of other sibs in the house survived) featured no parents and a gun.
Why so shy, big guys? The bedlam was discovered by a neighbor, so clearly the family’s identity is known to the neighborhood. Why don’t we know it? Why don’t we know anything about parents who had… seven? … eight?… kids and didn’t think it worth their while to put their gun away? Or did they say to their kinda funky fifteen year old Here’s the gun in case anyone tries to break in while we’re gone?
Here’s a possibility. In these big gunny states there’s a Lookaway Protocol. Nothing to see here. None of your goddamn business. You’re just gonna make a big fucking Thing about it and next thing you know they’ll take away our guns. It was probably a false flag operation, with gun-control fanatics playing the kids. Like at Sandy Hook. Let’s all just shut up about it and move on.
A Missouri psychotic named Greitens
Has watched as his Senate race tightens
He beats up his son
He threatens with guns
And Republican voters are frightened
… and every day will be … Sunday? Monday? Funday? … No! GUNday.
“[G]oing berserk with guns has become an American way of life.“
And it’s only lunchtime. Stay tuned.
In the U.S., the urgent desire to stop mass shootings — and gun violence in general — is met with almost total refusal in conservative state legislatures to pass laws or restrictions that make careless gun ownership a crime. “I don’t think there’s anything on the horizon that’s very encouraging,” says Allison Anderman, director of local policy at the Giffords Law Center. Meanwhile, 4.6 million children live in homes where loaded firearms are unlocked; a 2021 survey showed that 70 percent of parents believe they have sufficiently secured their weapons, while a third of their adolescent kids say they can find them within five minutes. In 2020, 4,368 kids died of gunshot wounds in America, making it the leading cause of childhood death. A third of these were suicides.
First Black Rifle Coffee, and now AR-15.
Although Black Rifle is as it were holding its position, UD fears that – under the influence of unfortunate events – we are seeing the end of an era.
But there’s a little good news on the horizon: The most popular name for baby boys in Fairbanks Borough Alaska is currently Barrett REC 7, and among girls it’s AAC Honey Badger.
Sing it!
Circuit judges
Pointing guns at lawyers
Frightened courtrooms
Running for the foyer
Wacko Justice
Pulling out his Colt
Threatening attorneys
Everybody bolt!
Get me home!
Country roads
From the jurist's
Pistoled robes
West Virginia!
Bloody wasteland
Get me home
Country roads
… something stirred in UD’s headlet, and she searched the name Junod on University Diaries.
Sure enough, back in 2010, she cited Junod’s smart remarks about her beloved Don DeLillo; and one of those remarks has now helped her think about the Black Rifle Coffee/Dallas Cowboys controversy – a controversy that doesn’t seem to be dying down.
No, [DeLillo] has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque…
What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.
Black Rifle, with its bloody brews (Murdered Out; AK-47), is corporatized violence becoming – via the Dallas Cowboys – a way of thinking and talking; a part of the landscape. What Brooks misses in his analysis of the origins and motivations of our teen massacrists is this normalization, this banality if you will, of apocalyptic weaponry and what it is doing to us. Coffee – that most banal of drinks – is now visually (via advertising footage, endlessly recycled) wedded to mass slaughter, to weapons that can literally murder us out.
An AK-47, first encountered by kids on a Jumbotron at a cool, fun, wholesome Dallas Cowboys game, is something that gives you the same vague chemical kick as a cup of Joe or a sports event. Everybody’s doin’ it.
Our violent psychotics do not necessarily, as Brooks argues, regard their AK-47s (often bought for them by daddy — Brooks has far too little to say about the depraved parents/suppliers of our killers) as charismatic icons of power and vengeance. They more probably seem to them utililtarian, normalized (how outlaw can AK-47s be when you get them from daddy, and when everyone’s drinking AK-47 coffee?), parts of the landscape.
Thus when Brooks gets melodramatically Biblical about guns (“The guns are like serpents in the trees, whispering to them.”), I wonder if he’s headed in the wrong direction. How can guns have this effect when dad’s chipped coffee cup has images of AK-47s all over it? When American parents routinely receive marketing pressing them to buy baby versions of AK-47s for their eight year old? When the raffle prize at the county fair is an AK-47?
