Doing it a day after a deadly shooting in a Chicago suburb, and a month-and-a-half after 19 children and two teachers were massacred in Uvalde, Texas … lacks morals, decorum, human decency, or any term you’d use for a person who trades their soul for a few dollars and a latte.
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More on the Dallas Cowboys coffee partnership.
Ah cmon! It’s like all those HANG MIKE PENCE chants at our last president’s rallies: Just really, really, violent people having fun.
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It’s nice to think of American kids experiencing their first cup of coffee in Cowboys stadium…
“What’ll it be, buddy?”
“Trying to decide, Dad. Suck my Glock, Kill-Myself-Colt, Mutilate-the-Missus-Mauser and Slaughter on Psychotic Ten-Year-Old Avenue all sound good!”
[Philadelphia Mayor Jim] Kenney complained of a lack of gun control in Pennsylvania. The holiday had started out “laid-back” and “chill” before … multiple shootings, he told reporters, “but we live in America, and we have the Second Amendment, and we have the Supreme Court of the United States telling everybody they can carry a gun wherever they want.” He went on to say he would “take care of guns” if he could, but said lawmakers “won’t let” the necessary gun-control measures go anywhere. “This is a gun country, it’s crazy, we’re the most armed country in world history and we’re one of the least [safe]. Until Americans decide that they want to give up the guns, and give up the opportunity to get guns, we’re gonna have this problem,” he said, before adding: “I’ll be happy when I’m not… mayor.”
And that’s what freedom looks like in Kentucky, baby!
Yes! Go for it, Katie! Alabama lags behind at only SECOND in the nation for gun violence: GET US TO NUMBER ONE and let that new gore gush all over the place!
Your uncompromising defense of the Second Amendment will splatter so much new blood onto our streets that in no time NO ONE will be able to catch up with Bama!!
GONNA BE NUMBER ONE GONNA BE NUMBER ONE
Vote Katie!
Sing it. Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money Maybe we're ragged and funny But we'll travel along singing a song Side by side! We don't know what's coming tomorrow Maybe it's trouble and sorrow But we'll travel the road sharing our load Side by side! When my deep depression Makes me wish I were dead I'll just grab my little buddy Point you right at my head When the booze and divorces undo me When the cold lonely winters cut through me I'll just go and unlock one of my Glocks: Suicide!
Especially when the school’s a mere five miles from UD‘s house.
I mean of course UD knows that this is just one loaded gun that this one school happened to find; schools all over her neighborhood (elementary, junior high, high school) are she assumes bristling with weaponized babies who will eventually not only get through security but kill everybody and then kill themselves blahblahblah, and indeed UD rather doubts the measured, well-intentioned letter that the latest shocked principal sent out to parents asking them not to send weaponized babies to school will have much impact.
I mean dear mom and dad you might not know this but you shouldn’t send your troubled twelve year old to school with a loaded Glock… What I mean is did you know this? Did you know you’re supposed to secure your guns, especially when your kid has fucked up badly enough to be removed from the regular school system and placed (as in this latest case) in a special school? Just how did your troubled fourteen year old get a loaded handgun?
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And why oh why are the innocent children of America supposed to sit around while the vile parents of vile offspring fail to notice that their tyke is locked and loaded and ready to blow everyone’s head off?
Just sit there at your desk, little one, and wait, while some maggot bursts in and kills you with his daddy’s gun.
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UD feels absolutely certain that when details of this latest baby shooter come out he will be notoriously frightening, notoriously violent, at his school, well known to the well-meaning principal who remains in denial about the homicidal nature of some of his weaponized charges. Just a tyke! Our job at our compassionate and enlightened school, after all, is to turn such people around.
Actually, these days your primary function is to fucking notice which of your students is likely to be a killer, and to remove those students for the safety of all. (There’s the possibility of legislation that might help you, but we’ll see.) Letters to parents asking them to put their guns away will do two things:
- Scare the shit out of most of the parents, since they’re unlikely to own any guns at all.
- Have no impact at all on the people raising a kid with loaded guns lying all over the house. Your job isn’t to persuade crazy motherfuckers to act responsibly. Your job is to get the future mass killer unlucky enough to call these people his parents the hell out of your school.
… shifting in Wyoming, are you? A Wyoming senator is
… “surprised” that her office was flooded with calls [after the Uvalde massacre] from constituents expressing a deep desire to do something to stop the spate of mass shootings across the country…
Yeah what a shocker! She certainly assumed they didn’t give a shit.
[Cynthia] Lummis said callers to her office generally have not declared themselves for or against specific policy proposals, but have expressed a “willingness to be open to suggestions.” She also said they may be motivated to act by Wyoming’s high suicide rate.
“The surprise to me has been the number of people that have weighed in, not with particular solutions that they support, but with a willingness to be open to suggestions,” she said. “They’re worried in large about, as I’ve said, the mental health issue, and Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the nation.”
You could knock her over with a feather. Significant numbers of people in her state are upset about the SCADS of her constituents who use their guns to turn their own heads into tomato soup. How could Senator Loomis ever be expected to anticipate an upset reaction, much less, as Senator, do anything about all the gun suicides? Wyomingites love their guns!!!!! But jeez! Okay! If you insist…
We all need to adjust to the idea that unfathomable levels of gun violence, including school shootings, are going to get worse, not better, in the decades to come. In the past month alone, my two sons had a baseball game canceled because of a shooting at the park where they were meant to play and, two weeks later, soccer practice cut short because a nearby gunman had opened fire on a school down the road. In that latter incident, no innocent lives were lost thanks only to the gunman’s inability to effectively use any of the three assault rifles—I’m sorry, “modern sporting rifles”—he had stockpiled in his apartment overlooking the school...
