An expert notes the firestorm of Republican ads featuring more and more desperate firearm brandishing.
UD gets this guy’s point that by 2024 guns in ads will be so routine that candidates will be blowing up Planned Parenthood offices to demonstrate their fervency.
But what about after that? What happens when not only guns are a snooze, but bombings elicit a shrug?
UD anticipates that, by 2028 or so, self-immolation will be the only way MAGA fanatics will be able to attract our attention.
… decided that name wasn’t quite … appropriate … or … haha… decided it was too appropriate… there’s been a dynamic linguistic reappraisal going on in the sports world generally.
For instance, now that Little Leaguers all over the country have been dropping and rolling on the field as bullets fly, we’re beginning to revisit some baseball slang that, if used, could cause pandemonium.
Words and phrases currently being assessed include:
bang-bang play
battery
dead red
fireman
five-tool player
heat
moon shot
platoon
twin killing
bleeder
base hit
hit and run
shot
slugger
Over the past decade, more than 1,000 crime guns have been traced to Firing Line Inc., a gun store in South Philadelphia that federal inspectors have cited for failing to stop straw purchases, losing track of weapons, refusing to run timely background checks and a lack of reporting on suspicious buyers.
In 2017, after several warnings, A.T.F. officials concluded that the owner “failed to maintain accurate information,” but they allowed the shop to remain in business, in part, because inspectors must prove intent to shutter a licensed dealer. Since then, 399 new crime guns have been traced to the location, according to Brady.
Bullet-riddled baseball is a uniquely American rite of passage, from the big boys of Congress to the Little Leaguers.
WUSA9 counted more than 60 gunshots over a 19-second span with the [Connecticut Avenue] shooter reloading once in the middle of the 2 volleys of bullets.
The video [taken by the shooter] is unstable at times and the sheer terror of it all is seen more clearly in freeze frames taken from the footage.
The shooter appears to have modified the camera to include a red bull’s-eye on the screen. First, taking aim at a poster for a recent fundraiser in the Edmund Burke School window. A few frames later, after the shots start, you can see four bullet holes in that same window. Just feet away, a young student appears to be ducking.
A couple of frames later, the bull’s-eye in the video appears to be tracking the students as they run for their lives. Then the shooter turns his sights back on the street and a person in a yellow vest who dives between parked cars to shield himself from the gunfire.
A student has apparently been shot at the school where my colleague Faye Moskowitz taught for years; two other people, near the apartment of our old friends the Elkins, have been shot. Hundreds of rounds went off, they say, and hordes of heavily armed police are still seeking the gunman. The area for blocks around has been locked down. The gunman is/was reportedly in this building.
Upper Connecticut – a broad beautiful leafy thoroughfare.
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I was sitting in the den overlooking Connecticut, Steve just told me, and I heard what sounded like some sort of machinery. Then I realized it was repeated gunfire. Di was just in its vicinity, at the grocery. I tried calling her, but she didn’t pick up. She just bought a new phone and doesn’t know how it works. I was frantic.
Finally she figured out how to make a call. She didn’t lock down. She sneaked across Connecticut and took a long roundabout way home. I met her outside our apartment, and at first we couldn’t get back in. I had to convince the police blocking the door that I live there.
Right now I’m looking at an incredible police presence up and down the avenue. I’ve never seen anything like it.
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Update: Now dead by his own hand, the Connecticut Avenue shooter seems to have lacked the whatever to massacre in the way of his role model, Vegas massacrist, Stephen Paddock.
[The] alleged shooter [on Connecticut Avenue] died by suicide while officers were entering a fifth-floor apartment where he had set up a “sniper-type setup” with a tripod. Six firearms, including several long guns, and multiple rounds of ammunition, were found inside the apartment.
Compare that to his hero, Paddock.
Twenty-four firearms, a large quantity of ammunition, and numerous high-capacity magazines capable of holding up to 100 rounds apiece were found in the suite. Fourteen of the firearms were .223-caliberAR-15-typesemi-automatic rifles: three manufactured by Colt, two by Daniel Defense, two by FN Herstal, two by LWRC International, two by POF-USA, one with a .223 Wylde chamber by Christensen Arms, one made-to-order by LMT, and one by Noveske. The others were eight .308-caliber AR-10-type rifles, one .308-caliber Ruger American bolt-action rifle, and one .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Model 342 revolver. Some of the AR-15 rifles were fitted with vertical forward grips and bump stocks, the latter of which allowed for recoil to actuate their triggers at a rate of 90 rounds in 10 seconds. The AR-10 rifles were equipped with various telescopc sights and mounted on bipods. Paddock was found to have fired a total of 1,058 rounds from fifteen of the firearms: 1,049 from twelve AR-15-style rifles, eight from two AR-10-style rifles, and the round used to kill himself from the Smith & Wesson revolver.
