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!
The longtime director of the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center describes UD‘s wild and crazy city. Last time UD visited the city of her birth there had just been a big riot. Inner Harbor, once a real draw, has apparently all but collapsed. Hotels are closing.
Dude already had a violent crime record.
‘Court records from Wyandotte County show Elmore was convicted in a Feb. 6, 2020, robbery where he stole a wallet from a person “by force or by threat of bodily harm, and did inflict bodily harm.”’
Why was he still enrolled in a mainstream public high school?
Is it because he played for the football team? If so, that’s really fucked up. Putting the safety of everyone at the school at risk because he made the team more competitive…
Of course, having covered the legions of Richie Incognitos out there, UD knows perfectly well that this is a calculation high schools and colleges all over this country make every day: He’s a dangerous person, sure, but he can really play the game. Coaches who make the call – see Art Briles – occasionally have to pay a price for it. The real price is paid by the people raped and beaten.
Background here.
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Richie Incognito! Isn’t that what Roman Abramovich just re-christened his yacht?
Heck, nobody should be surprised that when a youngster in a Kansas school gets annoyed by the assistant principal and the security guard, he’s gonna pull out his gun and pop both of them. Everybody ’round there’s got a gun; he’s probably been shooting that gun off since he was five years old. No doubt as the years went by his parents noticed he was a little… strange… But ain’t no reason to take his guns away! Most natural thing in the world for him to whip it out and draw blood when school-folk started ragging on him. I mean – SHUT UP – and if you keep talking to me DIE.
Looks as though these two ninnies – it’s their fault for annoying one of their armed students – are gonna pull through, and the lad himself – the security officer shot back, so there was a shoot-out – should be up and running, fully armed and psychotic, in not too long a time. Nobody died, and as I say, those two should have known better.
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Update:
An 18-year-old student shot [School Resource Officer] Erik Clark and [the vice principal] after sources tell FOX4 the student was called to the office area over suspicions he had a gun.
Clark returned fire, injuring the student and disarming him. He then called dispatch to report the shooting all while applying a tourniquet to himself.
Ha ha guess the suspicions were right! But the mistake these guys made was trying to separate an American and his gun. What were they thinking? If you suspect an 18 year old American male living in the heartland has a gun, have everyone hide under their desk and call SWAT.
A police officer in Virginia is facing firearm charges after his 2-year-old son [fatally] shot himself with a gun his father left sitting on a couch.
When Newport News Police Officer Stefhone Christian McCombs Sr., 25, returned from work on October 29, he allegedly took out his fully loaded 9mm semi-automatic Glock from his holster and placed it on a couch in his living room…
His children came home about five hours later at about 9 p.m. But McCombs allegedly forgot that the gun was left unsecured on the couch, according to a criminal complaint.
… During an investigation into the shooting, the officer told investigators that he does not normally leave guns unattended within the reach of his children. But when officers searched his home, they found another gun unsecured on a kitchen counter…