His 16 year old daughter “shot herself with her dad’s handgun in their living room. The gun was kept on the mantle and her father usually took it to bed with him, but had not that night.”

Excellent protection.

‘We’ll figure out where this individual got this gun from,’ Jeff Boshek, special agent in charge of the ATF’s Dallas Field Division, told CNN. ‘Our agents won’t sleep, working with our partners here, to figure out how he got this weapon in his hand to come in this school and cause this tragedy today.’

Heck I reckon the little tyke got it… deep in the heart of Texas!

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Uh huh, I know what you’re saying. All his buds that what he got in a tiff with this morning in class shoulda been carrying too so we’d a had one fine fettle of a gunfight. Hell, there’d a been time for someone to record it and all.

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Memory lane! SOOOOO many to choose from. Here’s one that kinda stays with me.

… BOOM!

BOOM BOOM BOOOOOOOMM!!!!

LOL. Waaaall now I don’t know, the campus of Colorado State Pueblo is a notorious killing field, and Robert Killis (helluva name) maybe needed these weapons – and, as it turns out, many, many more – in his car and apartment to stay safe. Plus he “liked to kill people” and “wanted to kill President Biden” and thought he might use “pipe bombs … to create an explosion in the courtyard where the ROTC students ate and took breaks. Killis would also talk about setting the pipe bombs off in the courtyard so when students ran, he could shoot them as they ran.”

Funny thing is if he just kept his trap shut and kept all that shit unloaded he’d probably have been fine. Colorado and Utah are America’s most gun friendly states, and their universities reflect that. But Bob’s a people person, and he just couldn’t help sharing and someone got scared and told the cops.

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This blog has covered quite a few Killises – wee lads who come to college outfitted à la Stephen Paddock because they want to kill everybody. Only a matter of time before one of them gets his wish.

UD’s been compiling, during this Suicide Prevention Month, the many forms of writing out of Wyoming about that state’s appalling suicide rate that never mention guns.

Though firearms are the third-most common method for attempting suicide, they are responsible for the largest share of suicide deaths because they are so lethal. Nationally, nearly two-thirds of all deaths by firearm are due to suicide, and Wyoming has had the highest rate of suicide by firearm of any state over the last 15 years. Studies have linked higher rates of gun ownership with increased risk of suicide death, but in Wyoming, which also has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the country, this is an unpopular topic. As Tom Morton of the Casper Star-Tribune put it in a series of articles about Wyoming’s suicide epidemic, guns and suicide are the “third rail of Wyoming culture.”

So for instance a University of Wyoming news page yesterday touted the work on Wyoming suicides of one of their psychology professors. Let’s take a look.

‘[Carolyn] Pepper’s research team at UW’s Stress and Mood Lab is using nationally collected health data to understand what factors are specific to the Mountain West’s suicide rate. The stoic, individualistic Western mindset is one possible explanation… The Stress and Mood Lab initially studied demographic factors such as age, race, urbanization level and gender. Although all of these were elevated factors in the Mountain West, they did not explain why suicide rates are so high. The research team is now shifting focus to the cultural factors of living in a state with a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality.’

Hm yes that bootstraps thing… You see it in ‘Deer Hunter’ states like Pennsylvania too, but they have strikingly fewer guns and less suicide than Wyoming…

‘“I kept thinking someday I should study suicide, but I was sure that someone was already doing this research,” Pepper says. “I waited and waited, but no psychologist was looking at suicide in Wyoming.”’

She was sure cuz… you know… when they’re dropping like flies in your state… when some counties in your state – like Platte – are just stupendously suicidal… you figure the best social scientists around are hard at work on it. But that third rail! Why bother? Just keep ignoring the Uberti in the room and you won’t piss off anyone.

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Let’s pile on. When you add to all of this Wyoming’s insanely low covid vaccination rate, with the sort of death rate that goes along with that, you have to conclude that the whole state’s got a death wish.

Here’s a typical article, and believe me UD has read many of them. Not a word about taking guns away from troubled friends and relatives, or at least securing them more responsibly, or something… State by state, suicide rates track closely with gun ownership, and Wyoming also leads the nation (at the moment it trails Montana – also Suicide Central – by a bit) in gun ownership… So you’d think experts and commentators there would have what to say about all those instant death appliances lying around the house, beckoning…

But the state of Wyoming seems to consider it rude to mention that guns in that state are FAR more about suicide than self-protection or homicide. Just bad form.

