U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman is facing pressure to resign from Democrats in his South Carolina congressional district after a string of text messages revealed the Rock Hill Republican called for a military takeover in order to keep then-President Donald Trump in power after his 2020 election defeat.
In response to this report in the Post and Currier, as well as to the White House comment, Bates has issued a statement:
You wanna talk “disgusting“? Disgusting is the president of the United States choosing a day sacred to people like me, people unafraid to stand up for the right of all Americans to arm themselves with Bushmaster Model XM15-E2S rifles, on which to attack my patriotism.
It will be my pleasure, as leader of the South Carolina Milisha, to blast the brains of the entire Eggzecutive Branch to a pulp. Just watch me.
He thinks his most favorite thing – martial law, which includes lots of guns to wave at women!!! – is spelled marshall rather than martial, and that’s because Bates is soooooooooper stooooooooooopid and now everyone’s laughing at him.
But that part of this story is, you know, okay. You get what you vote for, and folks in parts of SC like stupid people, and that’s democracy, and democracy is a beautiful thing, and UD will defend it as long as she draws run-on sentences.
Howsomever. Bates’s breathless excitement as he demands from Mark Meadows and the president a military takeover of the United States in the wake of Trump’s defeat is not quite as okay as the right of stupid people to be represented by stupid people:
[W]e are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!
Bates’s misspellings and errors and exclamations and caps and all tell you he is really excited, really agitated, really in need of calming himself down by exposing his loaded gun to groups of women, or, lacking that, leading a military coup against the United States.
Is Rep. Bates a threat to our country? He will be until we can find some way of dealing with his shpilkes, his inability to calm himself down in the matter of guns. I see two possible ways to go.
Cyproterone Acetate is a chemical castrator whose tranquillizing effect is well-known.
2. A more unorthodox approach would involve penectomy followed by surgical attachment of an NAA Mini-Revolver or other appropriately portioned piece.
Openly carried assault rifles have become an all too common feature of political events around the country and are having a chilling effect on the exercise of political speech… [We must address] the armed intimidation that has become commonplace in public places and the gun culture that makes it possible… [An] obsession with “tactical culture” and rifles like the AR-15 [is] a fringe movement among the 81 million American gun owners, but it is one of several alarming trends that have coincided with the increase in political violence in this country, along with the spread of far-right extremist groups, an explosion of anti-government sentiment and the embrace of deranged conspiracy theories by many Republican politicians.
Do you know how many high school basketball/football games end in gun fights in this country?
Lots; and the numbers are growing. Now watch as the phenom – utterly predictable as all of America resolves tiffs with one of the four hundred million guns available – moves to the college sports scene.
… makes sure its universities share fully in this bounty. Its two highest-profile campuses – U New Mexico, and New Mexico State – are POP POP POP POPPIN away with healthy rivalry, on the basketball court and off! (For the long glorious sports history – there isn’t any other history – of both schools, go here.) Now that both schools’ teams are literally engaged in an ongoing shooting war, the basketball coaches have, uh, started to issue statements and shit.
When your schools are dumpsters instead of colleges, and when your basketball teams are gangs (with the coaching staff apparently part of the gangs), instead of basketball teams, you should…
Oh I dunno. You’re down there with your guns and your gangs, leading your best life now, living out loud, standing in your truth, letting a smile be your umbrella, and ain’t no place of mine to look at the carnage and say one damn word.
About 45,000 people in a central North Carolina county [full of retirees] remained without electricity Sunday afternoon after two electric substations were damaged by gunfire…
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“T’aint nothin,” said Evelina Stanton, 95, a Moore County native, as she packed up a few belongings and moved to an emergency shelter for the week or more it will probably take to get the power back. “I liked to fool around with guns when I was young; we all did. No big deal.”
Indeed a spot poll among county residents showed a majority agreed with the statement GUNS SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN OUT OF THE HANDS OF DOMESTIC TERRORISTS.
Since Lake Charles is just about the most dangerous place in the country, itty bitty clubs like the VVS1 Hooka Lounge have EIGHT security guards. Eight! How many people can be in a hooka club on a Tuesday? Thirty? But so many of them carry guns and shoot em off that a itty bitty club on a Tuesday night has 8 – count ’em – 8 – armed guards.
