… spray.
… mawnin. As in much of the rest of the world, mass shooting is the way Americans celebrate ball games. (Southern won the game by doing what it had to do. Congrats!)
Already eighteen and only just bagged your first murder? This is America! This is Bama! Remember: There are competing states. I’m gonna assume you’ve already bagged a bunch, but only got caught for this one.
Only 13 years old and already so confident an AR-15 marksman he’s about to kill his whole middle school!
Here’s a headline with a whiff of the obsolete. Not long from now, parents will recall for their children the quaint practice of suspending football games when people in the stands or on the field initiated mass shootings. “Now of course they play right on through it – couldn’t have youth football if you suspended every game where some little fella took out his AR-15! … People still scatter. But as soon as the shooter’s finished, everyone comes back to the stadium. And something I’ve noticed is that there’s an excitement factor, a wake-up factor – like the guys on the field and the people in the stands are all shook up – but in a good way – after the shooting. The players are sharper; the fans are more enthusiastic. The whole thing feels more real; bleeding children remind the crowd of the preciousness of life and how lucky they are to be here, on a sunny day, watching football.”
Airbnb: Bringing Gangland to your neighborhood.
And the Supreme Court just said go ahead and sue.
You can’t help wondering, driving through Potomac, Maryland, or the Hamptons, or hundreds of locations like them, what’s going to happen to all the empty, unsellable, mcmansions. Turns out not every generation of Americans wants a meaninglessly vast, crushingly expensive box in a distant field – so once the owners realize they’re also desperate to get out of them, what do you do with the abandoned, house-littered landscape?
Of course there are always squatters – Florida and Nevada mcmansions are full of them – but there’s no money in that. OTOH: Turns out a beautiful cosmic convergence is playing out right in front of our eyes: Owners are renting to enormous bring-your-own-guns parties! Shooters want anonymity for their shooting; owners want rental income: Win/Win.
Yes, neighbors are pissed about hundreds of drunk dangerous people next door in what they thought was an upscale neighborhood — dumping trash, blasting music, fighting, crashing their cars, and killing each other — but town councils don’t give a shit, and by the time the police get there, as in lovely Orinda, California, five people are already dead, and more to come, kiddies.
And look – as I’m sure the NRA will explain to the local belly-achers – there are two cool things they’re overlooking here:
*****************
Uhhhhhhhh… okay! Day 1 post-massacre, Airbnb announces it’s banning party houses. But if you read the article I linked to, it’s clear that this won’t be easy. Massive parties and criminal activities have for some time been the “scourge” of the industry, and UD doesn’t see how you can effectively police liars of the sort who lied her way into the use of the Orinda house. Plus, as abandoned mcmansion territory grows, there won’t be any neighbors to complain about your meth lab/assault weapon jamboree. Miles of tumbleweed and turrets will assume a Mad Max character…
*************
UPDATE: ” [T]he party was filled with people carrying firearms…”
Parents of teeny weeny soccer players get all booohooo when it turns out spectators carry multiple weapons, including an assault rifle. I mean hellooo? This is America, people!
Layers and layers of horrible in UD’s hometown, Baltimore, Maryland, where a woman driver being threatened by the city’s adorably named squeegee kids takes out her gun to make them go away.
Squeegee is a venerable Baltimore institution:
One police officer estimates squeegeeing has been a part of the city “as long as murder has.”
… after the success of their committee room storming, Republicans are planning a second action, this one a knitting circle. Apparently the congressmen will sit together just outside the hearings room, each of them knitting a panel revealing a dystopian America if Democrats win the White House. Steve Scalise, for instance, will depict an America where James Hodgkinson is unable to buy a gun.
But she was his mother, so we can’t charge her with anything! I mean, after all, her son simply shot out the school’s door, exchanged gunfire with police, and then killed himself. He didn’t kill all his classmates, which was his intention…
Hey wait. Lookee here.
The felony charges against [Mary] York relate in part to [her boyfriend’s] gun-storage locker located in her basement. It was easily breached by [her son], nearly allowing the massacre to occur.
Maybe things are actually changing. She’s been charged with six felonies. Good. Now we’ll see if a jury has the sense to send her to jail. If American gunnies want to have a zillion weapons in circulation, they’re going to have to accept the consequences.
Once, I led a few special agents to retrieve several firearms from a local Philadelphia resident. We found one loaded firearm being used as a doorstop in his house. On another occasion, the resident had loaded firearms in every room and on almost every flat surface. Given the recent news stories of infants shooting mothers, themselves or other children, it’s clear that “common sense” laws must prevail.
Wow. Encountering these statistics – shared in their broad outlines with many other states – UD suddenly perceives the NRA in a new way: Not as the steely-eyed advocate of hunters and hearth-defenders, but as a kindly Kevorkian, provisioning all households with reliable, easy-exit, appliances.
Not defending the right to bear arms, but defending the right to find life unbearable.
Given this country’s massive, and quickly growing, suicide market, we can eventually expect an NRA public relations campaign with a tag line like If you’re going to do it, do it right.