***********************
Our country’s most outspoken, violent teenager, after all, is famous for having boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and it would only intensify his supporters’ enthusiasm for him. He didn’t know how right he was. Even his reported excitement about the impending death of his vice-president did nothing to dislodge him from his position of undisputed king of the nation’s Republican Party. His sons are even more violent – in word and deed – than he; and his congressional spawn … How surprised are you going to be when Jim Jordan can’t take it anymore and blasts into the January 6 committee room with a – you know – in his grip?
Go ahead. Laugh at this scenario. Go ahead.
*************************
Just as the handgun has become the home appliance of choice when you want to grab something to kill yourself with in this, our massively suicide-ridden land, so the AK-47 is simply there, part of the landscape, the thing you grab (dad’s far too ruggedly independent to lock it up) when your loathing of humanity reaches – let’s go with coffee – the boiling point. “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” and only America goes a step further than flooding the country with guns for absolutely everyone and electing a pathologically violent president: America makes guns cute and sassy and savory, an unremarkable part of our shared corporate advertising world.
It’s called HANDMADE SHOTGUN, in honor of the shooter who killed Shinzo Abe.
A spokesman for Black Rifle Coffee explained: “He made his own shotgun. Cool.”
… all nations – even Japan, with its incredibly low gun ownership/gun death rates – will have to assume that a madman with a gun lurks somewhere at even modestly significant public events.
If this can happen in Japan, it can happen anywhere. Grim as it is, public officials in most of the world are going to need American-level security, or something close to it. The guns have won.
*****************
The killings used to creep up on you, didn’t they? A mall shot up in Copenhagen, a woman walking her baby on the upper east side shot pointblank in the head… You take each instance in (keeping vaguely in mind, to be sure, that in places like Chicago and Tijuana everybody’s shooting everybody else to death day and night) and there’s a shudder and a disbelief and a disgust and then you move on. Only gradually does it occur to you that it’s now everywhere and all the time – the bangbangbang of people killing other people with guns. The panic my friend Steve experienced when he realized his wife was on the same street as the shooter here in DC, on Upper Connecticut Avenue… When I heard his voice on the phone hours after the shooter killed himself — that was I guess the moment for me. No more waving off all the gun killing as somehow peripheral to me. What world do I think I’m living in?
What a poor sport this newswoman is. (Scroll down for the video.) She actually cited the astounding suicide-by-gun statistic among veterans – the very group the Dallas Cowboys claim to be helping by promoting blood-soaked Black Rifle Coffee.
*********************
There are now reports that the Cowboys are about to announce a second coffee partnership, this one with CTE Coffee, the brew for people who love football-induced neurodegenerative disease. Each flavor is named after a dead CTE sufferer – Jovan Belcher, Dave Duerson, Frank Gifford, Aaron Hernandez, Junior Seau – and each features a graphic of their pockmarked postmortem brains. Strong stuff, you say? You betcha! The Cowboys are calling CTE America’s Brew cuz no one does lethal head blows the way we do! If you don’t like it, move to North Korea.
And don’t forget: There’s a good chance a family just like this lives in your town!
*********************************
A Glock for my favorite psychotic
Now that you’ve turned fifteen!
Just like the dad of Kip Kinkel
I’m proud of my own string bean!
[I’ve] seen dozens of other young men stay sober & become fruitful members of society, [so] these are not the only two options.
There are tens of thousands of stories like this one – ordinary Americans defending themselves — in this case, from the government trying to get between a boy and his dog — with their weapons. They do it to preserve the freedom to live as they wish. Bravo, young man.
[T]he most impressive achievement [Alabama Senator Richard] Shelby leaves behind is the military-industrial complex he supplied with lavish federal aerospace and defense contracts in Alabama’s 5th Congressional district, which sent [Mo] Brooks to Washington to chew off the “Big Government” hand that fed it. The local monument to the senator’s powerful career is the Shelby Center for Science and Technology at the University of Alabama Huntsville. The building is best known as the scene of the 2010 mass shooting in which Amy Bishop, a biology professor denied tenure, pulled a semi-automatic pistol out of her purse during a faculty meeting and executed three colleagues (she pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence).
On the bipartisan gun-safety bill recently signed into law, Shelby voted against even sending it to the Senate floor, leaving his A+ NRA rating unbloodied.
Shelby’s presumptive successor is of course a champion of the “God-given Second Amendment,” but she also sells herself as a “Mama on a mission.” To a future Senator [Katie] Britt, that means that “our children should be taught to love this country” — a nation so exceptional that our children die at their school desks in order to preserve our freedoms.