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Now, even though they say right there on their website that they have outdoor as well as indoor spaces, in the harsh light of last week’s mass shooting there, the owner seems surprised that
That’s what I mean by can-do. You close off one avenue, we’ll find another. Then we’ll kill everybody.
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One more thing about can-do. The club owner will be paying out millions in damages. The city can in principle shut the abattoir down. The owner could close the place. But the place won’t close!
Lake Charles Strong. We’ll come back from this tragedy better armed, with much bigger guns in the hands of younger and more insane people, courtesy of gun-friendly Louisiana.
Did I say gun-friendly? We can do better than that! Louisiana has the highest murder rate of any state in America. VVS1 can’t shut down. We have a record to uphold.
… killing is something this blog has followed for a long time. (Feast your eyes.) Usually it’s guns, but sometimes students (see the marching band) just beat the shit out of people until they die.
“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t surprised. [E]very time you turn around, there’s a shootout,” notes a person who lives across the street from the school. FAMU in particular, and Tallahassee in general, is just a mad wild ongoing BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG lately — guns galore, and they’re going off all the time and killing everybody. And hey lookit all they’re doing about it! Everything but anything about guns. Guns are sacred, and such a fine thing for our young people. Florida is WAY gun-friendly.
It’s a strange way, thinks UD, to go to college; but that is just your clueless elitist eastern seaboard dumdum speaking, isn’t it. I’m sure everything’s fine down there.
Due to the [two] shootings that have occurred at my apartment complex, as well as the on-campus shooting, I am saddened to say that I will be leaving the University of New Mexico. My family and I feel this is the best decision for me and my safety. I will be entering the transfer portal …
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[Brooke] Berry’s mother, Amy Berry, told Ken Sickenger from the Albuquerque Journal that Saturday’s incident was “the last straw.”
“Brooke really likes the basketball team, and she wanted to stick it out, but she was scared,” she said. “She called us Sunday morning crying and said, ‘I want to come home,’ so her dad and I drove down 14 hours to get her. If something happened to her, we’d never forgive ourselves.”
Berry arrived in New Mexico from Billings, Mont. She lived at Lobo Village, a student-housing complex just west of the UNM basketball arena, otherwise known as The Pit. The two previous incidents happened close enough to Berry for her to be concerned for her safety.
“Brooke called when a shooting was happening, and she was hiding in the bathtub,” the mother told the Journal. “I was thinking, ‘This is crazy.'”
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The university has released a statement.
Brooke’s being a real GIRL about this… Everyone at UNM has hidden in a bathtub during a gunfight outside their room! BFD! What a baby.
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The traditional New Mexico State/University of New Mexico men’s basketball rivalry game has been cancelled. The latest dorm killing was between members of the rival teams, and since NMSU killed a UNM guy the rivalry’s been settled: NMSU wins.
The two schools are working out a new money-saving arrangement in which the big game will not take place at all anymore. The schools will share the cost of weapons and ammo and let the guys work out the rivalry by killing each other every year at this time.
‘Whatis an established fact is that Jones had previously drawn the attention of law enforcement and university officials.
There was agun conviction officials at the state’s elite flagship university only recently learned about as a result of a hazing probe, the details of which were unknown. There were also attempts to buy a rifle and a pistol that placed Jones under the scrutiny of Virginia State Police.
… University Police Chief Timothy Longo told reporters the university’s “threat assessment team” had learned about Jones in September after a third party, who was not a student, reported that he spoke about having a gun. He said the school’s student affairs office interviewed Jones’ roommate, who had not seen the suspect with a gun.
It wasn’t clear if the school’s internal investigation of Jones possibly having a gun ended with that roommate’s interview.
Jones had also been involved in the campus hazing probe, which was closed due to uncooperative witnesses, Longo said.
… [U]niversity officials admitted they learned Jones had been convicted of a misdemeanor for a concealed weapons violation in 2021.
… [O]fficials said they realized only after Sunday’s shooting that the report of his conviction was never relayed to the University Judiciary Committee.
… [Said one observer:] “It’s like a series of cracks that he slipped through.”’
