Fight Over NASCAR Shirt Turns to Gun Threat Inside Family Dollar
[A Florida boater,] frustrated by the wake [some] children were creating in the water near his vessel … [pointed a gun at them and said he would] “shoot them and watch them bleed out.”
One can’t help seeing the mordant grins on the faces of America’s fast-growing gun suicides as these people glance, on their way out, at one lucrative, self-congratulatory, and predictably failed effort to reduce gun suicides.
In 2016, The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention teamed up with the National Shooting Sports Foundation to reduce suicide by 20% by 2025. (“Firearms were the leading cause of suicide among males and females in 2022. The rate of firearm-related suicide among males increased 31% after reaching a low of 10.3 deaths per 100,000 in 2006 to 13.5 per 100,000 in 2022.” By 2024, we see a “staggering” suicide rise.)
This article provides the gory details, but the main thing you need to know is that there is rather… uh… a glaring gap between the interests of anti-suicide crusaders and gun sellers.
The now-ended project did succeed in generating money for the two groups; and of course it enabled their leaders to use phrases like scaled implementation.
A guy who barely survived the Montgomery AL shootout says “he came downtown because there were so many people out and he wanted to join the fun, but that night of fun turned into something he described as a ‘warzone’ that he’s thankful to have survived.”
And he does pose the question. About guns. The killers were fifteen, sixteen, years old, and it was so easy for the brainless shits to get guns.
‘More people died by gunfire in Alabama [in 2023] than in New York State, which has nearly four times Alabama’s population.’
It’s that ol self-killer instinct, folks. Wyoming has it too. Guns guns guns guns until everyone gets ten! AK47s, AR15s, give em out like candy until everyone kills everyone in a blitz and then the cops kill the killers.
But WHY, Wyoming? A la what Alabam?
Read Nietzsche! says WY. Look under N for Nihilism! says AL. Life’s worth shit down here says AL. Life sucks in the Sagebrush State says WY. Read Better Never To Have Been and then shut the fuck up or I’ll blow your head off.
A huge open shoot-out in the center of the city wreaks death and life-threatening injury, but the police chief is here to tell you that the city is safe. He’s fucking crazy, as the state AG makes clear in his comment:

You can’t do much when your state has virtually no control over its millions of guns, many of them, like the ones last night, in the hands of fifteen year olds. Almost all of the shooters were 14-16. So you might as well do what Bama’s doing. Nothing. I mean, I assume the city has a crew that hoses down the rivers of blood. I assume they’re doing that.
Gun death at a hookah lounge in one of the most dangerous cities in insanely dangerous Louisiana. Who could have predicted this tragic turn? Especially on a weekend night?
But how much, really, is too much? This Texas high school begins to look like an armed camp, with many guns carried in every day. Parents are upset, demand action, blah blah. But it’s Texas. You wanna live where everybody, starting around age fourteen, doesn’t carry a loaded gun everywhere, move to Massachusetts.
Yeah why should Wyoming’s governor bother mentioning the primary reason his state has the highest rate of elderly suicides in the country? Virtually all of the guys use a gun.
Cuz walk five feet in any direction in Wyoming and you’ll trip over a gun. The state has more guns than almost anyplace else in the world, ‘cept maybe Mogadishu.
And that’s why it’s got world-class suicide rates. But you wouldn’t want to be impolite enough to say the word or anything.
The rest of America thinks you’re really weird for posing the question.
Big gun shop moving right next door to two day cares! What could go wrong?
Hoowhee Texas! You think YOU love guns! You ain’t been to Texas!! Gunshots morning afternoon and night; and in Katy in particular they put a shooting range across the street from a kids’ baseball complex.
Here’s a typical game:
“We started at 8 a.m. and the gunshots have been going off since then,” said [one parent].
“We had a game at 8 and could hear rifles and shotguns going off at times throughout the whole game. Even leaving the park after the game, shots were going off,” another parent added.
But don’t nobody say nuthin cuz it’s the fuckin sound of freedom. Smell of napalm in the morning blast of gunfire all day kinda thing. Heartbeat of America. Baseball and bullets. Don’t get better than that.
Sure, they hit the coach. Fine, the coach was airlifted out. BFD. “There was bullets flying everywhere. It wasn’t one shot. There’s bullets flying everywhere off the poles, onto the field. It’s just unbelievable.” You expect a little carnage in Texas, and, you know, at least it wasn’t one of the kids and at least no one was killed.
Yeah, datz where we are.
UD‘s having a hell of a good time reading this thread about leftwing gunnies.
“Was [Kirk’s assassin] on the left? I don’t know … It is a fool’s errand to try to say that these nuts who do these things are [on] any team… This kid doesn’t belong in either party. He belongs in a straitjacket. He’s an outpatient who should not be out.”
Which reminds UD of something else she’s been thinking about. The missing link in these kills done by people 16-25 is their parents. Many of the killers are still living at home, and in many cases their parents know perfectly well that their kid is nuts. Their response to this dawning horror is denial plus hiding: They don’t want it to be true; and they don’t want anyone outside the home to know it’s true.
Many of these homes are already really gunny, with dad deciding it’d make the kid better if they went to the ranges together… You’d be amazed how many parents of violent demented children decide more guns and more shooting is the answer.
Or maybe the parent enjoys his own rage against society being acted out by the kid. Things get squirrely here.
The larger theme of moronic negligence resounds throughout the land, as in the husband who took a business trip, leaving his spectacularly insane wife alone in the house with her four little daughters. She slaughtered all of them with one of many guns her husband decided were fine to keep unlocked with a maniac in the house. One of the girls survived long enough to suffer great pain for a few days.
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