Here I stand head in hand
But hey they’ve rationed care
I’m bleeding from a gunshot wound
Treatment rooms nowhere

Number One for gunshot death
Alaska — my great state
I can’t seem to catch my breath
Doc says four-week wait

Hey, you’ve got to hide your guns away
Hey, you’ve got to hide your guns away

When it comes to suicide
We’re ranked Number Two
If you tried and you need help
Nothing you can do

How could Mike say to me
Masks are not the way
Gather ’round all you clowns
Let me hear you say

Hey, you’ve got to hide your guns away
Hey, you’ve got to hide your guns away

… USA.

Lawyers for Remington Arms, the now-bankrupt gun-maker being sued by nine families of those killed in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., have subpoenaed the academic, attendance and disciplinary records for five slain students.

The weapons Americans buy to protect their loved ones are the weapons that end up being accidentally discharged into a loved one’s leg or chest or head. The weapons Americans buy to protect their young children are years later used for self-harm by their troubled teenagers. Or they are stolen from their car by criminals and used in robberies and murders. Or they are grabbed in rage and pointed at an ex-partner.

… Above all else, guns are used for suicide. In any given year, twice as many Americans die by suicide as by homicide. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among teenagers and young adults, behind only accidents. The good news is that suicide is highly preventable. Most suicide attempts are impulsive, an act of depression or panic. If a person survives an attempt, he or she will almost certainly survive the suicidal impulse altogether. A gun in the house massively raises the likelihood that a suicide attempt will end in death.

… Guns everywhere engender violence everywhere.

… The gun you trust against your fears is itself the thing you should fear. The gun is a lie.

… are SO much more likely to be random assholes shooting each other than a terror incident. With four hundred million guns lying around, you need to get used to a lot of bangbang.

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Story is still developing, but it looks as though someone shot and killed a police officer at the site. Maybe suicide by cop?

*********

An officer died after being stabbed on Tuesday during a brief outbreak of violence at a transit station outside the Pentagon, on the outskirts of Washington DC, and a suspect in the incident was shot by law enforcement and died at the scene, officials said.

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Chicago recorded 650 murders in 2017. Japan, which has 46 times as many people, had 307 homicides the same year. We’ve simply come to accept a level of violence in this country that much of the rest of the world—from poor, developing countries such as Vietnam to wealthy nations such as the United Kingdom—can’t even imagine. Ignoring that level of human suffering is hardly progressive, and it isn’t hysterical to say so.

… Joshua Koskoff, an attorney for the families, said the [33 million dollar] settlements were offered by two of Remington’s insurers.

“Ironshore and James River … deserve credit for now realizing that promoting the use of AR-15s as weapons of war to civilians is indefensible. Insuring this kind of conduct is an unprofitable and untenable business model,” Koskoff said in a statement.

The years pass, but the Sandy Hook massacre always – to quote from a Philip Larkin poem –

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

At least it destroyed one of the most disgusting gun manufacturers; at least insurers will take a second look at gun manufacturers.

Wyoming, always in a tight race with Alaska, is winner and still champeen.

See? UD‘s Maryland is absolutely pathetic on gun ownership, as are virtually all the other low-suicide states. It’s a comfort to realize that all we have to do to compete with the top of the list is buy a shitload more guns.

As the NRA’s famous line has it: Guns don’t kill people. People with guns kill themselves.

Wyoming, with the most guns and the highest suicide (overwhelmingly by gun) rate in the country, wants the National Rifle Association to relocate to the state.

This idea would create a brilliant synergy, sure to sweep up any suicide-hesitant gun owners into the general NRA-infused enthusiasm for La Vie (or in this case La Mort) Militaire. Just as locating the makers of oxycontin smack dab in the middle of the most addicted part of the US represents an obviously robust business plan, so placing the national headquarters of the NRA, which features a gun museum, a gun cafe, a gun bookstore, a gun movie theater, and just everything gun, in the very center of America’s suicide by gun epidemic, promises to take a real rifle blast to the head of the Depressed Cowboy State.