But this certainly makes the University of Virginia look – if possible – even worse. This is a student who had an active university judicial case pending against him (and pending… and pending…) for gun stuff. He’d been engaged in other criminal activity, but for some reason it was all suspended sentences. His father knew he was “extremely paranoid,” and I’m thinking people on campus had noticed too. Professors? Others in his dorm?
To ask the bloody obvious: Why didn’t the school do anything about this heavily armed paranoid with a rap sheet?
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Details here about how any fucking asshole can buy an arsenal in the gun-happy state of Virginia.
“They just kept coming, more and more gunshots – just wouldn’t stop,” Lynch said, adding the gunman then “just sort of walked or skipped off the bus.”
(Probably stopped because he ran out of bullets.)
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So here are some details. Apparently he didn’t even know the people he killed. He acted strangely throughout the trip and reportedly muttered crazy shit about video games as he shot up the bus.
So… sorry, but here you have clear evidence of concealed ownership of guns (weep for the people on that bus – no one thought it worthwhile to tell them they were traveling with someone who had a criminal past with guns), plus serious madness (his father knew he was a gun-toting angry paranoid and did nothing).
But of course it all went down in America, and you know how that goes.
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UPDATE: Wednesday’s [court] hearing also revealed that Jones was charged and convicted of a reckless driving and hit and run in 2021 and had a concealed weapons charge the same year. He received suspended sentences for all of the offenses.
Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them, as Adam Gopnik writes.
The father of the UVa killer knew his son was ‘really paranoid’; he almost certainly also knew he had guns. (How many guns does the father own?) How many other people knew the killer was going nuts? UVa knew he told people he had guns on campus; the school knew as well that he’d been arrested for gun violations. No one did shit as an armed paranoid stalked the campus, and now a significant portion of the school’s football team is dead, in critical condition, or in recovery.
Here’s a close parallel: The sister of Phillip Adams knew he was, in her words, “aggressively” mentally ill – paranoid. He also had shitloads of guns.
Pretty much everyone knew Adams was right round the bend, but no one did shit.
“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life,” writes Nathan Heller.
Like the UVa killer, Adams had been a college football player — at South Carolina State, which even after his mass murder of an entire family, including toddlers, maintains his hero page. Good ol’ Phil! He did it his way.
Another country might look at CTE ravaged paranoids with guns and restrict their access to weapons. Another country might find a way to commit them to long-term hospital care. America looks at them and says BRING ON MORE GUNS.
[The shooter] had been investigated by campus officials in September after someone reported [he] made a comment about owning a gun…
[The shooter] was also involved in a hazing investigation on campus …
[A spokesman further noted the university] learned of a prior criminal incident involving a concealed weapon violation that occurred outside the city of Charlottesville in February of 2021…
[The shooter] was required to report that to the University, but he never did. The University’s judicial council took over the case and the results are still pending.
Blah blah this and that this and that and we’re kinda still kinda looking into it. Told people about his weaponry; involved in hazing; criminal incident involving concealment lalalalala….
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This is what happens when guns are absolutely everywhere. When there are practically four hundred million civilian-owned guns in your country, you’re unlikely to give the issue your, uh, full attention. For many Americans, guns seem to have about the status of a household appliance. I mean, who cares.
UVa remains sheltered in place; a football recruit killed three and injured two. UD will go ahead and guess that this was some sort of weekend party/drunken fight that got crazy, but it’s of course too soon to know much.
[Update: The shooting took place in an on-campus parking garage, so the motive might have been a dispute between drivers. Road rage…?]
The Idaho details suggest the shooter (if this was about shooting; it certainly sounds like it, though a different weapon might have been used) is dead at the scene. (The Virginia killer is at large and since he’s heavily armed, with his photo in every paper, and everyone in the world is looking for him, UD’s gonna guess he’ll kill himself.) This one sounds more personal – a nutty vindictive ex-lover? – but we’ll see. Someone reported seeing an unconscious person and called the police, which maybe means at least one of the bodies was outside the off-campus house. Trying to flee? Or the body of the killer?
Both events could be as simple as someone turned away from a party, pissed about it, and returning with one of his big ol’ guns.
My blog post title comes from NPR‘s coverage. It’s America, so we have to bundle these stories.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