My wife, who grew up in the suburbs of New York without any firearms in her home, tells me that I am fighting a losing battle. She tells me it’s impossible to recapture a more responsible approach to firearms.
But we have to try. Because the firearms are just not going away. The shootings are not going to stop. Our children are going to be exposed to a level of everyday gun violence that children in literally no other developed nation experience.
Andrew Exum, The Atlantic
“Republicans are not going to expand mental health funding. Mental health care is for sissies and liberals. The only thing they’re going to expand is access to guns… The norm in this country has been that mass shootings have been used by state legislatures and governors as an excuse to loosen gun laws, not tighten them. This is our country.
… [T]here are two Clinton-era federal laws declaring schools gun-free zones. If the Republicans take over the House, they’re not going to have much of a legislative “agenda” beyond impeaching Joe Biden and getting to the bottom of the national crisis swirling around the question of why Hunter Biden’s canvases fetch such handsome prices, but I would expect that maybe they’ll repeal those federal laws and pass something getting us closer to their “Bushmaster in every classroom” fever dreams.
… McConnell has blocked vote after vote on gun safety. If he’s back in charge of the Senate next year, he’ll keep that grim, blood-soaked record intact. And he and his party will do nothing on mental health. How many children will have to die before a handful of Republicans will join Democrats to pass a sensible law or two? Whatever the answer is, it’s a ghastly and indefensible number. But I fear the real answer is that we’ll never know, because they never will.”
More Tomasky.
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PS: You know all about Wyoming, which Tomasky points out ranks almost, er, dead last for mental health care, because UD‘s always marveling at its AMAZING suicide statistics.
Hours spent reading reflections on America and the latest elementary school massacre have led me back to Christopher Hitchens writing about George Orwell. I very much want to believe – I plan to act in various ways in accordance with the belief – that there are enough clear-eyed and ethical Americans to start nudging us away from the nightmare the country begins to resemble.
From the simple, psycho, devotees of violence gathered in Idaho militias, to the less organized, more complex population of assault weapon adherents, we have a problem from hell, and must think calmly about how to solve it.
We must start at ground zero: NMAA.
No Motive At All. The older man who killed 58 and injured 1,000 in Vegas had absolutely no discernible reason for doing it, which serves to remind us that some people from vicious parentage/upbringing do what they do (Bernie Madoff, son of two financial criminals, had no discernible motive – he was already legitimately vastly wealthy) for deep-lying atavistic reasons.
The Vegas killer was the son of a big-time crook. Say he had it in his DNA; say he was one of those rare human animals living in a state of bestiality which he kept more or less under control for fifty years or so, but decided to let rip as he reached the end of his life. Although rare, such people really hit the jackpot when they’re born into a culture that begs them to collect massive assault arsenals.
We think Paddock killed a lot of people, but be assured that eventually two friends will do the same thing, shooting out of adjacent windows, and they will have learned a lot from Paddock’s errors.
I suspect for people like this, as with the two notorious Los Angeles bank robbers in the 1997 North Hollywood Shootout, the real satisfaction lies in the long, elaborate preparation — these people took painstaking years to prepare their climaxes.
In terms of sheer body count, NMAAs are our biggest challenge. I think serious intelligence organizations rather than local police forces/the FBI, should be involved in the identification/tracking/detention of these supremely dangerous people. At least until we figure out a way to stop arming them like high-functioning terrorists.
“… Fewer people own guns, but the people who own them own more of them—a lot more—and the reason they most often cite for owning them is no longer hunting (56 percent) or even target shooting (70 percent), both activities one can imagine normal people engaging in, but “protection against crime” (88 percent). For all but a small subset of people, owning guns for protection against crime is not normal. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. It’s paranoid and unhealthy and very, very dangerous.
People used to own guns to kill animals. Now they own guns to kill people. And enough of them are emotionally unbalanced enough to cause serious trouble…
Everything unkind that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ever said about this group (“basket of deplorables,” “cling to guns or religion”) is true, easily confirmed by even the most cursory review of polling data. Because of the unrepresentative nature of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, this minority’s opposition to gun control is sufficient to block any and all legislation intended to address the problem…
A majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws, but 80 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners do not, and that’s enough to prevent anything from happening…
How many more children will die before things change? It’s my duty to inform you, future victims, that 185 isn’t going to be enough. Your blood will have to be spilled as well. You probably won’t have to wait very long. The next school massacre is likely only a month or two away.”
[This] is happening, over and over, because certain people who very obviously have the power to try to stop it are refusing to do so and letting it happen. That isn’t random…
[This] is tolerated by Republicans and the right wing. This tolerance of such high levels of violence makes it, in essence, sanctioned by the state, or perhaps in this case, the states…
[Republicans] find this level and type of violence acceptable, and choose, over and over, not to do anything about it. And that is the fact that unites these otherwise unrelated acts of violence: The Republican Party makes excuses every time for why this or that act couldn’t have been prevented, and we must therefore do nothing. That makes the Republican Party responsible for this carnage…
… Am I saying that individual Republicans want individual schoolchildren to die? Of course not. I am saying that these same Republicans in general venerate a level of violence in our society that the majority of us find intolerable and appalling, and they understand intuitively how that violence advances their agenda, by giving their rabid base something to rally around. Mass-shooting violence used to be random in this country. But at this point, with it happening so frequently, and with the fanatical veneration of guns and the violence they reap so deeply knitted into the American right’s worldview, this violence ceased to be random some years ago.
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From The New Republic newsletter, ‘Fighting Words,’ by Michael Tomasky. (No link available.)