This writer stresses America’s fast-growing 4 – 14 shooter cohort: The NRA’s putting Glocks in Christmas socks, and our littlest ones are shooting them all over the place — at themselves, at party guests, at their families.
It’s a curious development. The onrush of America’s infantile infantry.
New York City’s not like San Francisco – it doesn’t have a depraved political class willing to let the city die. It has a tough on crime mayor. But even the toughest mayor can’t do anything about current gun-soaked American life; and the pictures of people bleeding, this morning, on subway platforms … it’s something we’ll have to get used to.
… Biden and his party [need to] counter Republican demagoguery about anarchy in “Democratic cities.” By falsely smearing all Democrats as closet [police] defunders … Republicans hope to obscure their deep complicity in today’s violent crime wave. Conservative pro-gun absolutism is the reason that criminals, street gangs and aspiring mass shooters can get quick and easy access to guns.
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It’s a whole new world. A whole new field of law to study – Strip Club Shooting Law.
Not strip club law; strip club shooting law.
One club in Atlanta is a real killing field. Several others in the city are much like it.
Just the blah quotidian of American life. In a few years (as UD has said elsewhere), no one’s going to bother writing this sort of thing up.
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Just as routine: Eternal vigilance in the state of Tennessee.
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Update: The LA Times seems to think we’re shocked.
[T]he same day that this horrific shooting rocked Sacramento, at least 95 other shootings took place across the nation.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Another 95 shootings — claiming 36 more lives and injuring 95 more people — just on this one Sunday in April…
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Well shut ma mouth. If a country has a trillion legal and illegal guns – they’re starting to find rocket launchers, by the way – all over the place, turns out desperate, pathetic, and evil people will use them.
Ain’t nothin you can do either. California has oodles of gun control laws. Lots of other countries with good gun control laws indeed have much less slaughter; but ’round here, see, the cat’s out of the bag. All them guns! Guns here are a household appliance you reach for whenever there’s an itch to kill yourself or others.
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America is deeply hopelessly gunny. I don’t say we shouldn’t have stronger gun control laws. We should. But at this point in the obsequies I don’t think we should expect much.
Locking up your mad gunnies won’t help much either. Your bigtime mass killers are psycho – they either kill themselves when they’re done or happily toddle off to life in prison. Your enraged ex-hubby is unlikely to let thoughts of jail interrupt his big moment. Depraved people who let their toddlers chance upon one of the ten loaded guns around the house and kill themselves and a sibling or two are too addled even to know what the phrase “criminal justice” means.
Gunnies – in neighborhoods, in legislatures – love guns and love violence and seem to regard all the pop pop pop pop everywhere as somehow charismatic. Like the heroin addict who salivates at the very sight of a needle, gunnies light up like the fourth of July at the sight of a gun.
SPEED, WEED, AND GUNS:
JUST ANOTHER I-77 TRAFFIC STOP
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As you know, UD anticipates that in five or so years no gun-related event in the United States will be significant enough to be covered as news, unless it involves terrorists and/or at least fifty fatalities.
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Look at ongoing spring break in Miami Beach.
Compare it to last year’s spring break in Miami Beach.
As you know, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” and at some point gun-mad, cheap hotel and booze-mad, no-government-interference-mad states like Texas and Florida are going to have to get sane, which UD thinks in this case means accepting the fact that when you proudly broadcast your gunny rummy scummy ways to the world, the world will respond. If you build tacky, they will come. And as the violence gets worse year after year, you’re going to need police-state-quality surveillance, which UD is sure your permanent residents are going to love. They bought their five million dollar condo for sunny, carefree Florida, after all.
Now, Florida – all shot up and beaten and exhausted – is grandly claiming that it never wanted spring breakers. “We don’t ask for spring break, we don’t promote it, we don’t encourage it, we just endure it, and frankly it’s something we don’t want to endure.” Fine words, Mr Churchill, and, now that it’s not just a source of revenue but a human and public relations disaster, you will fight it on the beaches etc. But of course you have promoted it; yours is not just a party city, but a mega-club party city, and a warm, longtime home for drug and gun dealers.
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Note what an even more sleaze-friendly city – New Orleans – did before last year’s Mardi Gras:
[The governor put] a statewide mask mandate in place as well as occupancy limits on bars, restaurants and other businesses.
New Orleans Democratic Mayor LaToya Cantrell, also a Democrat, went even further by closing bars completely in the city, even those allowed to operate as restaurants. City officials also closed iconic Bourbon Street to cars and limited pedestrian access for the final weekend of the season.
Next thing you know they’ll be confiscating weapons!
