She sent out an Orwellian little missive about how the school district doesn’t tolerate this sort of thing, but, uh.

UD says fire her. Fire enough high-priced apathetic administrators and you might see a bit of a change. UD says the opening lines of her missive should have been:

As you have by now heard, two guns were found in two days at one of our high schools. If two guns were found, a reasonable inference is that there were three to five additional guns in the same school on those days.

Do not forget that there are almost certainly other weapons – knives, for instance – in backpacks and offices.

We have violent people among student and staff at this school, and I want you to help me think about/solve this terrible problem at an upcoming open forum that I have scheduled for…

… where will the mass shooting take place – inside the courtroom or out? Assault weapons are absolutely everywhere in and around the South Carolina courthouse, with the latest use involving the lead defense attorney pointing one at the prosecution table and saying, to general amusement, “Tempting.” As things fail to go the defense’s/Murdaugh’s way, we can certainly expect some firepower to be released. Let’s consider the possibilities.

1.) The extended Murdaugh clan seems in possession of hundreds of AR-15-style score-settlers, and if the prosecution keeps sayin bad shit about their bro they might could get a court official buddy to slip in their weaponry, and then they’d kill a bunch of opposing counsel and rescue Alex and move the clan down Mexico way.

2.) Some lunatic local racist has been, let’s say, steaming bigtime about a black man, of all things, presiding over a white folks trial. Don’t make the state look good when uppity you know whats sit way up there in robes telling state senators their objections are overruled. He too smuggles in his AR-15, blows the judge away, is himself shot full of holes, and in the general pandemonium six other people, including three jurors, are killed. Mistrial!

3.) Didn’t think I’d forget the suicide scenario, did you? Alex, who has already tried something along these lines, uses his superior height/strength to overpower court security and blows his brains out. “You’ve destroyed this great and good man!” shout the defense team, initiating a riot so severe that shots must be fired to quell it. Four people die, fourteen critically wounded.

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Guns kill and we have 400 million of them and counting. Only one country in the world has constitutionally protected arms possession with minimal regulations — the United States. Not even the most primitive of societies can compete now with our new predictable savagery.

Fuck the gummit.

… really shone in South Carolina last night, with the home crowd shouting GUILTY and LOCK HIM UP at one of three Bama players involved in gunplay/a fatal shooting not long ago in Tuscaloosa. There was also a fight in the stands.

Now, since the player those mean people shouted at didn’t actually himself shoot the fatal shot (I mean, yeah, he provided the gun; and he’s spending most of his off-court time talking to authorities; but he didn’t you know SHOOT the woman; his teammate did), he remains a player in excellent standing at that excellent institution.

And, you know, Gun Normalization being what it is around here, I’m sure all three players will soon be reinstated. I mean, young people hanging out on the street at night with guns YAWN. As for … mmm… let’s call it… killing some woman who in some way irritated them well think of it like this: The mere possession of a gun is liable to escalate … consequences… in these situations. People use the implements available at stressful times. If they’d had knives, the woman might have survived. Unfortunately, they had a gun. No one’s fault.

South Carolina lost the game, by the way; and who’s surprised? BAMA HAS THE BEST SHOOTERS. Now that DC isn’t using it, Bama’s changing its team’s name to the Bullets.

But take heart, SC! Alex Murdaugh himself is about to take the stand!

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UPDATE: This guy thinks murder and provision of a gun for murder are enough to shut down a program! And not just any program: BAMA.

It would be a major step for the No. 2 team in the country to suspend its season. At some point, though, [given an ongoing team-related] murder investigation, student well-being and simply doing the right thing must prevail.

LOL. Look, babe. High-powered, heavily recruited college teams assembled by rich cheater coaches always yield some naughty lads; and the lads’ teamwork may run to more than shooting baskets together. How many stories have we covered, on this blog, of college football and basketball teammates raping and robbing and hazing ensemble? Guns have always been around these programs – you’ll find them in players’ cars, frat houses, and dorms. And the guns are multipurpose: Football hero Tyler Hilinski’s suicide was made possible by dormmates who, at the moment Hilinski was really feeling down, just happened to have had an AR-15 style rifle in their room. High-level drug distribution conspiracies operating out of a bunch of San Diego State U frats wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without a cache of weapons to protect the merch. What I’m trying to say is that, exactly as in the larger culture, guns are everywhere on many campuses, especially in the Greek/football/basketball subculture. Bama’s unscandalized response to a shooting death apparently facilitated by one of its active players is what you get when everyone’s owning and carrying and shooting. No big deal.

The now-fired Texas school superintendent who left his gun in an elementary school bathroom, where it was found by one of the tykes, uttered this immortal statement.

And, as this local points out, they’re still stiffing suicide prevention in the state which boasts by far the highest rate of self-slaughter.

The only thing baffling about the local’s commentary is his calling legislative indifference to rampant head-shooting-off in his state “baffling.” Nothing could be less baffling. Wyoming loves violence, and especially gun violence. Wyoming hates government. The two things that frighten Wyomingites the most are

1. A losing season at UW footballl.
2. Any form of government interference in anything any Wyomingite wants to do with a gun, up to and including his sovereign right to blast his fuckin head off with one. Got it? Now fuck off.

You got a zillion guns and very little police enforcement in the city with the highest murder rate in America – who wouldn’t carjack? It’s got to the point in New Orleans that just, say, beating up an old guy and taking his car doesn’t rise to the level of a crime.

Michael Casey, owner of Liberty Cheesecakes, was on a date in a wealthy area of the city when he witnessed an older man being beaten during a carjacking.

The police arrived relatively quickly, he said, but when Mr Casey pointed out the attacker, they wouldn’t go after him. An officer advised the victim to buy a gun, Mr Casey said.

Everybody get a gun, y’all! Shoot-out city!

Chekhov’s nineteenth century directions are in severe need of updating in our time, most potently on view in the ongoing Murdaugh familicide trial. Taking the stand on behalf of his father, who is accused of murdering his wife and son, the surviving Murdaugh son describes hundreds, if not thousands, of guns of all kinds scattered about the three Murdaugh properties.

Buster, who is testifying even as we speak, says no one put guns away properly; all three of these alcoholics (plus Alex has a twenty-year-long drug addiction) constantly used them, played with them, shared them, threw them in unlocked cars, got them stolen, lost them. These are not what you’d have considered irresponsible people – highly educated, influential attorneys from way back in the long family history, they are one of the first families of the state of South Carolina.

But – well – all the details here, if you can stomach them.

Poor Paul Murdaugh, raised by drunken savages. Amazing he made it to 22.

But… I mean… the Southland.

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So maybe we rewrite Chekhov for our time like this:

If there are two hundred loaded guns of every imaginable kind lying around the house in act one, scene one, you must kill your family with two different ones (the very likely murderer, Alex Murdaugh, used one gun for his wife and another for his son) by act three, scene two.

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There’s also the Wyoming variant of these directions:

If you have more guns than any other state in act one, scene one, you must also have the highest suicide rate in the country by act three, scene two.

Sing the state song with me.

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In the far and mighty West,

Where the lonely drunk seeks rest,

There’s a Remington that fits him like a glove.

The bloody chest of this lost man…

It’s where he took his one last stand

In Wyoming, dead and drunk, the State I love!

Wyoming, Wyoming!

The local loon who killed sixty and wounded for life hundreds and hundreds and hundreds six years ago didn’t shut down the place. Most of the killed were tourists at an outdoor concert; maybe if his ultrapowerful weaponry had shredded people strolling residential Henderson, there would have been a bit of an exodus. But big metropolitan areas are incredibly resilient. Look at the slow-mo daily murder/wounding rates in Oakland, Balto, etc. The core of the city of UD‘s birth has indeed lost population, but just outside the city, in bedroom communities, population rates seem steady.

Vegas itself is the sixth most murderous city in the US, and its population booms.

Universities are different. True, current applications at Virginia Tech are up; but it’s been fifteen years since its massacre, and the campus, in the wake of the event, has become one of the most highly secured in the world.

The Va Tech massacre occurred before America began experiencing daily mass murders, before certain locations became notorious carnage hubs. Only a fucking idiot, for example, would wander into a hookah bar late on a weekend anywhere in the States or Canada; and more and more of us know this.

As for universities, most remain insanely open locations – unlocked doors, large milling crowds, young heedless people, a massacrist’s delight. This is why essays about Michigan State this morning have titles like Requiem for the Spartans; people know that at least for awhile that show’s over.

Many students are leaving campus – who knows for how long. Everyone assumes universities are, in Bartlett Giamatti’s words, free and ordered spaces, but the free part begins to bite the dust as every hopelessly insane paranoid in America is issued an arsenal.

A Michigan State student who spent hours terrified, hiding in the dark, while one of many Americans working out his personal issues via mass slaughter killed people around her, registers her loss of innocence. Oh. Here too.

Here there everywhere. Everything everywhere all at once.

Also perhaps that particular American accounting: We only lost three. Virginia Tech was 32.

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Her partner rejected Va Tech because of the unbearable pathos/enduring stigma. You can’t forget the way that 76 year old professor died for his students… Or the sickening gun-toting photograph of the madman – mad boy – who did it… Maybe you know enough to know about yet other murders and lockdowns on that campus.

Enough already. Who needs it. Go someplace with at least a lower body count. Better chance to get out after four years alive, or not critically wounded. It’s like figuring out your chance of getting out of Baylor not raped.

Oh well. Enough of that. Back to the Murdaugh trial.

One of UD‘s oldest friends, from Northwestern University, works there.

Three dead; five remain in critical condition.

Went on and on; students crouched for hours, terrified, in the darkness.

… a free floor wax.

… Leandro Mathias de Novaes.